Harp Explains Decision; Cops Plan Protest Rally

Harp (pictured) made the comments in an interview Wednesday after taking heat from city cops for a decision she announced a day earlier to place on paid desk duty an officer who was recorded on video slamming a handcuffed 15-year-old girl to the ground during an arrest. The officer was placed on desk duty pending the completion of an internal investigation.

Meanwhile, Police Chief Dean Esserman Thursday urged officers and community members at a weekly Compstat meeting to hear each other out and ​“go forward” rather than lose ground on community policing.

On Tuesday, Harp had come out of her office to greet protesters angered over a citizen video showing Officer Joshua Smereczynsky slamming the girl to the ground on March 15. Harp announced to the group that she asked Chief Esserman to place Smereczynsky on administrative duty. (She also told the group that their condemnation of the officer was their ​“opinion” and urged them to wait for the results of an internal investigation into the incident before reaching judgment.)

“She bowed down to an angry mob,” responded police union’s President Louis Cavaliere Jr. Tuesday. ​“To say that we are pissed is putting it lightly. This mayor should have used her backbone and stood up for what is right.” Tensions boiled among some rank-and-file officers Wednesday who argued that the mayor had not supported them.

On Thursday the union was finalizing plans for a protest march to be held on Friday afternoon at City Hall. (That’s a change from previous plans to have the protest coincide with Friday’s police graduation.) (Click here to read about a 2011 police protest rally over a different matter, shown in the video.) A Facebook posting about the upcoming Friday rally proclaimed: ​“Law enforcement officers must unify now not only in support of Josh, but ALL officers. Let’s send a message that will be heard across this land!”

Harp said she acted as she did because she thought it would be best for the officer and the community. She appealed to officers to understand the community’s concerns about the video.

She also said that she had received a message over Facebook that she interpreted as threatening her physical harm over the matter. She said the person was using a ​“made-up name.”

The Lead-Up

The March 15 arrest of the 15-year-old girl during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade led to furious community members on both sides of the issue. That unrest was made visible when protesters in support of the girl stormed into the police department Monday demanding to see Chief Esserman or anyone in authority. Top cops stayed away. (Read about that protest here.)

Mayor Harp said said she began thinking Tuesday morning about the question of whether the officer should be on paid desk duty during the investigation.

She first encountered the desk-duty question while at an unrelated public event. There, she was questioned by Independent reporter Aliyya Swaby about the desk-duty question. Protesters had raised the question the day before after the Independent reported that Smereczynsky remained on active patrol duty pending the internal investigations of his actions, while another officer, Najea Poindexter, had been placed on administrative duty while an internal investigation was still pending. ​“Do we have two different police departments, or one? A police department for black officers and a police department for white officers?” State NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile had asked. (Poindexter is black, Smereczynsky white.)

Harp said at the time she didn’t know how long Smereczynsky had been a New Haven officer, but she believed that Pointdexter’s case was being treated differently because of her probationary status, not her race. She said she has since learned that Smereczynsky has been on the force for about seven years.

“What I knew was that Officer Poindexter was a rookie in probation,” she said. ​“Everywhere I have worked, when you are on probation there are different standards that management can hold you to.”

Harp said she re-read the Independent’s coverage of the earlier protest. She also learned that protesters planned to come to her office later Tuesday.

She consulted with numerous law-enforcement officers to seek opinions about the desk-duty question, she said. She also contacted a state criminal-justice expert with whom she’d worked as a legislator. She said that while she did not form a conclusion about Officer Smereczynsky’s conduct — she’s waiting on the internal affairs report for that — she did conclude that he should work inside headquarters pending the investigation’s outcome, given the community’s passions about what occurred and the pressures facing him as well.

Then, at 4 p.m., protesters upset over the video stormed her office, bullhorn on high, refusing to leave unless she would meet with them.

Harp said she felt her safety and that of her staff was compromised. She acknowledged that no one made a verbal threat on her life, or threatened any physical harm to her staff. Police officers also were present during the protest in the entryway of her office.

“I wasn’t personally threatened, but they were yelling and awfully close,” she said. ​“If I had said the word, I could have had them removed and jailed, but I decided not to do that. I thought, ​‘What is the fairest thing that could be done here?’ I thought I came up with something reasonable and fair, and I hope that we can get this investigation completed so we can put this to rest.”

She called Chief Dean Esserman. Esserman argued that the officer shouldn’t be placed on desk duty; he compared the case to that of Sgt. Chris Rubino, who was investigated and later found at fault for arresting a woman for video-recording him standing on the neck of a handcuffed bar patron who had previously resisted arrest. (That occurred before Harp became mayor.)

Harp said she saw the situation as more analogous to the Poindexter case, in which the officer was immediately placed on desk duty after her boyfriend was arrested for a traffic violation while driving her car with drugs allegedly in the vehicle.

“My thinking in looking at this from the point of view of the officer and the people was, ​‘Wouldn’t the officer feel better and even safer on administrative duty instead of being on patrol? — particularly because of the kinds of protests that have occurred [outside New Haven],” Harp said. Several peaceful protests have happened in New Haven post-Ferguson, but the March 15 incident riled a hornet’s nest. (Read about previous protests here, here, here, and here.)

“It protects [the public’s] interest as well as the officer’s interest,” she said. ​“Whether he is innocent or guilty, he is going to be made to feel professionally uncomfortable with anything he does, and he will be seen in a certain light. He would be more protected off patrol and on administrative duty, earning his salary and still working rather than being second guessed out on the street.”

“Let’s have a standard around when there’s an internal investigation [about a controversial public matter], the person should be on desk duty,” Harp said.

“Think About How The Community Feels”

Harp urged angry city cops to look at what happened to the 15-year-old girl through the eyes of the community.

“They need to think about how the community feels about them,” she said. ​“I’m asking them to extend themselves and look at this from the community’s side. From the side of a layman who doesn’t understand police procedure and protocol, or that in certain situations that that maneuver is appropriate. From a layman looking at what’s going on, they see a young woman, and a man who has the ability to use lethal force, and the young woman has physical injuries, according to what I’ve read in the newspaper.

“My thinking was, ​‘Gee, there ought to be a cooling down period and everybody kept in a safe place.’ It doesn’t mean that I have presupposed anything.”

Harp said she and the community entrust an ​“awesome amount of power” to the police department.

“It really is the power of life and death because they carry guns,” she said. ​“We absolutely respect them but because we give them that power they must exercise it in a way that we understand is designed to protect us.”

She said if politics are at play, they’re not at play on her end.

“I understand that Lou Cavaliere has his officers that he’s politically responsible to, but I believe that they have their own issue that has nothing to do with this incident or this officer,” she said. ​“I’m really saddened that the rhetoric being used around the chief and me, and our response, is being used as a way to express concerns that aren’t really related to this event.

“I think if it was related to this incident, cooler heads would prevail and the rhetoric would be far less strident. I don’t think anyone is being harmed by what I have done. The investigation will go forward, and we should be guided by its outcome. Any hyperbole that I have heard around that from union leadership is something that doesn’t mitigate the fact that we still have an ongoing investigation and we should all be guided by that. I hope that the investigation will be done fairly and as expeditiously as possible so we can move forward from that.”

Compstat Message

Esserman made a similar appeal to move forward Thursday, at the weekly Compstat data-gathering session at 1 Union Ave.

The chief (pictured in video meeting Tuesday with the arrested teen’s family) stood to address the room filled with law enforcement officers and community leaders. He usually gives his opening remarks from his seat at the table. He rose to ask those present to remember a time when the meeting was held behind a locked door and excluded many of the people in the room, including the press, and to urge them to not forget all the goodwill and cooperation they’ve built because of an incident that has caused days of tension in the city.

He said he wanted to be sure that the people in the room were ​“seeing each other, hearing each other and trusting each other.”

“What happened that Sunday at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and this Monday with the protest was America not hearing each other, America not seeing each other,” he said. ​“That has to change.”

Esserman said that when people saw the video, no one saw an officer of seven years, with a great family, a white officer who grew up in a black church. He said no one saw the girl through the eyes of a parent of a child who needed help because of trouble that started months before the day of her arrest.

“That day was an American crisis that has the ability to pull this community apart,” he said. ​“I’m asking this room: Don’t let it pull us apart. What the world is seeing around the country is people not listening and seeing each other. In this room, we listen and see each other, and we’re going to be an example.

He went on to say that he would trust any New Haven police officer with his children. He said he would trust any of the people in the room with his children in a heartbeat because he knows each person by name.

Esserman urged officers in the room to listen to the community, just as they’re ​“asking the community to listen, see and hear” them.

“We’re not going to go backward,” he said. ​“We’re going to go forward.”

Read previous coverage:

Video Captures Cop Slamming Girl To Ground
This Time, Cop Kept On Streets During IA Probe
Anybody Home?
​“I’m Sorry For What Happened”