Paul Bass Photo
Dad Carlos and daughter Tiffany Ortiz at line-up before hitting Hill.
The veteran Hill patrolman shepherded the rookie across Congress Avenue. “I’m going to introduce you,” he said, “to the Pringles.”
The veteran was Carlos Ortiz. He has been a New Haven cop for 15 years. Most of that time he has patrolled the Hill neighborhood, first on foot, then by car. He still does, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the daytime A shift.
The rookie was Tiffany Ortiz — Carlos’s daughter. Having completed her field training, she hit her new 4 – 12 p.m. B shift walking beat in the Hill for the first time Sunday along with her partner, fellow rookie former Branford firefighter Mark Salvati.
Beaming with paternal pride, Carlos joined them for the inaugural walk down Congress Avenue to share his knowledge of the neighborhood’s people — and its cut-throughs favored by fleeing suspects.
“Es mi hija!” Carlos declared Sunday to Spanish-speakers along the route, those he knew from locking up, others just from chatting over the years, like the Pringles.
“I heard about them,” Tiffany said before the trio reached the family’s front stoop at the Columbus West apartments. She’d heard about them from her dad, or course.
“This is my daughter,” Carlos told Twonna Pringle. Then he asked about Pringle’s daughter. “I’m going to have the baby next week. She’s a handful,” Pringle told him. Georgeanna Pringle, Twonna’s mother, came outside, and the Pringles reminisced about progress over the years on the block.
“Me and Mark are going to be up and down Congress,” Tiffany Ortiz told the Pringles.
“Like I used to do,” added Carlos.
Tiffany heard many stories about the police beat while growing up in Fair Haven. She and her older brother were close to Carlos; he raised them as a single father. Watching him work hard — and successfully provide for the family, including vacations to Barbados and Florida and plenty of day trips to Six Flags — planted the police bug in her, beginning with a criminal-justice course she took at Wilbur Cross High School. She went on to study criminal justice at Albertus Magnus College before winning acceptance to New Haven’s police academy. When Tiffany was younger, Carlos, who grew up in the Church Street South public-housing complex, at first worked two jobs to make ends meet, as an emergency room tech and dialysis tech. He then pursued the police badge out of a desire to be outside with people more; he found he could pay the bills with the one paycheck that came with it.
Tiffany remembered worrying a lot, too. She remembered the night around ten years ago when her dad came home with a bandaged wrist.
“I cried my eyes out,” she said.
Carlos was reminded of that night as he and the rookies left Columbus West. “When I broke my wrist, I caught the guy in that lot” behind the complex, he recalled.
“I was working narcotics, undercover.” Seated in the passenger seat of an unmarked car, he saw a drug deal transpire between two men. He got out, approached them. The buyer saw his badge on a chain around his neck. “His eyes opened like a deer,” Carlos recalled. The seller then noticed, too. He threw a bike at Ortiz, toppling him; he broke his fall with his wrist. Adrenaline flowing, he didn’t know at first that he was hurt. He chased the dealer, caught him. Later his supervisor noticed Ortiz was in pain and sent him to the hospital.
Inside California Grocery, it turned out Tiffany didn’t need her father’s introduction.
“I knew her when she was little!” co-owner Debbie Bethea remarked, emerging from behind the counter to give Tiffany a hug. Tiffany played basketball with Bethea’s daughter Ellen in eighth grade. (Tiffany attended Worthington Hooker, which didn’t have a team, so she traveled cross-town to play with Edgewood’s.) Tiffany and Bethea caught up: Ellen obtained her master’s and is teaching in D.C.
Back out on Congress, near the corner of Redfield, Carlos showed Tiffany and Salvati a lot where suspects like to flee.
That brought up the Dunkin Donuts coffee story.
“One day I was walking here when I was on the walking beat. I had a coffee Coolatta. …”
“[Officer Rob] Clark told me this story!” Tiffany interjected. “He said you were faster than him.”
Carlos continued: He and Clark, who had both just purchased Coolattas, saw a fleeing suspect. Carlos took off after the suspect. So did Clark, but he first dropped his drink. Carlos kept his in hand — and got to the suspect first.
“‘Carlos, how do you still have your coffee Coolatta?’” Carlos remembered his then-partner asking.
“‘I paid five dollars for this!’”
A block away Carlos took the rookies through an abandoned lot to inspect a broken fence. Another cut-through, he told them.
Tiffany already knew. While in field training, she recently drove her training officer to the same lot to catch a fleeing suspect.
At the corner of Arch and Congress, the trio stopped into Sandra’s Next Generation soul food restaurant. The joint was sparkling, and hopping. Owners Sandra and Miguel Pittman took turns coming outside to chat with the cops, reminiscing with Carlos Ortiz about how rundown and dangerous that block was when he started the beat.
Crime has come down, and the restaurant is not the only spiffed-up property. Right across the street three historic brick row houses known as the “Three Sisters” used to serve as a flophouse for druggies. The city planned to raze the buildings to make way for a big new school. Instead, preservationists prevailed on the city to restore the buildings instead and sell them as condos. The building’s now an anchor of the block.
“It took a lot of years to clean it up,” Carlos Ortiz reflected about Arch and Congress.
“Almost two decades,” Miguel Pittman added. Now Tiffany Ortiz and Salvati will inherit the job of keeping it that way.
Read other installments in the Independent’s “Cop of the Week” series:
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