6 Hamden Cops Sworn In; Hiring Process Critiqued

Six officers were sworn into the Hamden Police Department Friday morning, filling long-open vacancies and diversifying the force — while simultaneously prompting questions about the town’s hiring procedures.

Municipal elected officials enthusiastically joined Juan Bayas, Oscar Soler, Taquan Mitchell, Luisangel Valdovinos, Joseph Seagren and Natalie McLaughlin for the swearing-in ceremony at Memorial Town Hall to publicly welcome them into the town’s police department while proud family members looked on.

Mayor Lauren Garrett expressed awe at how many of the officers chose to leave jobs in neighboring cities to come to Hamden: Five of the six officers were previously certified police in Bridgeport; one last worked in Orange. 

For months, Hamden’s Police Department has been short-staffed by nearly 20 officers, which the town promised to address through their last collective bargaining agreement. 

“We have not hired this many officers in quite some time,” Garrett said. In fact, she asserted, the last time Hamden took in six officers at once was in 1995.

She said each officer standing beside her had successfully met ​“our standards” and thanked them ​“for choosing Hamden.” 

“Recruitment has been very hard nationwide, statewide and in Hamden here,” Acting Chief Tim Wydra noted. In addition to these six, Wydra said, two more officers are scheduled to join the force by August. 

“We still need to fill some ranks,” he pointed out. He said that he believes getting more patrol officers on the ground will help the department to broaden traffic enforcement and supplement hot-spot patrols. For example, he said he believes more officers should be patrolling the Farmington Canal Line, where 15-year-old Elijah Gomez was murdered in May.

Five of the six officers, Wydra noted, are also people of color. The town has long been in conversation about how to diversify its mostly white public safety departments; Garrett campaigned for office on a promise to bring more people of color into local government.

With the new hires, according to Wydra, the 92-person force is now 70 percent white, 12 percent Black, 2 percent Asian-American, 15 percent Hispanic; 87 percent of the force is male, 13 percent female.

Wydra said he and his colleagues have recently been upping efforts to reach out and ​“recruit from all walks of life.” 

“We want our department’s faces to reflect the faces in the community,” he said. Through ​“a lot of word and mouth” alongside increased presence at community events — including hosting a Father’s Day barbecue in June through the Strengthening Police and Community Partnerships Council and attending the town’s Pride celebrations — the department is attracting a broader array of candidates, Wydra said.

Plus, he suggested, perhaps as Hamden’s population becomes more diverse, more diverse candidates are in turn pulled towards the opportunity to police a community with ​“a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds.”

Luisangel Valdovinos exemplified Wydra’s words.

Valdovinos, who identifies as Hispanic, grew up in Hamden. He has previously worked as a cop in Hartford and Orange.

“I wasn’t often able to speak Spanish while in Orange,” he said. ​“And I like speaking Spanish. It’s my first language.” He said fluency in the language will give him an advantage while working with Spanish-speaking families, as Hamden’s Latino population has been growing.

Other new officers said they applied for jobs in Hamden for the superior benefits — including the health insurance and pensions — as well as the opportunity to receive more training and experience. 

Taquan Mitchell, for example, said he was excited to learn more about animal control opportunities. In Bridgeport, he said, he was never trained to deal with wildlife complaints. ​“There was a bat in someone’s house one day and I was like, ​‘What am I gonna do? I can’t shoot the bat!’” he recalled with a laugh.

Valdovinos weighed in: The biggest issues with police accountability, he argued, stem from a lack of appropriate training. When cops ​“do things out of their scope of training,” it’s often disastrous.

“Experience is key,” Mitchell agreed.

Commissioner Questions Qualifications, "Troubled History"

Some commissioners questioned the experience and expertise of the officers sworn in Friday. 

Police Commissioner Daniel Dunn, in particular, abstained from voting on five of the new officers’ applications last month, with the exception of Natalie McLaughlin, a Bridgeport officer going on seven years in the profession, on whose candidacy he voiced a resolute ​“no.”

“The standards for the candidates who are being referred to the commission is very, very low,” Dunn argued, citing a ​“lack of thorough review of the candidates.”

After the town’s personnel team screens and refers possible candidates for town jobs, the Police Commission is in charge of interviewing and voting on those hires.

“I abstained in any vote when I felt I didn’t have enough information or comfort with the candidate to say yes,” Dunn stated. He said that since joining the commission in January, he has not voted in favor of any possible additions to the department.

“There is very little information that’s being provided to the public,” Dunn said. Job candidates are promised private interviews; Dunn argued there should be ​“public participation or insight or feedback being allowed in the hiring process itself. Certainly at a minimum we need to inform the public of who candidates are.” He suggested that officers’ resumes and any publicly available information should be embedded in agendas for commission meetings.

“We have volunteer commission members whose resumes are posted at Council meetings. So we have more information on unpaid volunteers than we do sworn officers.”

Dunn argued that establishing better means for oversight is a priority over bringing more individuals into a department that he has consistently said is actively working against transparency and accountability. (Click here and here about how the department attempted to destroy records that overlapped with civilian complaints and use of force reports Dunn had cited FOI law to review).

“The town is receiving civilian complaints, but the commission still has yet to hear a single one — and is not being notified that the complaints are being submitted. So do we have oversight for the police in Hamden? No,” Dunn said.

In the case of Natalie McLaughlin, Dunn cited her involvement in a 2017 Bridgeport incident during which she was dispatched to break up a rowdy party. She called in backup, and 46 officers ultimately got involved. Ten officers — including McLaughlin — were then accused of lying about five city police officers’ and a city detention officer’s excessive use of force at the scene, according to this CT Insider article. (Another article reports that two police officers who were facing discipline for that event killed themselves while an internal affairs probe was pending.)

Three years later, McLaughlin and two others were found by the Police Commission during a series of disciplinary hearings to have ​“violated the Department’s rules and regulations,” according to this article. She and one of her colleagues were ordered to undergo verbal counseling. 

McLaughlin was previously rejected by the commission when Dunn, along with commissioners Rhonda Caldwell and Elaine Dove, voted against her hiring in a 3 – 1 decision in March. McLaughlin returned for a second interview in June, during which more commission members supported her candidacy, including Dove, who declined to publicly explain her change of heart, according to this New Haven Register story. Dove did not reply to a phone message by the time of this article’s publication.

McLaughlin told the Independent that she completed that counseling following the incident, but said that the ​“things you sometimes read in the paper” do not accurately represent her role in the incident. 

“There was a reason why I was picked,” she said of her hiring within Hamden. ​“I’m the officer I am today because of my time served in Bridgeport.”

She said she is excited to join Hamden’s Police Department to ​“represent and show females of any color” that they can also be police officers — and to be ​“a liaison” between people who feel a ​“disconnect” from police and the department.

“We often get used to and stuck in our old ways,” she reflected. ​“I’m excited to come to a different town — I like to be useful, and whatever the department needs, I’m very versatile.”

“I’m not a stagnant person. I’m not complacent,” McLaughlin asserted. ​“I’m ready for growth.”