Hamden Arrestees Afforded Seatbelts

Hamden’s only prisoner transport van now has seatbelts — and the police expect soon to adopt a policy requiring that all individuals driven by officers are actually strapped into their seats.

Acting Chief of Police Timothy Wydra has suggested implementing the latter in the town’s prisoner search and transportation protocol in the wake of a case across the border in which a 36-year-old New Havener was partially paralyzed while in police custody back in June.

That case has caused departments throughout the region, including Hamden’s, to reexamine their own transport policies.

“The reason we looked at the transportation policy now is because of the incident in New Haven,” Wydra said. ​“We wanted to make sure our policy was adequate.” The chief has prepared revisions to the policy for the Police Commission to consider for approval.

In the New Haven incident, police officers placed Randy Cox alone in the back of a van after arresting him on a weapons charge at a Lilac Street block party. They then handcuffed him while he was intoxicated without securing his body to the bench inside the vehicle, which lacked seat belts. When the driver stopped suddenly to avoid a collision while speeding, Cox fell and hit his head, injuring his spine and neck and immobilizing him. After Cox hit his head, officers dragged his immobile body into a jail cell, after he verbally insisted that he could not move, rather than waiting for an ambulance to immediately take Cox to a hospital. He ended up needing a feeding tube and a breathing tube; the case sparked outrage and national attention.

A simple seatbelt could have saved Cox from paralysis — and the city of New Haven from a likely multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit.

Hamden Chief Wydra told the Independent that the town of Hamden has used the same prisoner transport van for seventeen years without a seatbelt — ​“hundreds, maybe thousands of times,” he said — without ​“ever having a problem.”

But, he added, ​“we pay attention to what’s going on, and when we saw what happened in New Haven, we also saw that we did not have language that addressed that.”

After news of Cox’s mistreatment broke, Wydra said that the Legislative Council’s public safety chair, Adrian Webber, and Mayor Lauren Garrett reached out to the Police Department to determine how the town could help ensure such an incident did not repeat itself in Hamden. Wydra then worked with lawyers to review the town’s full transportation policy. The policy, which has not been officially updated since 2012, also contains instructions on how police should perform body and cavity searches.

The 2012 policy already explicitly states that ​“at no time shall a transporting officer leave a prisoner unattended, unless assistance must be rendered to a third party in a life threatening situation.” It also states restraint devices, like handcuffs, should be used ​“only when absolutely necessary to prevent escape of the prisoner” when an arrestee is sick, handicapped or injured.

Wydra said the only potential revision he thought key to preventing a similar incident in Hamden is to implement seatbelts. 

Once the department’s lawyers began to review the policy, they also suggested adding ​“proper language for 2022,” Wydra said.

For example, Wydra has asked the Police Commission to add to the town’s rulebook a provision that trans or genderqueer individuals subjected to bodily searches deserve the right to choose the gender of the officer performing said search.

Read through all of the edits to the revised draft — and through the current policy — here.

Police commissioners are not expected to vote on Wydra’s proposed changes until their September meeting. 

Nora Grace-Flood’s reporting is supported in part by a grant from Report for America.