Bull’s‑Eyes, Errant Arrows In Debate Attacks

A firefighter statistic missed the mark, while charges about democracy deferred landed closer to the target as Mayor John DeStefano’s three Democratic opponents took on his record at campaign debates, according to the Independent Truth-O-Meter.

DeStefano’s 18-year record in office came under sustained attack in campaign debates, on Aug. 11 and Aug. 18 (pictured above). The attacks came from the three candidates vying to topple him in a Sept. 13 Democratic primary: Anthony Dawson, Clifton Graves, and Jeffrey Kerekes.

Click here and here to read summaries of the debates, follow detailed live-blog discussions, and watch a video stream of the entire first encounter.

The campaign Truth-O-Meter took in the data, processed some of the key claims, and produced a verdict on their relative veracity:

Firefighter Hiring

At the Aug. 18 NAACP-sponsored debate, Dawson charged that all but one of the firefighters hired by the city in the latest class live outside New Haven. And all but one are white, he said.

“It’s unbelievable,” Dawson said.

Unbelievable — and not true.

In the most recent class of firefighters, which consisted of four paramedics, there were three white and one Hispanic firefighters.

However, Dawson made clear he was referring to the prior class, which had 28 members. He used the number 26 or 27. A review of all 28 members of the class shows 10 of them live in the city, and 11 are either black or Latino. That may not be something to brag about on the DeStefano administration’s end, but it’s far better than Dawson’s claim. Click here to view the breakdown.

On the other hand, Dawson charged that the DeStefano administration picked a ​“union leader” with ​“no supervisory experience” (who’s white) to serve as assistant chief. The Truth-O-Meter found that to be true: Pat Egan was sworn in last September. He beat out four captains, two lieutenants and three fellow officers.

There’s an irony in the criticism of DeStefano for not promoting enough black firefighters: He took national heat for alleged reverse discrimination when his administration threw out results of a promotional test based on a then-accepted interpretation of the federal Civil Rights Act; DeStefano adopted the NAACP’s position and his administration lost a U.S. Supreme Court challenge costing New Haven $5 million.

Democracy?

All three candidates made repeated charges in the two debates about what they called a lack of openness, free speech, transparency, and tolerance of dissent and new ideas in the DeStefano administration.

At the Aug. 11 debate DeStefano defended a high school principal’s decisions in the wake of a protest march against school budget cuts. The principle disbanded the politics club whose leader led the protests and canceled the results of a student election after that student won.

“Democracy is being squashed across the city,” Kerekes declared in response. ​“I was kicked out of City Hall for talking to people on line.” And city government employees in general have gotten the ​“message” that ​“when people talk to the the press, they lose their jobs,” Kerekes said.

Kerekes’ campaign volunteers did get booted from City Hall, not exactly for ​“talking to people,” but for seeking to have them sign a petition to place his name on the ballot. Kerekes himself was not tossed out. DeStefano administration officials claimed that longstanding (though unwritten) city policy forbids such ​“soliciting.” The Truth-O-Meter gave that claim a ​“true-ish.”

And it gave a ​“bingo” to the claim about city workers losing their jobs. The DeStefano administration did move to fire a city worker for speaking to the press at a public hearing about the closure of a senior citizen center. It did institute a policy forbidding city employees—even department heads—to speak to the press without prior approval and messaging direction from the mayor’s spokesman; how actively that policy has been enforced has varied depending on who holds the job and how close an election is.

Principals at multiple schools have ordered teachers not to talk to the press, even for positive stories, according to continuous reports from teachers to the Independent. Wilbur Cross High School teachers even heard from the central schools office that they were forbidden to speak to college students doing a research project without advance direction and clearance from an official spokesman. Meanwhile, the schools barred the press from a publicly advertised meeting with parents about a first-of-its-kind privatization deal it had already struck and started implementing at Roberto Clemente School.

In recent years the DeStefano administration has either been reprimanded or acted to settle complaints for repeated Freedom of Information violations ranging from repeated zoning board votes taken on meetings that weren’t advertised to the public, illegal closed-door fire commission discussions on non-exempt matters, and commencing an illegal meeting to approve a multimillion-dollar school contract without adequate public notice.

How Many Rs?

As DeStefano has emphasized his ambitious new school reform drive on the campaign stump, his challengers have hammered him in the debates on what they called poor results in the schools during his tenure.

At the first debate, at Metropolitan Business Academy, DeStefano declared that the rate of improvement on standardized tests by New Haven high school students this year was two and half times the state average. That statistic is true—as far as it goes. The gains were welcome news, but are quite small. New Haven students start far below the average student in the state, and the achievement gap is still wide.

For example, on the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), district scores rose 1.8 percentage points in math; 3.5 points in reading; 3.9 points in writing; and 3.8 in science. The improvements were more than the average state gains, but not by a huge amount. On the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT), the city still lags between 22 and 33 points behind the state average of kids scoring ​“at goal” on each of four subjects, math, reading, writing and science. On the CMT, city kids still stand 16.8 percentage points behind the state in math; 24.1 points behind in reading; and 18.1 points behind in writing. That’s all based on the percentage of kids scoring ​“proficient” on the tests.

DeStefano’s use of school statistics in the first debate resembled his claim during his 2006 gubernatorial campaign that New Haven’s drop-out rate had dropped during his tenure as mayor. He based that assertion on numbers that counted only those students who had dropped out after making it to 12th grade. Pressed on the point, his campaign responded that the state government used the same calculation in its statistics. But four years later, when he launched the city’s school reform drive, he reverted to a four-year calculation of the drop-out rate and declared it a long-term problem that needed to be turned around. In this campaign, officials exaggerated the results of some of the test scores to make it look like one struggling high school was in fact among the system’s stars.

The Truth-O-Meter’s needle wobbled between ​“true-ish” and ​“dubious” without landing on either.

Clifton Graves charged in the NAACP debate that 133 school administrators earn over $100,000 a year, a sore spot with the electorate. He said he believes they by and large work hard and earn their pay, but argued that in tough economic times they should take 10 percent cuts (as should the mayor and top aides) to ​“share” in needed ​“sacrifice.”

According to the city budget document passed in June, the district has 133 administrators making over $100,000, including 37 central office staff, 45 principals, 49 assistant principals, and two former assistant principals who got bumped down to teaching jobs due to layoffs. (Click here to view a list of assistant principals and central office staff in that category.)

Truth-O-Meter’s read on Graves’ statement: True that.

Whose Homicides?

DeStefano has taken the most heat this year for the city’s spiraling homicide rate and overall violence, as well as continued disarray in the police department and a decline in community policing. DeStefano has defended the department’s performance and touted the department’s new efforts to fight crime, often in collaboration with other law enforcement agencies.

“These children are living in the fourth-most dangerous city in America,” Anthony Dawson said of New Haven’s young people. Dawson is correct that FBI stats show New Haven with high crime compared to many other places. But he was referring to a website’s ranking of the crime rate in cities; it was based on FBI statistics. Technically, the numbers were true. But the FBI itself rejected that ranking because of the apples-and-oranges nature of comparing cities in ​“home rule” states such as Connecticut to those (Los Angeles, for instance) in which suburbs comparable to Hamden or North Haven or Woodbridge are considered part of city limits. (Read about that here.)

“Dubious,” concluded the Truth-O-Meter.

“We need a detective bureau that solves more than one murder of the 21 that we’ve had [so far],” Kerekes declared at the NAACP debate.

He was asked this week how he arrived at the one-in-21 figure. ​“That came from a police officer who gave that to me,” he said.

The Truth-O-Meter outright rejected Kerekes’ anonymous cop’s stats. As of mid-July, police had made arrests in four of the 2011 homicides; they had arrest warrants prepared or strong suspects in numerous others. They’ve made arrests in at least two more homicides case since, including one this Wednesday; and an arrest in a second case that led to a dispute with New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington and a dismissal by a judge.

“We have cleared 13 homicides this year as well as 5 cold cases,” said Assistant Police Chief John Velleca.

Kerekes broader point — that homicides aren’t being solved quickly enough — is harder to assess. ​“Solved” is a tricky word. The police consider a case solved when they make an arrest, or sometimes when they’ve submitted an arrest warrant application. Those cases don’t always end up in convictions, however. Also, it can take months to solve most murders, unless someone immediately confesses, solid eyewitnesses come forward immediately, or the killer is caught at the scene with, say, gun in hand. Even with good leads, detectives working on multiple cases have to amass and double-check mounds of evidence. So it makes more sense to review a previous year’s worth of homicide cases rather than just fresh ones in assessing the department’s performance. Finally, the city department is not wholly to blame for delays. The state crime laboratory is clogged, forcing local cops to wait months for evidence results.

That said, the unwillingness of witnesses to come forward with information on major crimes is partly attributable to a decline in community policing and a lack of trusting relationships between cops and neighbors. Critics blame DeStefano for those failings. Defenders point to a ​“no snitching” phenomenon that is common in cities across the country.

Either way, the Truth-O-Meter determined Kerekes’ claim was ​“hokum.”

Previous Truth-O-Meter installments:

• 1 Picture, 2 Interpretations