Lorenzo Boyd and Gary Winfield at WNHH FM.
Three years after the murder of George Floyd sparked a national reckoning, Lorenzo Boyd and Gary Winfield continue working step by step to recraft the way Connecticut approaches policing and criminal justice.
Boyd, a retired sheriff and current University of New Haven criminal justice and community policing professor, has received a $1 million federal grant along with colleague Karl Minges “to analyze how to break the cycle of gun-related violence.” For the next two years they plan to “train 200 officers in interviewing people who have experinced trauma and building up relationships with local communities.”
Winfield, a New Haven state senator who has championed police accountability legislation for 15 years, just finished another session as co-chair of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee. He reworked a now-passed law aimed at keeping the small group of repeated gun offenders behind bars to avoid casting too big a net and dragging in the wrong people. He for the first time voted in favor of legislation promoting municipal automated speed and red-light enforcement (which passed into law) after concluding it addressed important civil rights concerns.
Boyd and Winfield expressed hope tempered with ongoing struggle in a discussion about the state of criminal justice reform and community policing, during a joint appearance Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“I’m very optimistic. Because we’re in a very different place than we were three years ago. We’re not nearly where I’d hope we would be. But even with the Derek Chauvin case, we see police officers, police commanders testifying against rogue officers. We wouldn’t have seen that five, 10, 20 years ago,” Boyd said. He also gave a thumbs up to the direction of New Haven’s police force under its new chief.
“So I think the needle is moving. It’s slow. Crime is symptomatic of large problems in society. We’re just not equipped or ready or willing to deal with larger problems.”
“We’re constantly making progress in Connecticut,” remarked Winfield. “I won’t let us not make progress.”
Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with State Sen. Gary Winfield and Professor Lorenzo Boyd on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline.”
Connecting legislative success in CT with “Progress” concerning a police murder over a thousand miles away within a completely different state is a misnomer of record proportions.
The white-controlled media and its reporters love to rush declaring progress and positive change for issues and circumstances that don’t affect other white people but that have significantly affected Black people.
It is an attempt to create a narrative that helps to calm us down so that our justified anger is quickly quelled or proved untenable if it is not.
Black people should not fall for this tactic—our enormous disappointment in American policing results from what has occurred throughout this country and its history. A few bad laws made a bit better in one state do not change that.
The Rev. Mr. Samuel T. Ross-Lee