Thomas Breen Photo
Youth organizers at June 6 protest.
Natalia Gregg traces her impression of New Haven police to a day she accompanied her father to a store.
Natalia was 7 years old at the time. Officers came into the store and approached her father.
“They pushed him to the ground,” Natalia recalled. “They were so rough with him.” They said he matched the description of a criminal suspect. Turned out to be a different person.
Natalia Gregg on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
A decade later, Natalia, a student at Wilbur Cross High School, has been active with fellow students statewide in a “black and brown” coalition to change policing. The group hosted rallies before the death of George Floyd at the hands and knee of a Minneapolis cop ignited worldwide mass protests against police mistreatment of African-Americans.
“We never imagined it would be worldwide, everyone fighting for our rights,” Natalia said Monday during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Gregg works as a junior counselor at the Hill South site for the youth education and recreation group LEAP. She appeared on the program with LEAP Dixwell Assistant Site Coordinator Ramzia Issa and LEAP founder and Executive Director Henry Fernandez.
They spoke about efforts LEAP has made to keep young people active and engaged during the Covid-19 pandemic. And they spoke about how the past two weeks of protest have been high on the minds of LEAP counselors, who have long wrestled with policing concerns in their neighborhoods.
Sixty-three young people who work with LEAP participated in a group Zoom discussion last week to talk about “the struggles that America is facing,” said Fernandez, who recalled his own experiences being stopped and questioned by police as a Yale law student because he allegedly “matched” a suspect’s description.
Fernandez (pictured) has argued for changes in policing ever since, as an organizer, youth director, city official, and political candidate.
He said he takes heart in the current youth-led protest movement. (Click here and here for recent stories about New Haven protests led by teens and young adults.)
“For young people there is an awakening to their power. Change has come in this country only when young people mobilize,” Fernandez observed. “We’re heaing some really interesting ideas…. We’ve asked police to do so many things, but have trained them mainly to solve problems through use of force.”
Fernandez recalled the days of the “Beat-Down Posse” when he first came to town — the late-1980s and early-1990s crew of cops who descended on urban street corners to randomly beat up young males they found there.
“Policing in New Haven has changed a lot. Things are a lot better than they were in the early ‘90s,” Fernandez said. “We still have a long way to go.”
Issa (pictured), a student at Albertus Magnus College, had also been involved in the policing issue before the current wave of protests. She called the Floyd murder “our breaking point.”
“We’re tired of the hashtags. We’re tired of the T‑shirts,” Issa said. “This was our breaking point” in demanding action and change.
“I don’t necessarily believe in getting rid of the police. We need them. We need reform in how police view us and deal with us,” she said. She also endorsed the demand of New Haven’s protest leaders that the city transfer much of the police budget to efforts to address the root causes of crime.
Click on the video to watch the full episode of WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” with LEAP’s Ramzia Issa, Natalia Gregg, and Henry Fernandez, in which they also discussed the virtual learning LEAP has pioneered during the pandemic.