During a bipartisan, police-civilian conversation on policing, a Republican leader, a police chief, and an ACLU activist all agreed on one thing: that policing in this country needs to change.
The community forum, titled “Policing in this Current Age: A Conversation” was co-organized by Connecticut House Republican Minority Leader Themis Klarides and Rev. Steven A. Cousin Jr, Pastor of Bethel A.M.E Church in New Haven. It comes ahead of an upcoming special legislative session that will focus largely on police reforms. It comes a month after George Floyd, an African American man, was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis.
In the Zoom forum discussion, both New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes and Yale University Assistant Chief of Police Anthony Campbell called for police departments to transform their goals from one of strict crime reduction to one of protecting civilians through community policing methods.
“Law enforcement for too long has been tasked with reducing crime and doing traffic stops rather than really being about community wellness,” said Campbell, who previously served as New Haven’s chief. “For too long, law enforcement have been part of the problem rather than part of the solution.”
He said that the police have never established trust with the African-American community and argued that police departments nationwide must implement protocols to track how police officers use excessive force.
Rev. Keith King, senior Pastor at the Christian Tabernacle Baptist Church in Hamden, called for a reevaluation of the role of the police. He suggested that certain functions traditionally undertaken by police, such as traffic violations and domestic violence, should be reallocated to social service providers better equipped to handle such situations.
“George Floyd, if he was indeed peddling a counterfeit 20 dollar bills, didn’t require police officers to handle that,” King said.
Activists, including the ACLU of Connecticut and the Black Lives Matter movement, have called for defunding the police with some of the resources being diverted to Black and brown communities.
Daniel Hunt, a community leader who organizes community walk programs in New Haven and Hamden, spoke out at Monday’s forum against defending the police. “We have crimes happening in our community,. Who would we call if we defund the police?” he asked. Hunt has lost cousins to gun violence in New Haven.
Reyes argued that rapidly downsizing police departments may create a vacuum where high-crime neighborhoods are inadvertently put at risk. Long term, he said, a healthy community would not need a police presence.
“Our goal should be to rid our communities of police,” he said. “That’s how we know we have gotten somewhere. The question is: Are we ready for that right now?”
Dori J. Dumas, president of The Greater New Haven Branch of the NAACP, argued for the creation of a database of police officers who have a record of misconduct, a civilian review board with subpoena power, and a zero tolerance approach to any officer who is found to be using excessive force against a non-resisting individual.
“We have to really dismantle the whole system and look at what has been happening wrong,” said Dumas.
We need many more public conversations on this topic, but we need more community activists on the panel.
Personally, my view is the more these panels seek people with credentials, the less they have to offer.
The leaders in Black Lives Matter were the first to advocate for defunding the police and investing in community needs - not "experts" on policing.
Substantive change will NOT come from within the establishment. It will only come with input from the larger community, especially the people most affected by the paramilitary approach.
All conversations have some value, but the original ideas will not come from those invested in the system.