In a spirited debate over tea and coffee, New Haven’s embattled police chief vowed to “fine-tune” his approach in the wake of a rank-and-file no-confidence vote but also to take technological steps to identify abusive officers earlier.
“I think it’s a lesson we can all learn from,” Chief Frank Limon said in reference to last week’s 246 – 21 non-binding vote against his first 10 months’ performance in office. “I don’t take it personally.
“But I realize I’ve got to fine-tune what I do as a leader and a manager.”
Limon made the remarks during a moderated 35-minute back-and-forth with community activist Barbara Fair and Alderman and retired police Capt. Gerald Antunes about recent controversies hitting his department.
The debate took place Thursday at Bru Cafe, the second installment in a “New Haven’s Talking” series produced jointly by the Independent and NBC Connecticut Channel 30. The series builds on news stories, like coverage of the no-confidence vote, that have generated discussion in the Independent. Some of the key actors come to Bru to discuss the issue further and respond to some of the posted reader comments. Channel 30’s cameras roll; then an edited version of the debate airs on Channel 30.
The Limon-Fair-Antunes segment was prepared by reporter Diana Perez and cameramen Dan Lee and Daryl Vallez. Participants also responded to comments posted by Independent readers “RobN” and “City Dem.” Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch Perez’s report. Click on the play arrow here for an unedited version. ( Click here to watch the first installment of the series, about New Haven’s plan to charge people for handling storm run-off.)
Fair, who organized a demonstration on behalf of Limon before the no-confidence vote, nevertheless ended up disagreeing with him throughout Thursday’s discussion. She argued that the cops don’t need to carry Tasers, for instance. The weapon leads police to use force when otherwise they might just talk someone down, she said.
“Having a Taser maybe sometimes is just easy access to hurting someone, ” she said.
She also criticized the decision to bring AR-15 rifles into the police arsenal.
The city started arming officers with Tasers in 2009 after a years-long debate that followed the 2004 shooting death of a mentally ill man who had threatened an officer with a knife. The new AR-15s were ordered before Limon moved to New Haven last April to become chief. The rank and file, in fact, have criticized him for not putting the weapons in their hands yet; he said he’s been working on the policy for deploying them.
Thursday Limon defended the decisions to add both weapons.
Officers “need to be prepared” to “defend themselves and defend the city,” Limon said.
He said that the Tasers enable police not to have use greater force — like guns with bullets — in life-threatening or other difficult encounters.
New Haven officers fired Tasers 116 times in 2010, he reported. He said 12 of those cases “involv[ed] a weapons investigation,” in 11 of the 12 instances, cops recovered a gun from the tased subject.
Fair also criticized the department’s handling of complaints against officers accused of brutality. Demonstrators recently picketed the station about the department’s decision to take no disciplinary action against an officer accused of brutality in nine separate incidents.
Fair asserted that many people abused by police don’t bother filing complaints.
“When you can break somebody’s nose and rupture their ear and butt-head them and yet internal affairs comes back with ‘exonerated,’ who’s going to have faith in that kind of department?” she asked Limon.
He responded that he plans to use technology — a software program called IAPro — to keep track of complaints and other problems involving officers in order to intervene sooner and offer training and counseling to people who seem to be causing trouble. (The IAPro website claims the product “assists public safety agencies in identifying potential problems early on, so that proactive action can be taken. IAPro ensures the most efficient handling of citizen complaints, administrative investigations, use-of-force reporting, and other types of incidents, while providing the means to analyze and identify areas of concern.”)
Antunes, who used to train the department’s SWAT team and order weaponry before his retirement, told Fair he believes the vast majority of cops do their jobs with integrity. You have to expect any organization to have occasional bad apples, he argued. “Unfortunately we have to recruit from the human race.”
Now an alderman from the Bishop Woods neighborhood, Antunes was asked how he plans to vote on proposals to trim police benefits (by, for instance, cutting cost-of-living adjustments, upping officer contributions to pension and health plans, no longer adding overtime pay into base salary when calculating pensions, upping the years some cops serve before they can retire). He said that as a lifelong cop he’s sympathetic to officers who risk their lives on the job and came onto the force expecting the current rules to stay in place. But he also said he recognizes the city faces a huge budget gap ($31 million at last count) and can’t just raise taxes on people to solve it. He said he’d like to see both sides — the city administration and the police union — meet in the middle on the issue.
Fair spoke of having to pay more money toward her pension than she had expected when she retired from a career at SNET, because of changes in the economy. That’s reality for people working today, she said, and that reality should hold for city police, too.
Did you talk about how 20-26 officers are going to be laid off, but you kept them in the dark? That's 20-26 lowest paid officers on the force, and most likely paid less that Johnny's mayoral staff.