These were among the many ideas shared at a roundtable community discussion held Tuesday night via the Zoom platform.
Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers and State Sen. Gary Winfield spearheaded the event on Tuesday to get community input on what legislative steps they should take to address police brutality amid a worldwide movement for structural change.
Walker-Myers said she plans to have all of Tuesday night’s suggestions collected in a document to be posted on the city website, then followed up on by small working groups.
Winfield, meanwhile, will be leading an effort in an upcoming state legislative session to pass police accountability proposals; he serves as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee.
Greater New Haven NAACP President Dori Dumas was among those suggesting the police force require officers to get reevaluated and recertified. Dumas said the idea should be mandated with a zero-tolerance approach.
Amid recent local protest rallies, Mayor Justin Elicker said he and the police have been reviewing and strengthening the language of the department’s use of force policy. They are also reviewing New Haven’s memoranda of understanding with Hamden’s and Yale’s police departments as well as the use of school resource officers (SRO). “We’re figuring whether they are playing the right roles in schools,” Elicker said of SROs.
Panelist Rev. Samuel Ross-Lee was briefly joined by his daughter Naomi, who shared her perspective on SROs. “They’re not conducive to a learning environment,” she said. Naomi said the presence of SROs have only caused “anxiety-inducing experiences” for her.
Rev. Ross-Lee suggested a federal registry for those officers charged for police misconduct to keep them from getting hired at other departments nationally.
“There has to be a reckoning of the many, many roles police play,” argued the Rev. Scott Marks of New Haven Rising.
Black Lives Matter Ala Ochumare advised that the city “reinvest and divest” — defund policing while switching those public dollars to productive social purposes. She disagreed with Marks that “police do many wonderful things in our community.”
“Folks in the Tre are killing each other. We need folks in the Tre to do transformational work” separate from police officers, she said. “There’s no reform policing can do … It needs to be abolished.” Some officers can be “untrained” of “their violent ways” to participate in the work that would come next.
Police union President Florencio Cotto participated in the discussion as well. “What happened in Minnesota was tragic, unnecessary,” he said. “In New Haven we need to have a strong presence of character-driven police officers.” He welcomed the idea of “improvements” to save lives: “I’m here to listen.”
NHPD Assistant Chief Karl Jacobson and Yale Police Department Chief Ronnell Higgins also offered suggestions on behalf of their departments.
Higgins said he wants to work on changing who teaches at police academies and the academy curriculum. “What are we teaching our officers about the history of policing in America and do they know the hard truth of how it started?” he asked.
Jacobson expressed his personal interest in connecting with police accountability activist Emma Jones, mother of Malik Jones, who was slain by an East Haven cop. Jacobson said he’d be interested in having people such as Jones tell their stories to officers during their police academy training. “We want to do better,” he said. Emma Jones participated in Tuesday night’s forum, recommending a creation of a national database of police officers who use excessive force.
Other suggestions included bimonthly mental health check-ups of officers, a psychological training to be completed in the police academy, and a residency requirement for officers to police in the communities where they live.
For those of you who don't watch Last Week Tonight With John Oliver he makes a compelling argument for defunding/disbanding policing as we know it.
Enjoy the video of that episode at the end of this Esquire article
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/amp32802796/john-oliver-defund-police-video-last-week-tonight-kimberly-jones-social-contract/