Velleca: NHPD Needs To Rebuild Trust, Not Create Surveillance State

Tip #1: Keep the acting chief in charge until a new chief comes. 

Tip#2: But then change the way the department seeks to earn the community’s trust. 

Tip #3: And change the way it recruits and advances cops.

John Velleca offered that advice for New Haven policymakers at a time of transition in policing: The department’s acting chief is retiring after the Board of Alders nixed her nomination to become the permanent chief. A national search is theoretically beginning to find a replacement. And everyone’s talking about coming up with a ​“plan” to improve and diversify the department.

Velleca knows about these transitions: He served as acting chief a decade ago when a search was on to replace a chief who got pushed out. He’s now retired from the force, teaching criminal justice at Albertus Magnus College and serving as sergeant-at-arms for the State Senate.

He offered the timely advice during an appearance on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Among Velleca’s points on the show:

• Velleca disagreed with a comment from a listener suggesting that the acting chief, Renee Dominguez, leave now rather than continue to run the department during the months of a national search. ​“You should stay constant” during times of transition, Velleca argued. ​“Every chief is going to come in with a different group of people with them.”

• Velleca said the department needs to do better in promoting cops of color to upper ranks. 

That does not mean the chief herself or himself needs to be Black or Hispanic, he said. Opponents of confirming Dominguez made a similar nuanced point. A misperception about opposition to Dominguez’s appointment was that Black alders and ministers in particular were calling for the chief to be Black or Hispanic. But then they said they want to see ​“someone who looks like me” in the police department, they were calling for at least someone in a leadership position to be nonwhite; for the first time since 1993, the NHPD has only white people filling all the chief, assistant chief, and captain ranks. Velleca agreed that the race of the chief is not the issue, but the advancement of people of color in some upper ranks. 

• That doesn’t mean advancing people who aren’t ready for the job, he argued. It means doing a better job of finding opportunities to advance them.

One way is through the ​“rule of three,” he said. That rule allows the city to promote people from among the top three scorers on a civil service test, rather than straight down the line step by step in order of ranked results. The current chief made a wave of white promotions this year and passed over some applicants of color whose scores were just lower than white applicants. Velleca argued that those fractions are meaningless. In fact, he argued, tests scores do not measure merit, do not signal who’s best for a job. ​“If I know that a cop is a shit bird and he’s been in trouble, I don’t care if he scored first. He’s not getting the job. I don’t want a subpar police officer in a supervisory role. We’ll pay for that over and over again,” more than the cost of potential legal challenges over the promotion, he argued.

• The problem starts with the hiring process, Velleca argued: The NHPD focuses on weeding out applicants based on individual incidents in their past or shortcomings in screenings — in other words, looks at who is not qualified — rather than focusing on who shows talent, and then finding how to enable those people to qualify. He called for a ​“selection” process rather than a ​“de-selection” process: ​“Everybody has a little bit of baggage, the one little thing we can x them out for,” when sometimes a potentially talented officer is lost.

• Rebuilding trust in the community, particularly the Black community, will go further in addressing violence crime than will creating a surveillance state, Velleca argued.

NHPD has fallen far behind other Connecticut cities’ departments in solving homicides. This year it has made three arrests out of the 25 homicides reported so far; it has made five arrests related to 2020’s 20 homicides. By contrast: Waterbury has closed 11 out of 13 2020 homicide cases and all 10 2021 homicide cases by arrest. Hartford reported making 17 arrests out of 25 homicides from 2020, 20 arrests so far out of 34 homicides in 2021.

The mayor and current NHPD leadership posit a lack of surveillance cameras as a major reason for the difference. So the city is spending $3.8 million in federal pandemic relief to install 500 surveillance cameras.

“That’s just inexperience talking,” argued Velleca, who used to oversee homicide investigations at the NHPD. He said he has seen no proof that cameras significantly help solve crimes. But they do destroy people’s privacy, at bigger cost, he argued.

To rebuild trust in order to partner with residents to solve crimes, he argued, the department needs to ​“stop lying to the community” about what it can and can’t do to solve crimes; hire and promote more officers of color; and make deescalation training an ongoing endeavor rather than a one-off lesson.

Click on the video to watch the full discussion with John Velleca on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”