Cop-Review Board Vacancies Mount

The Civilian Review Board’s secretary and most public-facing member has resigned, leaving the police accountability panel with yet another seat to fill as frustration-fueled vacancies steadily mount.

That now-former CRB member is Richard Crouse, whose last day on the volunteer job was Monday.

A Florida native, Yale neuroscience PhD, and longtime Dwight Community Management Team stalwart, Crouse has served on the CRB ever since the board relaunched in late 2020.

As secretary, he’s played a key role not just in the board’s hours-long discussions about alleged cop misconduct and the proper workings of the CRB, but also in making accessible the wealth of police complaint report summaries, investigations, and other related documents that are posted on the board’s public-facing Google Drive folder.

Crouse announced his resignation during Monday night’s latest CRB meeting. His term technically expired in July 2021, as is the case for many other board members who were approved to their roles by the Board of Alders back in 2019.

The Independent caught up with Crouse by email about why he decided to leave the CRB.

“I have been considering leaving the board for some time,” he replied. ​“It felt to me that our development had stalled and continued work on my and other members’ parts were not yielding adequate results, despite our best efforts. There were obstacles that we could not seem to overcome, so I thought it would be more productive for me to step back, even though I did not want to leave the board before a replacement was found. Monday’s meeting reinforced my decision.”

He said that he was encouraged to stay on longer when city attorney Catherine LaMarr began working with the CRB. He said he ​“cannot credit her enough for helping the board grow.”

What exactly led him to step down?

“The members of the board were handed a monumental task and we accomplished some good things,” Crouse wrote. ​“That the board still exists at all is a win. However, the CRB and city have a great deal of more work to do in all aspects of the board’s functioning before I believe the CRB will be a solid, robust entity. The CRB will (and should) be ever evolving, but if it stays in its current state, it could become a hindrance to reform by giving the appearance of progress without meaningfully moving the dial.

“I won’t go into the administrative portions around minutes, meeting notices, etc. because that has been covered at length on Monday and before. Some other notable aspects are: reconciling conflict between the ordinance, bylaws, and police union’s collective bargaining agreement; follow through and recollection of previous board decisions; communication, transparency, and involvement with the public; and ensuring that the board is carrying out all of its mandated duties, and in a systematic way. I believe it is possible to address all of these things in time, but with the current board’s dynamics, I wasn’t able to find a clear path to move forward, which signaled that it was time for me to step back.”

Crouse isn’t the first CRB member to step down from the board. Nor is he the only one to do so in the past few months. His resignation follows CRB member Steve Hamm’s in August. It also follows former CRB Chair Samuel T. Ross-Lee’s in July. (As was the case for Crouse, both Hamm and Ross-Lee stepped down from the CRB after their respective terms had expired.) 

To add still another vacancy to the mix, Beaver Hills Alder Brian Wingate ceded his role as aldermanic representative on the board to Newhallville Alder Devin Avshalom-Smith when the latter came into office in January. Since Avshalom-Smith had previously been a non-aldermanic member of the board, his move into the aldermanic seat and Wingate’s step off of the board left another vacancy.

In email comments sent to the Independent for this article, Hamm and Ross-Lee expressed similar concerns as Crouse’s when explaining his reason for stepping down from the CRB. 

“I had many frustrations,” Hamm said.

One pertained to how the CRB ordinance was written by the Board of Alders regarding which police misconduct cases fell within the purview of the board. ​“The alders only included complaints brought by civilians, not cases brought by police brass, so we had no say in some of the most significant cases,” he wrote.

He said he also found that only a small number of CRB members did most of the subcommittee and full board work. ​“It was difficult to get meetings scheduled because members assigned to committees failed to respond to repeated emails, texts, and phone calls,” he said.

He added, ​“I think people didn’t understand the amount of work being on the board requires. Future appointees should be made aware.” 

In a separate email sent to the Independent for this article, Ross-Lee highlighted a number of challenges for a revived CRB that started operating amidst the pandemic — and that has only ever met online. 

“Spending my entire tenure on Zoom was frustrating for me. I wished we could have met in-person, but there was resistance from some members,” Ross-Lee wrote. ​“The fact that only four members of the Board consistently turned their cameras on during the meetings was also bothersome.”

He agreed with Crouse and Hamm that, to put it mildly, ​“the CRB is a lot of work. Along with that fact, the Board was thrown before the public before we were ready. We were struggling to do the job while being trained for the job at the same time.” 

He said that conflicts between the alder-passed ordinance and the CRB’s by-laws were a ​“huge problem that need to be corrected by the Alders,” and he said that some of the board’s processes — like needing to make appointments with Internal Affairs and then go in person to the police station to review police video recordings — proved ​“cumbersome.”

“The job was a constant grind, with emails coming virtually daily and necessary subcommittee meetings between the regular meetings made it more so,” he wrote. ​“At the end of my two-year term I was exhausted with the process.”

With all of that said, Ross-Lee wrote, ​“I still believe the Board did some important work and set the stage for the next Board to progress better than the initial one.”

In a conversation with the Independent on Thursday, current CRB Chair AnneMarie Rivera-Berrios thanked both Hamm and Crouse for their hours upon hours of service to the board.

“I’m sad to see Steve and Rick leave. They were a tremendous asset to the CRB, but I understand their frustrations,” she said.

“I think as a board we are still working through a lot of hurdles together as a team,” Rivera-Berrios added. ​“I think we are starting to make some gains, moving forward, and I hope that we continue to make more and that we recruit more members in the future that are dedicated to working for the goals of the public.”

She said that, when she assumed the role of chair earlier this year, one of her top goals for the CRB was to develop ​“a positive relationship with the police chief in order for him to be able to consider our recommendations and make those changes, or consider making those changes” when the CRB disagrees with a police department policy or investigation. 

She noted that Police Chief Karl Jacobson attended the board’s Monday meeting for the first time. ​“And we are going to be having him at our meetings and discussing the relationship” between the CRB and the police department going forward.

During Monday’s CRB meeting, Avshalom-Smith expressed a similar level of confidence with the CRB and Jacobson working together. ​“There is some real harmony between the objectives of the police department and the objectives of the CRB,” he said.

“This is something we’ve been building and working towards,” he added, about both the chief’s participation in the meeting and about new reports provided to the board. ​“The conversations we’re having here are definitely building blocks” for better police accountability in New Haven.

Rivera-Berrios said that she plans on staying on the CRB for now. She said she’s submitted an application to the city for a formal reappointment, and that she has asked all other current board members who want to stay on to do the same.

In his email to the Independent, Crouse noted that city law states that the CRB should have ​“no more than 15” members, with a quorum consisting of seven members. Now that he has stepped down, the board currently has 10 members.