To hear New Haven’s top cop tell it, the city has some of the finest officers in America — officers who deliver babies and take calls from the community even if they’re vacationing in Hawaii. Community policing is working, and Chief Dean Esserman has the lower crime stats to prove it.
To longtime community activist Barbara Fair, that doesn’t mean much when there are communities in New Haven that feel targeted for certain kinds of criminal activity,that are over-policed and abused by officers.
Esserman and Fair (at right in top photo) The two offered different perspectives shared their experiences and aired their differences on police brutality, mass incarceration and criminal justice policy at Yale’s Davenport College Thursday afternoon as part of a dialogue hosted by the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project.
Esserman, a former New Haven assistant chief, returned to the city in 2011 with a mission to revive community policing. He said Thursday night the return of officers walking a beat and getting to know their neighborhoods, and working with other community agencies, is making a difference. New Haveners are slowly coming around to the idea that when they see a NHPD officer, he or she is not just a face and a badge number, but someone they know by name and who knows them by name too.
But he said community policing isn’t an overnight fix.
“It takes time,” he said.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Fair said it also takes transparency. Though Esserman (pictured) has expanded the department’s internal affairs division, Fair said the department hasn’t been transparent enough with its investigations and prosecutions of officers who misbehave or commit crimes.
“As a member of the community, when you commit a crime, you’re arrested and locked up,” she said. “But not when you’re a police officer.”
Fair conceded that there are some good officers in the city police force. But she said for every good officer she can tell you 10 stories about officers who are disrespectful and contemptuous of the people they are supposed to serve and protect.
Esserman said he doesn’t doubt the stories of negative experience with officers, but he also said it is important to highlight the good that officers do. He said over the 23 years he’s been a police officer he’s heard the same thing from both officers and members of the community: Everyone wants to be treated with dignity and respect.
“Both sides feel the same way,” he said. “They want to feel they are getting a fair shake.”
New Haven State Sen. Gary Holder-Winfield, who attended the forum, said there is something wrong when a community of people feel that they have to be on guard with the very people charged with protecting them. Though he has a public role, said Holder-Winfield, who is African-American and lives in Newhallville, he still makes sure he keeps identification on him.
He carries it even when he’s working in his yard, just in case he is stopped and questioned by the police, he said.
Holder-Winfield suggested that one way to change the systematic problems with policing— such as the disproportionate number of young black males arrested on drug charges versus non-blacks— is to make such arrests less palatable.
For instance, in some communities a police officer might let a young person caught with a small amount of marijuana go. But that’s not often the case when the person is black. Holder-Winfield said if an officer had to wake up a judge every time to make such an arrest, that officer might use his discretion and let the person go.
Another way to build trust and demonstrate to the community that residents and police officers are on an equal playing field is to make sure officers are punished when they misbehave and go to jail when they commit a crime just like a resident, he said.
Actually, my point was not if police had to wake up a judge but the telling of a discussion that took place some years back about differential response in particular where juveniles are concerned. During the talks it was broadly agreed that given an offense response did not look the same across racial lines. So, one set of young people might be warned off of the behavior and sent home and the other introduced into the juvenile system. That is where the discussion about the judge came in.
The real issue with this discussion is that even when not meaning to it breaks down into two sides and those two sides then often talk past one another.