“I heard good things about New Haven,” President Barack Obama remarked. “I might have a daughter going there one day.”
“She will be in the good hands of the New Haven police department,” Chief Dean Esserman assured him.
Esserman recounted that conversation Thursday afternoon upon leaving a meeting at the White House.
He joined other chiefs and law-enforcement officials in the meeting with Obama and his attorney general, Loretta Lynch.
Esserman is part of a group of 130 chiefs, prosecutors and sheriffs around the country who have organized to call for cutting the size of prison populations. (Click here to read a full story about that.)
President Obama has made a similar push.
His sympathies were clear at Thursday’s meeting, Esserman reported.
“What was most striking was how well-versed in depth, how familiar the president is with the issues,” he said. “For a man who has such a broad reach on so many issues the presidency has to be familiar with, he speaks with great clarity and understanding. All of us were struck by it.”
Esserman said he also had a chance to speak directly with Lynch about lowering prison sentences for young people charged as adults.
“I’ve put too many children in jail in my career,” Esserman, who was a prosecutor in New York before beginning a 25-year career as a police chief in a number of different cities. “The conversation about mass incarceration can’t just be about drugs and parole violations. It has to be about the understanding that there is no magic age at 18 that you become an adult. The brain doesn’t develop that way. I grew up in a generation of criminalization of children and ‘super-predators’ [with people arguing that] if a child committed a crime like an adult, he would be treated as an adult. We made a mistake. I was part of that. I believe in holding children accountable. I believe in punishment. It needs to be a punishment that fits the crime.”
Esserman said he was “proud to represent New Haven” and “proud to follow the mayor to the White House,” referring to a recent visit Mayor Toni Harp made to D.C.
Obama’s daughter Malia has visited Yale, among other campuses, as she prepares for her college career.
Let's hope she picks Dartmouth or Princeton.