Police Commission Votes To Fire Cop

Kenroy Taylor lost his job as a New Haven police officer on Monday evening, when the Police Commission convened a special meeting to hear his disciplinary case.

Commissioners voted unanimously to support Acting Police Chief Renee Dominguez’s recommendation that Taylor be terminated. 

Dominguez and other higher-ups in the department accused Taylor of four incidents that they argued cumulatively warranted his dismissal: missteps in his response to a 2020 domestic violence case, a handful of warrants and reports that Taylor failed to file, an incident in which he did not arrive on time to an assignment to close down a park, and an incident in which he was found to be at the Home Depot on non-police business during a shift.

“There’s multiple small things, but altogether it’s a large issue of failing to be able to do his functions,” Dominguez testified before the commission. ​“If I am not able to trust that an officer is about to carry out basic functions, how am I able to trust that the officer is going to make the right decisions when it comes to [making arrests] or use of force?”

Dominguez argued that the incidents — and Taylor’s explanations to superiors — revealed a pattern of ​“untruthfulness” and ​“inaccurate documentation,” which she said could harm the public’s trust in the department.

Taylor’s attorney, Marshall Segar, responded that while Taylor had misstepped, his mistakes did not merit termination.

“Officer Kenroy has been the subject of continued bias and mistreatment,” he said.

He framed the inquiry into Taylor’s errors as targeted and out of scale compared to other officers’ similar offenses. ​“I really don’t know how to convey to you enough my feelings, and the union’s feelings, that when certain people in the agency want to get another person harmed, they will do it.”

The hearing unfolded nearly two years after the Black Lives Matter movement’s resurgence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder brought renewed attention to accountability processes in American police departments — ​“a time when transparency is of the utmost importance,” Dominguez said. 

It also occurred as the NHPD, whose leadership is overwhelmingly white, has faced questions about whether Black officers, like Taylor, have been subject to more severe punishments than their white colleagues. (Update: Click here to read a New Haven Register story about Taylor’s plan to sue the department for discrimination.)

A Domestic Violence Call

A key incident leading to Taylor’s firing was a domestic violence call on March 26, 2020, that Taylor mishandled, according to labor attorney Floyd Dugas, who argued the department’s case against Taylor before the commission.

According to a report from Sgt. Carlos Conceicao, Taylor responded to the call involving a mother and her adult son, the alleged aggressor, in the early afternoon.

Taylor’s body camera was turned on ​“buffering mode,” not recording the incident, for just over half an hour until it was turned off. In Taylor’s report, according to Conceicao’s write-up, Taylor wrote that his camera had been activated. (The Independent obtained a copy of the internal affairs investigatory report of the allegations against Taylor, which contained the quoted documents.)

Eventually, Taylor transitioned the case from a domestic violence incident to a ​“mentally disturbed case,” Conceicao testified, and sent the alleged perpetrator in an ambulance to get a psychiatric evaluation at the hospital.

According to Conceicao, Taylor did not run a necessary warrant search on the alleged perpetrator and missed an existing warrant for his arrest.

Another officer, Michael Lozada, had activated a body camera that Conceicao reviewed. Based on that video footage of the encounter with the domestic violence call, Conceicao wrote, ​“I believed that this incident should have been handled as a domestic violence incident… it was clear that [an off-duty officer who had originally called in the complaint] was not properly interviewed by Ofc. K. Taylor.”

​“When it comes to a domestic, we have to be pretty much perfect,” said Conceicao to the commission. ​“Warrant checks have to be conducted, interviews have to be down. … If the adult son decided to leave the hospital and possibly hurt the mother … We got lucky.”

Finally, Taylor had confiscated drug paraphernalia during the incident — two capsules covered in a white substance and a clear glass pipe — that he did not log at police headquarters per procedure, Conceicao reported. The next officer to use the police car Taylor had been using found the evidence in the vehicle.

​“You don’t want to have [evidence] inside your vehicle” for long, Conceicao told the commission. ​“If something happens, evidence could be destroyed or lost.”

Taylor did not have a chance to give his side of the story on Monday, but according to Conceicao’s report, he wrote in a memo that he had been diverted to another call while en route to log the evidence. The officer who found the paraphernalia told investigators that Taylor said he ​“forgot” to log the evidence, according to the report.

59 Of 60 Warrant-Botchers Offered Deals

Another central component of the department’s case against Taylor arose from a department-wide audit into incomplete reports and warrants in the department.

That audit found that Taylor had failed to complete four reports and five warrant requests. Sgt. Brendan Borer, the top downtown/Wooster Square district cop, testified on Monday that those warrants pertained to a domestic violence case, two car-related crimes, a landlord-tenant dispute, and a ​“criminal mischief” incident. Due to statutes of limitations, only the latter two of those warrants could be submitted by the time their incomplete status was discovered.

Dugas asked about the significance of those warrants. Borer responded that the domestic violence warrant was a particularly egregious error, because ​“there’s a greater likelihood of continued violence between the alleged offender and the victim” compared to other crimes. Officers are supposed to file a domestic violence warrant by the next shift, Borer said, ​“to protect the victim.”

Sixty other officers were identified in the audit as having filed incomplete warrants and reports.

Segar later pressed Dominguez on the department’s response to those other officers, establishing that Dominguez had offered all 59 other officers implicated in the audit a deal to accept a suspension rather than face a hearing. 

“How many of those officers had failed to draft domestic violence reports?” Segar asked.

“Numerous,” Dominguez replied.

“Was Officer Taylor the worst offender?” Segar asked.

“No.”

“You didn’t offer the deal to Kenroy?” Segar later pressed.

“Correct,” Dominguez responded.

Dugas raised two other incidents that prompted Taylor’s termination hearing: one in which Taylor had not shown up on time to an assignment to assist the parks department with closing the gates to a public park, and one in which Taylor had been spotted in the Home Depot in Hamden while on duty.

When questioned about the parks incident, Taylor told supervisors that he had not been feeling well and was running late because he needed to use the bathroom. Sgt. Chris Cameron testified that Taylor’s vehicle GPS located him on Newhall Street and then at Wexler Grant School that afternoon, and that Taylor’s key card was not used to enter police substations in the area.

Segar argued that even if Taylor did not use the bathroom at police substations, he could have used the bathroom at other locations. He noted that Cameron did not interview Taylor during the investigation.

As for the Home Depot incident, Taylor told supervisors that he had an urgent issue in his own bathroom and needed to meet a plumber at the store. Again, the police department cast doubt on this narrative of events, citing video surveillance footage that did not appear to show Taylor making a transaction or browsing the plumbing section of the store. Again, Segar stressed that the department did not make an effort to contact the plumber whom Taylor said he met.

In her testimony, Dominguez noted that based on ​“some of the charges of untruthfulness,” the state’s attorney’s office issued a letter identifying Taylor as a potentially untrustworthy cop. The letter could affect Taylor’s ability to testify in court, depending on judges’ discretion, Dominguez said.

Segar asked Dominguez whether other officers in the department were allowed to continue working with the so-called Giglio letters from the state’s attorney. ​“More than one? More than two?” he pressed her.

“Yes,” Dominguez said.

Community Support

While Segar did not present witnesses, a number of community members wrote letters in support of Taylor, including State Rep. Robyn Porter. Taylor had once been assigned to patrol Porter’s neighborhood of Newhallville. 

“We need more officers like him, not less,” Porter wrote.

She asked the commission to consider ​“the way police officers across the board have been disciplined, especially those who’ve committed much more egregious acts than Officer Taylor.”

Police commissioners did not ask questions of either attorney. They deliberated in executive session, meaning that their discussion was not open to the public. After they emerged, and before they unanimously voted to fire Taylor, Commissioner Michael Lawlor made a statement.

Lawlor said he would abstain from the vote, because he did not have a hard copy of the meeting materials. (He was in Italy, so he wasn’t certain he had all the relevant documents in hand.) However, he said, he was not persuaded by the argument Taylor had been held to a higher standard compared to other officers — because officers should be held to a high standard of honesty.

“It is a new day,” he said.