nothin High Point, Street Outreach Workers Collide | New Haven Independent

High Point, Street Outreach Workers Collide

barbara%20tinney.jpgBarbara Tinney couldn’t understand why cops appeared suddenly at her office. Looking back, she’s horrified.”

Tinney (pictured) runs the New Haven Family Alliance, an agency overseeing New Haven’s Street Outreach Worker Program. That program, an anti-violence centerpiece of Mayor John DeStefano’s reelection campaign, enlists ex-cons who have turned around their lives to work with gang-banging young men.

Tinney was in the agency’s James Street offices on the morning of Feb. 18 when she was alerted that seven or more law-enforcement agents were in the entry to the agency. They were in their black gear. I was really quite stunned.”

The incident has exposed simmering tensions between two separate approaches to New Haven’s youth violence program — tensions that reflect some of the challenges of implementing an unconventional effort like the outreach workers campaign.

The cops showed Tinney a picture of a young man that we were working with.” They told her he had an outstanding drug warrant. The wanted man had given the office address as his own address.

The man wasn’t there; the program he participates in takes place in the afternoon. Tinney contacted a street outreach worker, who located the young man, who then turned himself in to police.

Her agency could have done that with a simple phone call, Tinney said — if the city’s police department were still supportive of the street outreach program the way it was a year ago.

What the officers didn’t tell Tinney that morning was that their stop was part of a citywide sweep launching Project Restart,” New Haven’s version of a celebrated crime-fighting initiative from High Point, N.C. The program — like the street outreach effort — is aimed at giving young people involved in crime a chance to straighten out their lives rather than simply locking them up in a series of revolving-door prosecutions.

The cops had spent weeks documenting drug sales in the city to gather strong cases against mid- and upper-level dealers. Now they were rounding up hard cases while preparing to offer newer players a last chance to straighten out their lives by signing up for education or job-training or other other social service programs.

The cops have been slow to institute that latter part of Project Restart, the part that makes it different from Drug War” sweeps of the 1980s. Read about that here.

Eleven weeks after that initial burst of publicity for the program, Tinney said the incident had set back what was already a deteriorating relationship between two groups that need to be working cooperatively rather than at cross-purpose: the street outreach workers and the cops.

This is a not-for-profit agency. I have families and children coming here for services. We have worked very hard to create an environment that is safe and welcoming and respectful,” she said.

I can’t calculate how much it cost to have these people here for half an hour. It didn’t have to happen. There were other ways to achieve the same goal.”

Tinney said it has been challenging” working with the police since the mayor brought James Lewis into town take over as chief.

The chief, he has another way of thinking about working with this population,” Tinney said. “[Predecessor] Chief {Francisco] Ortiz really embraced” the street outreach program.

That talk frustrated Chief Lewis.

That’s her opinion,” he said. We’ve talked about this.”

They didn’t pick that location deliberately,” Lewis said of his Project Restart team. That was the address they had.

Do we wish it went smoother? Yes. Do I think it was a mistake to go there for the subject at the address?”

No, he said. And, it worked.”

Truce Leaves Bad Taste

Underlying this incident is the murky question of just what relationship the police should have with the street outreach program. Everyone acknowledged that some kind of wall needs to exist between the two groups in order for participants to trust the program, and in order for cops to do their jobs.

The street outreach worker program, which started in Providence and Boston, is a concept that many cops don’t embrace, Lewis acknowledges. Some cops think it’s great. Some think it’s felons helping felons.”

The turning could be said to have come last July, when the outreach workers ended a deadly feud between two youth gangs that had terrorized the entire city — and that the cops hadn’t been able to stop.

Cops were notified, then kept at a distance, as the outreach workers brought members of both gangs to a closed-off section of Winthrop Avenue, near where some of the feud’s shootings had taken place.

Right out in the street, the workers mediated a tense peace agreement that ended up sticking. Read about that here. (Read about earlier truces the workers mediated here.)

Although the streets got safer, some cops openly simmered about the incident. They resented that felons wanted for violent acts were able to show up in public, near cops, and not be arrested.

And some complained about the role the police had played in setting up the program. Officer Shafiq Abdussabur, who on his own time ran successful youth programs in Dixwell, helped City Hall craft the street outreach worker plan. He recruited some of the workers. He referred young people there who needed help.

Abdussabur and another cop were the department’s liaisons to the outreach program. By all accounts, it was a cooperative relationship.

DSCN0573.JPGEnter James Lewis. One week after the truce was struck, Lewis, who came from Wisconsin, took the helm of a corruption-plagued police department. He promised to take a hard line against the gangbangers.

From the start, he said this week, he was hearing about problems caused by the ties between the department and the outreach program. The concern was about criminal cases being compromised by having a cop working too closely with street outreach workers.

[New Haven State’s Attorney Michael] Dearington brought it up with me when I got here. And I agree with him,” Lewis said.

Everyone was of the mind that when this thing was created, the relationship was too close. This is a very gray area. She [Barbara Tinney] is still struggling with that.”

You can’t have this close relationship with the police department that they would like,” Lewis said. Did she tell you about” the fact that under a Supreme Court ruling, someone who works with police on a case becomes an agent” under the law? If an outreach worker shares information relevant to a criminal case with a cop, and then someone is arrested, the suspect’s attorney can have access to any information that was shared.

Similarly, the outreach program stresses to participants that confidential information they share with staffers will not be turned over the police. That distance is essential to earning their trust.

Michael Dearington declined to discuss any conversations he had with Lewis about the program. He noted that the same difficult question about where to draw the line between cooperation with and necessary distance from cops has challenged the programs in Boston and St. Louis, too.

Lewis responded by reassigning Abdussabur back to an overnight patrol beat in Dixwell. He cut the number of staff liaisons from two to one. Still, he said, some of his district managers continue to refer young people in trouble to the program.

Praise & Concern

That’s true, Barbara Tinney responded — some do. Fewer than before Lewis arrived.

Maybe 50 percent of his district managers don’t believe in this program,” Tinney said. It’s a paramilitary organization. They’re good soldiers. They’re going to follow the leadership, the chief of police. If he saw value in the program, it would translate differently in his rank and file.”

Lewis is absolutely” right about the Brady case and the need to avoid working together and sharing information about criminal cases, Tinney said.

But there are other, legitimate ways the department supported the program before and now makes the work more difficult, she said.

For instance, before Lewis arrived, her outreach workers would have an easier time getting in to see shooting victims at the hospital. They were able sometimes to glean information that they could use to prevent retaliatory shootings.

After shootings, her program used to receive detailed public information that could similarly be used to act fast, she said — not the identities of suspects, but details on victims, for example. Now her agency receives terse emails with barely any facts, she said.

And she’s seeing fewer of those referrals from the district managers.

Tinney stressed that she doesn’t see Chief Lewis as trying to dismantle” or oppose the program. And she credited him with improving the department’s record in arresting violent criminals.

Rather, she described an honest difference in philosophy that affects the ability to work together to help young people and cut down crime in the city. She said, for instance that unlike the people in Project Restart, she wouldn’t have removed from an alternatives-to-jail track a 19-year-old convicted of selling $50 of marijuana.

It’s a matter of whether or not there’s a shared philosophy, a belief that a number of these young people can be reached,” Tinney said.

Lewis was asked if a closer relationship existed with the outreach workers, Project Restart members might have recognized the James Street address before making the Feb. 18 visit, or whether they might have held back when they saw where they were, or whether they would have phoned Tinney in the first place and just asked her to have the target turn himself in, as she eventually did.

I don’t know if I called her up and gave her a name, that person would show up,” he responded. How the hell would I know?”

It isn’t an issue that the police department does not want to work with the street outreach workers program,” Lewis said. Rather, for both agencies to succeed and follow the law, he said, they need to have clear boundaries and be completely separate operations.”

Previous coverage of High Point/Project Restart: 

High Point? Not For Raheem
Top Brass On High Point
A Cry Goes Out: Bring Back Community Policing
Edgewood Patroller Heralds High Point
High Point Diary
Community Policing Moves South
Witness to the Call In”
Drug Market Closed
Chief, in Dixwell, Reveals High Point Delay

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