New Top Cop Revisits Familiar Streets

Sgt. Jarrell Lowery has spent the past week viewing through new eyes neighborhoods he has known his whole life.

He has done that to begin a sprawling new assignment: District manager in four different neighborhoods.

Lowery is the new top cop in District 6, which covers Dixwell; as well as in District 7, which includes Newhallville, East Rock, and Cedar Hill. He replaces Lt. Dana Smith in that top-neighborhood-cop role.

All of the neighborhoods in Lowery’s new districts are ​“different areas with different walks of life,” he noted. With a common strength he aims to build on: Active, connected neighbors who ​“have no trouble calling the police” and who ​“deserve a safe neighborhood to live in.”

Lowery, 38, has lived in New Haven his whole life. He has spent lots of time in each part of his new districts. He lived for nine years in Dixwell, for instance. He went to college at Albertus Magnus. Family members live in East Rock. Close friends from his church, Life Changing Outreach Ministries, live in Cedar Hill.

Still, he wants to hear directly from neighbors what they expect from their new district manager, to see their concerns up close, through their eyes.

To that end, he spent hours on Monday touring Cedar Hill with its alder, Anna Festa.

Festa makes a point of introducing each new district manager to the ​“forgotten” compact seven-street Cedar Hill neighborhood in the shadow of East Rock near the Hamden line, bordered by Warren Place, View, Rock, Grace and State streets. It has more than its share of homelessness, prostitution, and drug problems. But with its small population, it must regularly speak up to get a share of police coverage or code inspections.

A highlight for Lowery on the Alder Festa tour was meeting Marie Gallo. Her family has run an appliance store in Cedar Hill for 50 years. (The anniversary was this past Saturday.)

She was excited, too, to meet Lowery. The ​“nice young man” impressed her, she subsequently reported. ​“He’s very caring. He looks anxious to do a fine job for us.”

“He seems very nice and polite and respectful and understanding,” agreed Festa, who said Lowery is off to a good start.

She filled him in about an after-hours club that recently moved out and on the word on the street about the fate of a commercial property for sale. She expressed a wish for ShotSpotter sensors in the neighborhood. And, of course, she’d like to see more cops patrolling.

Lowery has already heard that message everywhere in his two districts. That, and a universal plea for traffic enforcement and speed bumps.

“People want to see us,” he noted, preferably walking a beat, but at least driving through.

That’s a challenge, given the department’s staff shortages. Lowery has between two and four officers for all of District 7 during morning, afternoon and evening shifts; and just two overnight.

Still, he’s confident he can have officers make a point of spending more time in Cedar Hill, he said. He’s looking to work with the department to bring traffic enforcement units to the district more often. ​“I want our officers to be visible. I want them to have strong ties to the community,” he said.

Lowery has developed ties throughout New Haven since growing up in the Hill. The son of a corrections officer, he has wanted to be a cop since he was 5, he said. He retained that dream while working at Sports Authority and Staples and Radio Shack in his 20s, he said, then as a school security guard. One day, while at the job at Brennan Rogers School, an NHPD officer suggested he apply to the force. He did, and in 2016 realized his dream.

He had his eye on becoming a sergeant; he observed his supervisors closely, including district managers. (He was promoted in February 2022.)

Now that he has the DM job, he said, he aims to incorporate lessons he learned that observation, from checking in on officers regularly to make sure they’re OK, to giving them room to do their jobs without being micromanaged, to periodically popping in on the beat to ​“show you’re around.”

He continues living in the city, in Charles T. McQueeney Towers, through the city’s officer-in-residence program locating cops in public housing. ​“That is a huge part of community policing — not only to police it, but live in it,” Lowery said.

Police Chief Karl Jacobson agreed. He said Lowery’s roots were among the strengths that earned him the new assignment.

“I’m looking to bring hometown New Haven people into positions that directly affect the community,” Jacobson said. ​“You don’t have to be from the community to be a real good district manager; we see that in other people. But it does help. It gives you a head start on knowing the landscape of New Haven, knowing the people in different districts, knowing the people who can get things done.”

As he works on figuring out how to increase police presence with limited resources, Lowery is making a point of driving through the neighborhoods regularly himself,

He spent a half hour driving through Cedar Hill separate from the Alder Festa tour, for instance.

“I want people to see me. I want them to feel like they matter. Because they do,” Lowery said.

“People were glad to see me. I plan to do more of that.”