Abdul-Karim with Holder-Winfield, Keitazulu, & Elicker.
One said it unfairly targets black people. Two others applauded the basic concept — though one said it took the city too long to embrace it and still needs more government back-up.
Those views emerged Thursday morning about New Haven’s “Project Longevity” as the three announced candidates for mayor gathered for their first joint forum.
The New Haven Register hosted the forum from 8 to 9 a.m. and live-streamed it on its website. The Register’s Shahid Abdul-Karim (at left in photo) moderated the discussion with Democratic candidates (from left next to Abdul-Karin) Gary Holder-Winfield, a Newhallville state representative; Sundiata Keitazulu, a Newhallville plumber; and Justin Elicker, an East Rock alderman. All three are seeking to succeed Mayor John DeStefano, who plans to retire at year’s end after two decades in office. Other candidates are expected to emerge in coming weeks.
The three offered differing takes on Project Longevity, a joint federal-city-community campaign that targets violent drug gangs.
The project began late last year as part of Police Chief Dean Esserman’s broader efforts to revive community policing in New Haven.
Modeled on successful similar programs in other cities, Project Longevity identifies the small number of people committing the most shootings in town; maps out their gang affiliations, then brings them to “call-ins” with prosecutors, cops, social workers, educators, and community leaders. At the call-ins, they’re told that if any one member of the gang commits a shooting, law enforcement will swoop down on all members of the gang and lock them up on any charges they can find. Prosecutors vow to give the cases highest priority. At the same time, leaders offer immediate front-of-the-line spots in programs offering job-training, housing, continuing education if the gang-bangers agree to go straight. Click here to read more about it; click on the play arrow to watch the principal of New Haven’s Adult Ed deliver the program’s message.
Since Project Longevity’s roll-out late last year, the city has grown relatively quieter. After a 50 percent drop in murders and 30 percent drop in shootings in 2012, violent crime has continued dropping precipitously so far in 2013. It’s too early to attribute the drop on any one of a host of new community-policing initiatives or to judge the long-term impact.
So far, Elicker said in the Register forum Thursday morning, he likes what he sees in Project Longevity.
“It’s early to tell if it will be successful in New Haven. It’s not going to fix the problem. I think we need to combat this problem of violence in our cities from many aspects,” Elicker remarked.
That said, Project Longevity “has been successful in other cities for two reasons. One it is a stick, in that we bring folks in and say, ‘We take this seriously. We know who you are. Knock it off.’ … Number two, there’s a carrot.”
He said he has reviewed literature on current best practices in American policing, and Project Longevity is included among them. So are some other tools New Haven has been using, he said, including the ShotSpotter system (which electronically alerts cops the instant gun shots are fired) and a “cops on the dots” approach. That approach includes stationing officers not just in the general areas, but on the very address where crimes have been occurring. Research in other cities has shown that, contrary to instinctual logic, the crime does not all simply move to other blocks.
Holder-Winfield, for his part, expressed some skepticism about cops on the dots: A criminal who wants to commit a crime will find somewhere to commit it, he argued.
Like Elicker, he did embrace the general concept of Project Longevity.
Holder-Winfield said that he and other community activists called for the same concept in 2007 at a Dixwell event calling for a “Zero Killings” campaign. Read about that event here.
“At the time we were told that was crazy,” he said. He said it shouldn’t have taken the city so long to listen to the community. Now that Project Longevity has started, the city needs to plan long-term to ensure follow-through, Holder-Winfield added; he said programs that work in other cities sometimes fail here because of too little follow-through. The DeStefano administration announced in 2007 that it was bringing a version of Project Longevity here four years ago, then abandoned it within months.
Holder-Winfield also argued Thursday that the city isn’t doing enough on the “carrot” end. The city has manifold job-training programs, he said, but not enough follow-through to ensure people — especially those emerging from prison — have the “soft skills” to keep jobs once they land them. And developers and city officials need to stop making “excuses” about why more people of color aren’t landing contracts and subcontracts on development projects, Holder-Winfield said.
Unlike his opponents, Keitazulu blasted Project Longevity and the current policing regime. He said he will bring back retired Assistant Chief Petisia Adger as the new police chief “when” he becomes mayor.
Keitazulu echoed concerns originally expressed in a Register story Abdul-Karim wrote featuring interviews with black New Haveners: that Project longevity represents racial profiling.
“I look at Project Longevity like I look at the war on drugs. People in the inner-city are going to be attacked,” he said.
Instead of the gang initiative, he called for the creation of a “safety patrol” featuring “young people working with the police. Paying them. Hiring them. I think this is better.”
He also called for the creation of two new vo-tech schools in New Haven. He would transform Hillhouse into one of those schools, he said.
“Every time I see these new crime bills come up, the only people getting affected is minorities,” Keitzaulu said. “The prisons fill up. Minorities make up 12 percent of this country and 50 percent of this jail population. A t the same time, everybody wants peace.”
I'm not sure how they think that targeting all known members and associates of a gang when one commits a crime is a NEW idea, nor do I understand why its racist.
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act - aka RICO (Enacted in 1970)
In layman's terms (and this is a BIG simplification because you could study RICO for years and not fully understand it,) it allows law enforcement to target ALL members of a criminal enterprise if even ONE member commits a predicate offense.
This law has been used against "La Cosa Nostra", Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (Hells Angels), hispanic gangs, police departments and even in some instances, the Catholic Church. Its incredibly effective at dismantling organized crime groups and has been held up in court numerous times. So you can stow the "its not fair to treat us all as one" argument, because the whole point of a gang is to act as a single group.
As for the "racist" argument. Last I checked the police don't pick who gets to join the gangs. Here's a hypothetical:
I want to start a criminal enterprise. I reach out to a few of my buddies who are of the same ethnicity and we get a group together and form a "gang." One of our rules is that we only allow people of our ethnicity into the group.
So sooner or later one of our members gets caught doing something illegal and tells the police that we ordered him to do it. Now, thinking back to the entrance requirements WE as the gang set, what do you think the racial makeup of the individuals on that warrant will be? I'm betting they will all be the same, but that's hardly the police's fault. They're simply arrested the members of the gang. They didn't decide that all our members should be X or Y race.
Food for thought.