Caitlin Emma Photo
Officer Todd Kelley spotted an older man in glasses walking down Henry Street, hunched over, his busy hand fishing inside an extra-large bag of Doritos.
“Hey! D.C. Walker!” Kelley yelled.
Excited to see Kelley, he stopped, pulled his hand out of the bag and threw a couple fake punches at the air.
“This guy used to be a champion boxer!” Kelley said.
Walker (at right in photo) is a Dixwell neighborhood fixture — one of the people with whom Kelley (at left) and Officer Juan Monzon have grown familiar on their beat.
Kelley and Monzon were walking the beat in Dixwell Wednesday evening when they ran into Walker. It was one of many such stops they made on the shift. One of many stops walking cops are making each day in New Haven now that all 10 neighborhood districts have instituted permanent walking beats this month as part of an effort to revive community policing.
Most of the stops, like Kelley’s with Walker, don’t end up on police blotters. They don’t involve crimes or problems. They’re meant to prevent problems — by building relationships, and by keeping an eye on the street. Other stops do involve following up on trouble or, as occurred Wednesday evening, following up on crimes to gather evidence. In all cases, the cops are connecting with the neighborhood, daily.
Most days Kelley, who’s been a cop for 12 years, and Monzon, a 13-year police veteran, are not among the close to two dozen officers assigned to permanent walking patrols. They usually patrol on bicycle. Because Dixwell’s regular walking cops were off Wednesday, they were filling in on foot — something they find themselves doing pretty regularly anyway during part of their bike shifts.
Walker, who’s almost toothless, smiled at Kelley. He gestured toward Ringside, the new boxing gym at the corner of Henry and Orchard streets.
“I don’t know if what they got in there is as good as what I got,” he said.
“That’s the competitive side of you, huh?” Kelley asked.
“No, that’s the real side of me,” Walker said.
“Still, seeing the young people do something positive — that’s a beautiful thing,” Kelley said.
As Walker sauntered off, Kelley said he had looked up his boxing record. He said he thought Walker’s last professional fight was in 1983 in Boston. Walker has had his problems at times, but he’s a good guy, Walker said.
Stetson Pitches In
The daily walking beat in Dixwell inevitably leads back to Smoker’s Stop Convenience in Dixwell Plaza. That’s where the beat began Wednesday for Kelley and Monzon. The convenience store, which sells smoking paraphernalia, attracts trouble late at night and during the early morning hours.
“If we’re here buying loosies, and I don’t like you and you don’t like me, then there’s going to be a problem,” Monzon said.
A problem came up recently, just after dark on Feb. 13. A young man shot at someone else after a personal spat. He missed. Since it happened on Kelley’s and Monzon’s beat, they wanted to nail down the identity of the shooter for detectives investigating the incident.
Inside the Smoker’s Stop, Monzon and Kelley tried to pull up the store’s surveillance tape from that night. Monzon had a suspect in mind. He had downloaded pictures from the suspect’s Facebook page, but he needed to compare them to the video.
Kelley wasn’t working on Feb. 13, but Monzon was. Monzon said he went to grab a sandwich and eat it at the substation just before it got dark. The minute he took a break, the shooting happened.
“It’s always as soon as we leave,” Kelley said.
Monzon and Kelley try to pull up the tape.
As the tape took longer and longer to call up, the conversation meandered.
“Look at all these varieties of cat food,” Kelley said, staring at a shelf in front of him packed with pet supplies. “Indoor Delights, Seafood Treasures … We’ve really come a long way, huh?”
Monzon and Kelley decided to leave the store and check up on other people while the minutes on the surveillance tape ticked backward.
The officers walked into the Stetson branch library, located just a few storefronts away from Smoker’s Stop in Dixwell Plaza. Kids walking by said hello. The busy library branch manager, Diane Brown, yelled over from the back.
“Hang on guys, I see you!” she said.
Stetson Library plays an integral part in Dixwell’s community policing network. Brown calls the guys if she suspects an issue or if she needs an officer to sit down with some kids and talk to them about their day. They call her if they suspect a kid is in trouble and needs a safe place to go.
“A lot of parents will only let their children come here after school,” Brown said.
Monzon and Kelley asked Brown if they could borrow a computer cord so they could burn a DVD of the surveillance tape from Smoker’s Stop.
Brown flitted around the library while the two officers worked to extract the cord from a back computer. She picked up a poster. On it, Monzon sat reading a book in uniform against the background of the American flag. The word “READ” was emblazoned across the bottom.
“Officer Monzon was one of our ‘read’ heroes,” Brown said.
Monzon laughed from the back computer.
“You want me to sign it?” he asked.
Brown got emotional as she talked about the officers and how Sgt. Donald Harrison, Dixwell’s district manager, told her that Dixwell’s youth crime dropped since the library has been open. Under Harrison, on-foot patrolling and routine community check-ins were routine even before they became official city policy. Perhaps as a result, Harrison’s beat cops found themselves sometimes helping out in Newhallville when that adjoining neighborhood had more crime last year.
“It’s not just a vision for the community, it’s a reality,” Brown said. “And he told me, ‘That reality translates into numbers for me,’” she said.
Da Bomb
After the library stop, Monzon and Kelley stopped in to the Elephant in the Room boxing gym and greeted some kids by the doorway. The rest of the kids were inside, filling the room with the smacking of boxing gloves against punching bags.
Devonne “Da Bomb” Canady, the gym’s owner, greeted the officers warmly. She opened her gym last month.
“We wanted to grab a few applications for Baker,” Monzon said. Baker, or Officer James Baker, had said he wanted to hand out some member applications for kids he knew. (Baker also originally donated money to help the gym open. Read about that here.)
“Sure,” Canady said, and went into her office to grab some.
“They come in here nightly,” she said of Monzon and Kelley. “I really appreciate that. The kids see them, know they’re present. It gives them a sense of security.”
Kelley watched, amused, as a group of boys learned to keep their hands up by their face while pivoting quickly on one foot.
“We just like watching them,” Kelley said. “We come to support them. It’s a beautiful thing. We can only wish there were more things like this.”
Related stories:
• The People Talk, The Cops Walk
• Wynne & Benedetto Start Walking The Beat
Great Job, That's what neighborhood policing is all about.