Pandemic Prompts Lock-Up Reduction; Activists To Mayor: End All Custodial Arrests

The police department has reduced the number of people it’s holding in the local lock-up from around 20 per day to around 7 per day in an attempt to stem the potential spread of covid-19.

Meanwhile, a local criminal justice reform nonprofit has called on the mayor to release everyone currently detained by the city, and to put an end to all custodial arrests for the duration of the pandemic.

Police Chief Otoniel Reyes and Mayor Justin Elicker provided the updated numbers Monday afternoon during the mayor’s latest coronavirus-related press briefing, which was held online through the video-conferencing app Zoom.

In response to a set of questions and demands posed by the Connecticut Bail Fund (see more below), Elicker and Reyes said that the city has prioritized reducing the number of people held in the 1 Union Ave. lock-up at any given moment in an attempt to prevent any potential spread of the novel coronavirus.

The department is home to 52 cells where arrestees who can’t post bond are detained pending court appointments.

“We’re both working on minimizing the number of people who come into lock-up and we’re also doing a better job of working with our maintenance companies to make sure that the facility is cleaned daily and very thoroughly,” Reyes said.

Health Director Maritza Bond said she visited lock-up Monday morning and was satisfied with the cleanliness and public health precautionary measures being taken by the police department. Critics have recently laid into the police department for conditions at the 1 Union Ave. lock-up.

Reyes said that the department typically has between 15 to 20 people held in lock-up per weekday, with that number going a bit higher on weekends.

“Right now we have been averaging about seven. So we have definitely seen a significant reduction in lock-up, and we are making every effort to minimize the number of people that have to come in.”

Elicker applauded the police chief for his efforts to reduce the occupancy of lock-up during the pandemic, and he said that the city should not release every person from detention because some people who are held there ​“are suspected of doing some pretty heinous crimes. Us promising that we’re not going to lock up anyone is not an effective way to keep our community safe.”

“While I would love to say that we should let everyone out,” he continued, ​“I think that’s an unrealistic scenario and does not improve the safety of our community.’

Dear Mayor: End Custodial Arrests Now

The following letter was written by the Connecticut Bail Fund, a local nonprofit that raises money for low-income individuals who cannot afford to make bail.

Mayor Justin Elicker,

Last week, our communities made urgent demands to protect the lives of our incarcerated community members. We have yet to see any action from your office, nor have you publicly clarified your policy regarding custodial arrests in our city.

You have closed down schools, businesses, and other high-risk places where people congregate. Yet, you have done nothing to protect those incarcerated and policed in our city. Are the lives of our incarcerated loved ones and community members not worth the same to you as the lives of other people in this city?

In the midst of this global crisis, a crisis our city and country are not prepared for, the New Haven Police Department is still surveilling, profiling, brutalizing, and arresting our community members. New Haven police are still taking people into custody, imposing unaffordable bail on them, holding them in the dangerous, unsanitary Union Avenue lock-up, and transferring them in crowded vans to criminal court, where they are sent to pretrial incarceration.

At every step of this, our community members — most of all our Black, Brown, poor, disabled, chronically ill and homeless community members — are being forcibly exposed to the highest risk for COVID-19. And when they get sick behind bars, they will not be given necessary, humane, and life-sustaining care. This kind of medical care has never been available in jails and prisons.

You need to understand that incarceration is a death sentence in this pandemic. Those incarcerated are put at the highest risk for COVID-19 because jails and prisons are confined spaces, overcrowded, and filthy.

There is poor ventilation, little access to food and soap, no adequate medical care, and routine medical neglect and abuse. Those who are incarcerated often develop respiratory issues and asthma because of these conditions.

Everyone incarcerated has a compromised immune system and compromised access to medical care. Those incarcerated are at the greatest risk of death. This is why everyone incarcerated needs to be freed now.

We know coronavirus is already spreading in Connecticut’s jails and prisons. You’ve delayed taking urgent action, and the cost of this delay will be the lives of our community members.

We demand that you take immediate action to protect the lives of our community members and decarcerate our city. This means:

1. Releasing everyone from lock-up at the New Haven Police Department;

2. Instituting a total moratorium on custodial arrests indefinitely;

3. Expanding emergency shelters in the city so those leaving incarceration are not left on the streets, since the city’s shelters and housing services currently lack capacity;

4. Massively redirect city funds currently being used for policing and incarceration towards housing and other public health needs;

5. Ceasing use of NHPD in so-called public health measures; this use of police must stop immediately — it is NOT a public health measure, it is police surveillance and violence on our most vulnerable communities;

6. Make public the exact number of custodial arrests by NHPD occurring during this crisis, as well as the charges and bail amounts.

7. Join us in calling on Governor Lamont and the CT Department of Correction to protect our community through urgent, large-scale decarceration and a massive re-allocation of state Department of Correction funding to municipal-level public health expenditures.

If your concern right now is public safety and health and flattening the curve, then you should know there is no way to sustain current practices of policing and incarceration.

The goals of public safety and health and policing and incarceration are in direct conflict. The more COVID-19 infection spreads on the inside, the more it will affect every community on the outside. Jails and prison walls cannot contain transmission.

Government officials around the world are recognizing the massive public health crisis that prisons will create in this pandemic. The country of Iran has freed nearly 100,000 people from incarceration. Today, a judicial order in New Jersey was signed, calling for the release of about 1,000 people from county jails by tomorrow at 6 a.m. Meanwhile, in New York City, at least 17 guards have already tested positive for COVID-19 at Rikers Island.

How many people need to die at New Haven Correctional Center before the City of New Haven stops sending our community members to jail? Before the City of New Haven agrees that our loved ones who are incarcerated deserve to live? Are policing, incarceration, and criminalization worth more to you than the lives of our people?

What would you be doing right now if your family were incarcerated?

Policing and incarceration target our Black and Brown communities, so it will be the Black and Brown people of our city you’ll be committing to a death sentence by your inaction.

If you care about Black and Brown communities in New Haven, if you care about our most vulnerable communities, if you care about our city, you need to free everyone incarcerated now, stop all new custodial arrests by your police department, and take immediate steps to fulfill the above demands.

Our lives are in your hands.

We ask that you publicly address within 48 hours each of the seven actions above, how you will see them through, and how you will ensure the survival of our most vulnerable people.

CT Bail Fund