New Haven Independent

Mayor Daniels voiced his question at a meeting of the Greater New Haven NAACP, at which Police Chief James Lewis was a guest speaker. The new chief has been taking part in community meetings throughout town as a way of introducing himself to the city and explaining his policing philosophy, which does not emphasize New Haven’s 1990s version of “community policing.”

The meeting, which was held in the function room of St Luke’s Episcopal Church on Whalley Avenue, was designed to be non-confrontational. “This is a meet and greet. This is not a roast,” said NAACP chapter President James Rawlings before the meeting. To that end, rather than a free-form Q-and-A, there were a limited number of pre-set questions for the chief to answer after his remarks.

The last of these questions came from former New Haven Mayor John Daniels.

“Fourteen years ago, New Haven had one of the most outstanding community policing programs in the country,” the mayor began. “The reason why was that the police chief and the mayor [referring to himself, Mayor Daniels] believed in it despite the president of the police union being against it.”

“Then the mayor [Daniels] left, the chief left and community policing went down the hill,” continued Mayor Daniels.

The police union — then as now run by Louis Cavalier — staged a weekend-long “blue flu” to try to kill the early community policing program when Daniels introduced it. The experiment was based on a critique of traditional, military-model policing that emphasized racking up street arrests to combat crime. It focused on prevention; putting cops on neighborhood walking beats where they get to know neighbors, who were organized into management teams based on substations; bringing rough cops up on charges for brutality rather than promoting them; de-emphasizing weapons and police dogs in favor of building relationships; aggressively recruiting black, brown, female and gay cops; having cops work alongside child shrinks to help kids who witness violence; training recruits in communication and social issues like homelessness at the academy; instituting the country’s first successful government needle-exchange program; dismantling the “Beat Down Posse” of cops who threw their weight around on neighborhood corners and racked up arrests of street dealers, in favor of building intensive intelligence, with the help of neighbors, on the chiefs of drug gangs who were then sent away to jail for 15 years or more. Violent city crime dropped from nation-leading levels to the 40-year lows.

“My question is how would you implement a community based police program when the president of the police union is against it and the mayor [Mayor DeStefano] only pays lip service to it?” Mayor Daniels concluded Thursday night.

Chief Lewis (pictured) responded by dismissing the opposition of the president of the police union, saying that he doesn’t sit on any staff meetings. He underscored Mayor Destefano’s “sensitivity to the community.”

The chief went on to say “my cops don’t believe that they’re doing community policing.” The phrase is written on the back of the cruisers, he said, but it’s lost its meaning. (The phrase “A Commitment to Community Policing” is written on the back of the city’s police cars.)

Chief Lewis said that to him, “community policing is about solving people’s problems.” The chief mentioned that he was specifically targeting prostitution and drugs as a way of showing people that the police are serious about cleaning up their neighborhoods.

After the meeting the chief elaborated on his answer, saying that he doesn’t like to use the term “community policing.”

“I avoid those words,” he said. “They confuse the issue because everyone hears them differently.”

Indeed, New Haven and other cities like San Diego and Boston in the 1990s embarked on a kinder, gentler, community-building version of “community policing.” And other cities like New York used the same phrase to mean rounding up “squeegee men” and other neighborhood “nuisances” and unleashing cops to be aggressive on the street in the pursuit of “quality of life crimes.” Both variants of the philosophy were based on the “broken windows” theory of preventing small problems from growing into big ones. Both were also based on intensive daily fact-gathering of crime data and holding neighborhood-level police supervisors accountable for results. Both cut crime and earned plaudits.

Lewis has earned praised in his short tenure here for responding to neighborhood quality-of-life complaints with neighborhood anti-prostitution stings; for restoring a sense of management and direction to the force; and for meeting and speaking openly with people of all views at community meetings like Thursday night’s NAACP forum. His future plans for his expected 18-month tenure include upgrading officers’ guns, reinstituting a canine force, expanding police-run youth programs based in part on ROTC, grooming successors for top management jobs, and implementing an expert panel’s detailed plans for improving internal department systems in the wake of a corruption scandal. He said he wants “aggressive,” but not violent or disrespectful, cops on the beat.

Asked if he was satisfied with the chief’s answer to his question, Mayor Daniels said, “He’s on the right track. But he’s underestimating the president of the police union.”

NAACP chapter President Rawlings said after the meeting that Mayor Daniels and Chief Lewis might be using different words but “I’m hoping they’re saying the same thing.”