Dear Abby — Er, Officer Mark

The woman bent down to her toddler daughter and whispered in her ear as Officers Mark de Carvalho and Jon Pleckaitis approached on foot. The little girl hesitated, on the verge of smiling, but looked unsure as she waved at the two policemen.

“I was telling her y’all are gonna come and get her!” said the little girl’s mother, laughing.

“No, no,” de Carvalho and Pleckaitis replied. They laughed, too — uneasily.

De Carvalho and Pleckaitis were walking the beat in the Hill neighborhood Thursday night when they ran into the mother and the little girl. What seemed like a little fun for the mother represents a bigger problem, de Carvalho said — parents socializing their children to look at police like bogeymen.

Combating that problem is one reason the pair has been walking the streets of Hill every working day — as have similar teams in all 10 city policing districts. New Haven has brought back permanent walking beats as part of a larger effort to bring back community policing. Part of the point: To make cops familiar, trusted faces, not threats.

Watching an evening’s worth of greetings and interactions on the street Thursday revealed some of the challenge they face, as well as the inroads walking beats can make. It might surprise you what people say when they run into police officers on foot in their neighborhood. Sometimes they share valuable information. Other times they ask for the kind of advice that you find in ​“Dear Abby” or ​“Ask Ann Landers.”

De Carvalho said children have burst into tears around them. Once, when the the two officers responded to a call they were talking to the woman who called. Her young son stood off to the side and pantomimed guns with his hands, saying, ​“I’m going to shoot you cops.”

Now that de Carvalho has a 3‑year-old son of his own, he wonders: If a child fears the police and then gets lost one day, what happens?

“There’s still a stigma about talking to police, especially in your own neighborhood,” said Pleckaitis.

“And police are often only as effective as the community they work with,” said de Carvalho.

Neighborhood Advice Columnists

Pleckaitis and de Carvalho greeted everyone who walked by. They checked up on the progress of projects in the neighborhood, like a house on Vernon Street made entirely out of shipping containers. They dropped in a Sam’s Convenience Store near Yale-New Haven Hospital to ask the owner how he’s doing.

The walking beat has also facilitated communication in unexpected ways. As the officers left the intersection of Congress and West streets, a man hurried past them on the sidewalk. Just as the man blew past the two officers, he doubled back.

“Hey, man, I’m sorry to bother you, but can I ask you a question?”

The man was dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and a hat, even though the unseasonably warm day’s temperature had dropped to normal nighttime winter cold.

“I’ve been locked out of my apartment since 11, man,” he said. ​“Me and my girlfriend, we got into a spat or what have you, and I walked to the store to get a cigarette. When I came back, I saw her walking down the street and I couldn’t get back in.”

De Carvalho and Pleckaitis asked him: Did you talk to your landlord? Is there anyone you can stay with? Is this the first time she has locked you out?

The man eventually decided to wait on his girlfriend a little longer, but his brush with de Carvalho and Pleckaitis reflected a theme of the walking beat. People often doubled back to ask questions. Questions like: ​“I lost my wallet the other day. Should I go down to the police station?”

“I got a ticket the other day, but I lost it. What should I do?”

“How can I get a job with y’all?”

De Carvalho said people double back on them all the time and often, the questions aren’t so black and white.

“Seems like all of a sudden we’re like the neighborhood advice columnists,” he said. ​“People will start talking about their relationships and saying, ​‘My girlfriend wants to accuse me of rape,’ and we’ll say, ​‘Well, assuming you’re innocent, you might want to consider getting out of the relationship.’”

The barrier between police and civilian breaks down. There’s no context of police work, no distressed call — just a run-in on the street. This kind of interaction hardly ever happens when responding to calls in a police car, Pleckaitis said.

“No one really calls the police to say, ​‘Hey I’m having a great day today,’” he said.

The thinning of the barrier between police and civilian is a new feeling for de Carvalho and Pleckaitis, who have served as New Haven police officers for eight and five years, respectively. They used to work out of cars; up until August they worked on robberies together.

The two officers grew up in New Haven County and knew each other through mutual friends before they became cops. De Carvalho, 32, said he always had a hunch he wanted to be a police officer. When he went to college at Hofstra University in New York and none of the subjects appealed to him, he knew the hunch was right.

Pleckaitis, 30, is the son of a retired New Haven police sergeant. He went to Southern Connecticut State University and soon discovered the choice felt right for him, too.

“But I mean, growing up, I also wanted to play point guard for the Boston Celtics,” he said. 

Barbarian Salad Triumphs

Now that Pleckaitis and de Carvalho are walking, they notice stuff — the sheer volume of broken glass and dog poop on the streets, a Revolutionary War monument they had always driven past and never stopped to look at, a tiny place that serves amazing food.

In fact, they talk about food a lot.

“The Little Salad Shop on High Street,” de Carvalho said. ​“Their salads are epic.”

“A couple weeks ago, I got their ​‘barbarian salad’ and I was a little ashamed of myself for not being able to finish it,” Pleckaitis said. ​“But seriously, it is like eating six pounds of vegetables.”

But they’re lucky when their walking beat allows for talk about food. There’s the occasional spat of street trouble, as when a group of guys yelling at each other outside of a shelter’s overflow building.

Sometimes, the job can make it difficult to relate to people who aren’t police officers.

“Especially when you had to chase down some kid with a gun that day or you saw some guy with his head split open,” de Carvalho said.

The pair check in frequently on bodega owner Edilberto ​“Eddie” Fontanez, a fixture in the Hill for almost 40 years. He owns Eddie’s Market, which got robbed earlier this winter. When a man came in the store with a shotgun, Eddie wrestled it out of his hands and tried to lock him in the store. Eddie called the police, but the guy snuck out.

“Guys like Eddie have to walk a fine line,” de Carvalho said. ​“They have to protect themselves, but it can look bad if you’re talking to the police.”

“They’re good help,” Eddie said of the officers. ​“When you’re in trouble, who else are you going to call?”

Related stories:

• Walking Cops Check In On The Champ (Dixwell)
• The People Talk, The Cops Walk
• Wynne & Benedetto Start Walking The Beat (Downtown)