Standing near the scene where someone allegedly shot at a cop the other day, mayoral candidate Henry Fernandez called for taking community policing to the next level — to keep everyone safer.
“It is a threat to all of us whenever anyone is shot, and particularly when anyone shoots at a police officer,” Fernandez said at a Monday afternoon press conference outside Van Dome on Hamilton Avenue. “It puts all of us at risk.” A suspected armed robber allegedly shot at New Haven police Officer Leonard Soto, who was chasing him on the street while working an extra-duty job at the club last weekend.
Fernandez called the press conference in response to a stretch of six shootings across town over the last nine days, including two murders and several others that could easily have ended up as murders.
“Part of my job as mayor is to make sure all police officers get home safely to their families,” Fernandez said at his press conference. (Click here to read his crime platform.)
In the interest of keeping everyone safe, Fernandez laid out a four-pronged approach for building on the initial steps taken under New Haven’s revived community-policing effort:
• Draw on a new body of policing ideas known as “legitimacy,” with an emphasis on positive everyday interactions between cops and citizens — how quickly calls are returned, for instance — to build trust with the public. (Read more about that here.) “Legitimacy ensures that residents will be more likely to be partners, joining block watches, calling 911 when they see a crime, and acting as witnesses to crime,” Fernandez argued.
• Focus more on “prison re-entry” by working with the state and not-for-profits “long before” people come out of jail to “help them find housing, reconnect with families, get into job-training programs, and start on a path to further education.”
• Reopen a “full-service community center” in Dixwell and Newhallville (along the lines of the shuttered Q House), keeping “at least one school building … open through the evening during the school year” for youth programs in each neighborhood, and ensuring teens have summer jobs.
• Stop the state from bringing Keno to town. (Read about that here.)
And nothing new has been said.