Boarding up the Apple Store on Broadway.
Steele: Mayor “is not a white supremacist.”
Standing with community leaders at one of two police substations that someone tried to burn down, Mayor Justin Elicker promised Monday afternoon to respond to demands to combat racism and excessive force by law enforcement.
Meanwhile, less than a mile and a half away, a crew of construction contractors worked on boarding up the Apple Store on Broadway as part of a nationwide company effort to protect its consumer tech from looters.
Elicker promised to move faster to appoint members in conjunction with the Board of Alders to the reconstituted Civilian Review Board to oversee allegations of police misconduct.
He announced that he has nominated Tracey Meares, a national community policing expert who has helped reform departments across the country, for a seat on the Police Commission.
He promised to review the city’s agreements with police forces at Yale and in neighboring communities setting rules for how their officers conduct themselves when dealing with citizens in New Haven.
He made those vows at a press conference held at the Newhallville police substation at 596 Winchester Ave. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the substation at around 2 a.m. Monday, about an hour after the same thing happened to one of the two Hill neighborhood substations, on Howard Avenue. Neither station sustained extensive damage.
The walling off of iPhones from the public, meanwhile, took place late Monday afternoon, at the Apple outpost at 65 Broadway. (See more on that below.) And Walmart temporarily closed its Route 80 store as part of a wave of nationwide outlet closings in the face of urban unrest.
Standing beside Police Chief Otoniel Reyes, Assistant Chiefs Renee Dominguez and Karl Jacobson, and a dozen community leaders and politicians ranging from State Sen. Gary Winfield to State Rep. Robyn Porter to Newhallville management team chair Kim Harris to Dixwell small business contractor Rodney Williams, Elicker said he is proud of how overwhelmingly peaceful yesterday’s local anti-police brutality protests played out.
He stressed his “deep frustration and anger” about the police killing of a 46-year-old African American man named George Floyd. A viral video of a white police officer murdering Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes served as the most immediate catalyst to nationwide outpourings of grief, anger, frustration, and outrage over a long history of police officers killing unarmed black people.
He said he recognized that 1,000 people turned out to protest in New Haven yesterday not just because of George Floyd.
“It is also about Connecticut,” he said. “It is also about New Haven. It is about us and the work that we must do.”
He said he doesn’t have all the answers, and does not know what it is like to be black or brown. “But I care,” he said. “And I am deeply committed to doing the right thing, addressing police brutality and systemic racism. And I’m listening.”
The Winchester Avenue substation.
Elicker listed three actions he promised to take in the coming weeks and months of his administration to help address some of the concerns raised by protesters in New Haven and around the country this weekend.
He said he will “finish the work around the decades-long battled to create a Civilian Review Board.” That means working closely with the alders to finish appointing the remaining members necessary for the board, which alders legally created in January 2019, to finally come into existence and start meeting.
He also promised to review the agreements that the city currently has with the Yale Police Department and the Hamden Police Department. He didn’t say he would necessarily scrap those agreements, as some of yesterday’s protesters called on him to do, but he said he would spend time reviewing and rethinking them “to ensure that those activities adhere to values we have in New Haven about our relatinship between the police and the community.”
And Elicker said his administration would push to “deepen the conversation about community policing.”
He said he recently submitted a request to the alders for Yale Law School Professor Tracey Meares to serve on the city’s Police Commission.
Meares is a nationally influential criminal justice thinker whose research on “procedural justice,” which focuses more on building police-civilian trust than on punishment, helped lead to the creation of Project Longevity, among other community policing initiatives. She also served on then-President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in 2014.
In a phone interview with the Independent Monday night, Meares said she’s interested in serving on the local police commission in part to “bring the work that I have done nationally, home.”
“I have studied policing for almost my entire career,” she said. “I have attempted to contribute to the improvement of how policing is carried out at a national level and in cities around the country. I think I have something to offer to the city in which I live.”
Meares’s appointment now advances to the Adlermanic Affairs Committee for a public hearing before proceeding to the Board of Alders for a final vote.
Steele: Mayor “is not a white supremacist.”
Varick AME Church Pastor Kelcy Steele stood up for Elicker, who was the subject of vocal criticism by some of the protesters who rallied late into the night outside of police headquarters Sunday.
“Mayor Justin Elicker is not a white supremacist,” Steele said. “But he is a white man trying to ascertain the climate and the concerns of all our communities, black and brown. I am disappointed by how he and his family are being targeted. These problems … were here before we elected this mayor.”
Steele praised the overwhelming majority of protesters in New Haven and elsewhere in the country who “have been peaceful, courageous, responsible and inspiring. … The small minority of folks who have resorted to violence in various forms … are putting people at risk.”
Former youth outreach worker Dougie Bethea (pictured) turned to the police and said, “You guys, your officers did a phenomenal job of holding your peace” on Sunday. “You guys did a hell of a job holding your ground and not being pushed to react the wrong way.”
And Williams (pictured), who grew up in Newhallville, similarly praised city police and the Elicker administration. “Yesterday they took a little more than I feel they should have took,” he said about local police. He said they let the criticism roll right off their backs.
“Yesterday community members protested, and that is their right,” Reyes (pictured) said. “I am proud of the men and women of the New Haven Police Department who remained professional. We allowed people to protest.
“It is a very difficult time in the country, because George Floyd died at the hands of a police officer. That is something that as a chief … we must own.
“We must understand that our role is to stop it. We’re committed to justice even if … that injustice is at the hands of police.”
Reyes said that at around 1 a.m. Monday, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the police substation at 410 Howard Ave. in the Hill. At around 2 a.m., someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the Newhallville substation.
“Somebody tried to burn two community buildings,” he said. “These are community buildings. We will not allow these acts to come between the work that we intend to do as a community.” He said the department is working with the FBI to identify who threw those flaming bottles at the substations.
“We realize this does not represent the sentiment of the community,” he said. “This community is committed to change. This community is commited to working with the police department. … We are committed to working toward change.”
When asked about the protesters who said the police pepper sprayed them Sunday as they tried to enter the police headquarters to talk with the mayor, Reyes said “some agitators in the group began to call out to storm into the police department. We did not want that to happen. They attempted to push through the officers and threw some projectiles — batteries, water bottles, which hit a supervisor in the face.”
Officers put on safety gear in response, he said. “We held the line.” And officers used pepper spray to move the crowd back. “They did it quickly. They did it based on their training.”
“We had a very long day yesterday,” he said. “There were no arrests. There were no injuries. We can build on that.”
Boarding Up The Apple Store
Down on Broadway at around 5:15 p.m., roughly 10 contractors worked on the finishing touches of boarding up the Apple Store.
From New York City to Washington state, Apple has been boarding up some stores to protect its merchandisers from looting during the nationwide anti-police brutality protests.
A roughly 15-foot-tall, 40-foot-wide set of wooden planks now cover the entirety of the consumer tech store’s glass facade at the heart of the Yale-adjacent, Yale-owned commercial district.
One contractor dipped a paint roller into a tray of deep black paint and covered the light brown wood into darkness.
“No comment. We have no comment,” the crew’s apparent supervisor said. When asked for a phone number for someone who might be able to comment, he said he didn’t have one.
A representative from Apple did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.
Apple is boarding up stores nationwide after two of its Boston outlets were looted.
Anderson Scooper Photo
A passerby who first alerted the Independent as to the boarding up of the store earlier on Monday said that they saw the pictured Yale Properties staffers approach the contractors, urging them not to follow through on boarding up the store.
“We’ve learned that Apple headquarters made this decision for their New Haven store and many other locations around the country,” Yale spokesperson Karen Peart told the Independent by email Monday night. “The university did not grant permission for this action.”
I know 'subpoena power' has been a real sticking point with moving this CRB forward.
Rather than 'subpoena power', could 'full co-operation with any CRB investigation' be made a 'condition of Police Employment', rather than giving an Attorney's power of subpoena to Civilians.