Anderson (center) pushes for more motor vehicle enforcement.
Paul Bass Photo
The York-Frontage crash.
Sometimes, Sgt. Sean Maher told Wooster Square and downtown neighbors, they may need to choose between more walking cops and more traffic cops.
Maher made the observation while reoprting good news — and then getting some pushback in response — at Tuesday evening’s monthly Downtown Wooster Square Community Management team meeting at City Hall.
The sergeant, the district’s top cop, and several of his officers updated two dozen community members present on the progress they have made using fewer resources to achieve greater motor vehicle enforcement, including over 300 traffic stops in downtown over the last month.
He also announced that four out of six district officers per shift have now been assigned to walking beats. Walking beats have been a popular cornerstone of New Haven’s community policing strategy.
Maher and his predecessor also heard a lot at these management team meetings about the desire to crack down on speeding, reckless drivers. They also have heard a lot about the desire for walking beats to connect with people and help them feel safe while solving quality-of-life problems.
Sometimes, Maher noted, the department has limited resources to accomplish both goals. Sometimes there’s a trade off.
“When we have radio cars out doing motor vehicle enforcement, that pulls from walking beats,” said Maher.
“I’ve come to many community meetings where the stress is for walking beats, and I believe in the walking beats. But walking beats cannot safely do motor vehicle enforcement. It’s an ebb and flow of service, and this needs to be a discussion that we have as to where we prefer the service to be.”
Neighborhood activist Ed Anderson kicked off one strand of that conversation when he asked for an update on the car crash that killed a pedestrian at the corner of South Frontage Road and York Street earlier this year.
“There haven’t been any charges pressed in regards to the vehicular homicide that happened a couple weeks ago,” Anderson said, quizzing Maher on when the public would know the results of the police department’s pending investigation into the accident. “Because of past experiences with issues like this, we’re pretty cynical around here about the driver being held responsible.”
Thomas Breen photo
Maher: We have limited resources.
Maher and his officers explained that these investigations take time, and that the department had not yet made public its report. But he relayed that the police’s traffic unit is currently in the middle of a two-week study of the intersection to better understand trends in vehicular crimes at that location.
“Lt. [Rob] Criscuolo is overseeing the whole project, which involves both our daytime and evening squads,” Maher said. “This study will help us see if there’s something we can do to make this intersection safer.”
Furlow presses city to lower speed limits.
The conversation then shifted towards a broader discussion of how best to mitigate dangerous speeding on city side streets, as Alder Richard Furlow shared his latest efforts to petition the city and the state to decrease city speed limits.
“If you look at the speed limits in New Haven, one of the things that we need more of is police enforcement,” said Furlow, who represents parts of the Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills neighborhoods.
“We need to do a whole ‘Slow Down, New Haven’ campaign, because it’s outrageous how fast cars are driving. If the speed limit was dropped to 20 miles per hour on our secondary streets, that means that, if you’re doing 30 miles per hour, now you have to be stopped by the police because you’re 10 over the limit. I think that’s a good place to start.”
Furlow is looking to hold a public hearing next month on lowering city speed limits. He encouraged Maher to focus on protecting New Haven pedestrians from the dangers of vehicles speeding through city side streets.
Which brought the conversation back to the issues of traffic safety, public resources, and police priorities.
Anderson questioned Maher on the wisdom of devoting resources to educating pedestrians on how to cross the road safely instead of focusing all police traffic efforts on stopping and ticketing offending drivers. Maher reiterated that cops dedicated to walking beats cannot necessarily work on motor vehicle enforcement at the same time. And so the community as a whole has to decide how much of a priority they want the police to place on each issue.
“One of the downsides of more walking beats is less motor vehicle enforcement because we have fewer cars on the road,” Maher said. “If there’s a consensus from the community that we’d rather pull walking beats to cars to do more motor vehicle enforcement, that’s a discussion we can have. But the consensus I’ve seen from all of the meetings I’ve been to is to push for walking beats.”
The needs in each of the districts/neighborhoods are different and may vary within at times. I think the district management team meetings are a good place to develop a consensus on what is needed in that district based on the police reports of criminal activity, the population density of the area and the current/active concerns of those expressed at the management team meetings. In my district, some of the areas need for more beat officers because of illegal street-based activity, and other areas need more patrol cars at certain locations at certain times of day because of heavy traffic on main thoroughfares. And during night shifts, we need strictly patrol because the street vision of the beat officer is limited, there's less pedestrian traffic and there are fewer patrol cars to respond to calls. The district managers should be given the authority and resources to make adjustments as needed to serve the neighborhoods in his/her district.