5 OK’d For CRB; 4 Tapped For Housing Commission

The Board of Alders unanimously approved the appointment of five additional members to the Civilian Review Board, bringing that decades-in-the-works local cop accountability board one step closer to formally convening.

Alders took that vote Monday night during the full board’s latest regular monthly meeting, which was held online via the Zoom videoconferencing platform.

After discharging the appointments from the Aldermanic Affairs Committee so as to expedite the voting process, local legislators unanimously threw their support behind confirming Samuel T. Ross-Lee, Devin Avshalom Smith, Melvin Counsel, John Pescatore, and Christian Peralta to the CRB. Click here and here to read about recent committee interviews with those nominees.

Those five New Haveners now join seven other city residents approved by the alders last year to serve on the recently revived board, which is charged with investigating incidents of alleged police misconduct.

A half-dozen alders spoke up Monday night in support of the five CRB candidates’ diverse backgrounds and their respective commitments to providing civilian oversight of the police.

“I believe with these five nominees that our community will be able to exhale now and have faith that they will be heard, and that things will be fair among them now,” said Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn.

Downtown Alder Abby Roth applauded the candidates’ collective recognition that the CRB can be successful only if both residents and local police believe it to be fair.

And Downtown/Yale Alder Eli Sabin singled out for praise the five members’ commitments to making sure that Yale police officers fall under the purview of the CRB. ​“They have their police powers through the city and they should be publicly accountable like the officers of the New Haven Police Department are,” he said.

The CRB now has 12 confirmed members. The ordinance passed by the Board of Alders in January 2019 required a maximum of 15 and a minimum of seven. The alders have not yet announced which member of the local legislature will serve on the board.

Mayor Justin Elicker told the Independent after the vote that he believes the next step for the CRB is for that board to have a formal meeting at which its members will select a chair. They’ll then have to hire a staff member, whose salary is covered in the city budget.

“The formation of this Civilian Review Board has taken an incredible effort on many people’s part,” he said. ​“I’m glad that it’s fully constituted. This is one piece in a lot of work, a lot of initiatives that we’re working on around police accountability. There’s plenty more left to do.”

Monday night’s vote comes over a year and a half after the Board of Alders voted to create the new version of the CRB in January 2019—which in turn took place over five years after city residents mandated the creation of a new all-civilian police accountability board during the 2013 charter referendum. Emma Jones, a longtime police accountability activist and the mother of the late Malik Jones, spent two decades advocating for the city to create a new version of such a board with subpoena power after the previous version stopped meeting in 2001 for lack of quorum.

The vote also comes less than one week after the the governor signed into a law a wide-ranging police accountability bill at the state level. That bill, which was drafted and shepherded through the state legislature in large part by New Haven State Sen. Gary Winfield, allows all Connecticut municipalities the ability to create local CRBs with subpoena power.

4 Tapped For Affordable Housing Commission

Also included in Monday night’s Board of Alders agenda were four new mayoral appointments of New Haven residents to serve on the recently created city Affordable Housing Commission. 

Those appointments have been submitted as communications to the Board of Alders, and advance now to the Aldermanic Affairs Committee, which will formally interview each candidate.

The four appointments include Yale Law School Associate Professor Anika Singh Lemar, Amistad Catholic Worker House co-founder Luz Colville, former Downtown Alder Alberta Witherspoon, and Diamond Robinson.

The alders voted to create the new permanent commission on affordable housing in August 2019 in following up on one of the recommendations from the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force.