Laura Glesby Photo
New District Manager Jasmine Sanders: "The Hill is like my home."
Hill residents welcomed a new top neighborhood cop — and presented her with a familiar set problems to address.
The new top cop, Sgt. Jasmine Sanders, is taking over the Hill South and Hill North police districts. She replaces Lt. Justin Marshall, who served in the role for three and a half years.
The neighbors heard the news Thursday evening at a community meeting organized by Police Chief Karl Jacobson and Assistant Chief David Zannelli.
As Marshall takes on a new position leading the department’s Special Victims Unit, Sanders will take over his role as a supervisor for neighborhood officers and point person for community members.
Sanders welled with emotion as she reintroduced herself to neighbors. She started her career in the New Haven Police Department as a patrol officer in the Hill, she said, and at one point lived in the neighborhood as part of the officer-in-residence program. She has family in the Hill, she added, including on Spring Street.
“To me, [the Hill] is like my home,” Sanders said.
Jacobson took the opportunity to inform residents of policing strategies he hopes to implement in the Hill and throughout the city.
One of those strategies includes creating five walking beats that would regularly switch locations throughout the city depending on crime hotspots, with each beat involving two officers. The short-staffed department lacks enough officers to have a full complement of walking cops.
“It’s not your classic community policing,” Jacobson admitted, saying he would like to establish permanent beats allowing officers to establish relationships with neighborhood residents. “But being 92 people short, I’ve gotta wait until we fill those numbers.
Jacobson said he plans to create a new unit focused on “outreach and enforcement” related to public opioid use, which has persisted for years near the APT Foundation’s methadone clinic on Congress Avenue. The unit would “connect people to social services,” Jacobson said, while investigating overdose deaths and targeting drug dealers.
“It’s not all about arresting,” Jacobson said. He said he’s planning “call-ins” for people involved in the drug trade, modeled after a program he once led in the department known as Project Longevity, which invites people identified as likely targets and perpetrators of gun violence to learn about available resources and opportunities off of the streets.
“For violent crime, it’s worked. So why not do it for drug dealing?” Jacobson said.
Chief Karl Jacobson, center, with Justin Marshall, right.
After welcoming Sanders to her new role with applause, longtime Hill residents dived straight into the concerns they want her to prioritize, igniting debate over the role of police officers in addressing quality-of-life concerns.
Opioid abuse, for instance.
Radu Radulescu, who lives near the APT Foundation clinic, said his complaints about open substance use in the area have been dismissed by patrol officers and dispatchers. He called for more enforcement of substance use ordinances, and for more significant consequences for drug users who get arrested through the court system.
Greenwich Street resident Angela Hatley, meanwhile, gathered four of her neighbors to raise another problem: “Dirt. Bikes.”
Hatley speaks about dirt bikes.
Hatley and her neighbors said a handful of kids on their street blare dirt bike engines late into the night, preventing neighbors from sleeping until about 3 a.m. Non-emergency dispatchers have dismissed Hatley’s calls about the issue, she said.
Most attendees of the meeting asked police for more enforcement around these two prevalent concerns.
Hill activist Leslie Radcliffe suggested that police officers require substance users to relocate from public spaces, but that they do not need to confront or arrest those individuals.
“We don’t want you to be social workers. We don’t want you to be babysitters,” said Radcliffe. “We want you to be the police … To say, ‘You have to go.’ ”
Jacobson thanked Radcliffe. “That was the best thing I’ve heard in a long time,” he said. “All we’ve been hearing since George Floyd is, ‘We don’t want police.’ ”
Wilson Branch Librarian Meghan Currey offered a different perspective. “I don’t see this as a community policing issue,” she said, addressing concerns about both the dirt bikes and the opioid use (which she said occurs near the library often.) Rather, Currey suggested, the city needs more programs and resources for young people, which could provide alternative activities to dirt bike riding and the drug trade.
Jacobson said that the city is planning to implement its long-awaited COMPASS program, which would send social workers alongside police officers to respond to certain emergency calls, in the early fall.
Alder Evelyn Rodriguez expressed optimism about COMPASS, echoing the sentiment that more social services are needed to address the Hill’s opioid use. “New Haven is about the heart,” Rodriguez said. “We need to be a community.” She repeated longtime calls from neighbors for the APT Foundation to take more responsibility for opioid use in its vicinity on Congress Avenue.
Leslie Radcliffe: Balance caution with courage.
Alder Carmen Rodriguez offered an additional suggestion: a citizen-led celebration outside some of the hot spots of substance use and dirt bike riding, modeled after a Fair Haven community effort to “occupy” the area outside the Grand Cafe. Fair Haveners danced and played music for thirty days straight outside of the Grand Cafe, a hub of gun violence, until the establishment lost its liquor license.
Sanders proposed that neighbors could walk throughout the Hill with her, combining a police presence with the trust that community members have already established in their neighborhood.
Hatley was not convinced. “If they see us out there with you … now we’re targets, because we’re colluding with you.” She said that someone once slashed the tires of her car, which she suspects was retaliation for a phone call she made to the police.
“You do have to be careful,” said Radcliffe. But she said her experience joining the Fair Haven group in front of the Grand Cafe had felt empowering — and she likes the idea of a similar effort in the Hill.
“If I had done nothing, I still could have had a house full of bullet holes,” she said.
"It's not about arresting"
Really? That statement sounds like it came from a first year sociology student.
When a citizen is a victim of a crime and the suspect is identified it is the job of a police officer to make the arrest. Either on site if the situation is right or via arrest warrant. Victims of crime want the results that an arrest can produce working within the court system. Can someone in the New Haven Police Department actually be a police officer. No social justice warriors needed.
I can see this scenario. Dear crime victim. We are going to forgo the arrest process and instead work with our community partners to show this criminal the errors of his ways. Maybe a cookout, a prayer circle or midnight basketball with police officers.
It's all doomed to failure. Criminals look at these efforts as appeasement. Good grief