Allan Appel Photo
Sen. Winfield (right), with Alder Marx: "Most of the kids are not repeating and do not belong in jail."
A chronically under-staffed police department 90 officers short meets a national post-pandemic rash of juvenile vandalism, car thefts and life-threatening joy riding that makes everyone feel unsafe.
That “perfect storm” for policing that has arrived in New Haven was analyzed in a crime and safety-focused Westville-West Hills Community Management team meeting Wednesday night.
It attracted 75 very concerned residents in person and via Zoom to the Coogan Pavilion tucked in among the trees just off Whalley Avenue in Edgewood Park.
Police, alders, and state officials sparred politely with neighbors that the storm might be weathered, even surmounted, by the new more generous police contract currently before the Board of Alders; by an exploratory new program being rolled out to increase detention of kids involved in these public safety-rattling car crimes; along with a community’s stepped-up love and understanding that throwing kid offenders in jail doesn’t solve the problem.
The meeting of the west side CMT specifically to address crime and safety issues was convened, said its chair Josh Van Hoesen, at the request of elected officials.
Even though statistically car thefts are lower this year than last, constituents, he reported, have expressed particular alarm at car-related crimes, vandalism, and potentially lethal young teen joy riding that cumulatively are undermining quality of life and shaking the sense of public security.
And Wednesday night, beneath the bright lights of the pavilion, those officials were in attendance in force: three alders (Adam Marchand, Richard Furlow, and Amy Marx); two state reps (Toni Walker and Pat Dillon) and recently re-elected State Sen. Gary Winfield, a long-time advocate for reform of the way juvenile offenders are treated by the legal and prison systems.
The officials acknowledged that new approaches to policing, however enlightened, are contributing to the problem. They are what the west side District 2 Manager, Lt. Brian McDermott (who characterized this issue of car theft as the “perfect storm”), characterized as more compassion and more de-escalation, along with the attendant time-consuming paperwork, especially required to justify young offender detention.
These factors have all contributed, along with the chronic officer shortage, to a widespread perception that young teens are breaking the law with impunity and no remedy is in sight.
At Wednesday night's meeting.
“The idea that nothing can be done is wrong,” countered Winfield.
He cited a task force on teen crime and specifically car theft that is emerging from City Hall and what he characterized as an upcoming 60-day period to see if more young people committing these offenses can or should be detained.
The car thefts, he and others emphasized, are being committed not by young people who are repeat, inveterate offenders who deserve lock up. Rather, at the ages of 16 or less, the kids involved are largely first-time offenders, often without sufficient supervision at school or from distraught and over-worked parents, or overlooked by other intervention programs.
It’s largely a phenomenon of the pandemic, said State Rep. Toni Walker, referring to kids who dropped out of school during Covid and for all intents and purposes have not returned, and this is one of the key underlying explanations for the problem, she asserted.
“Fourteen- to 16-year olds were being put in detention for silly things,” she said. “Many were arrested because they weren’t in school.”
Walker referenced a state-mandated group she has helped to establish: the JJPOC, or Juvenile Justice Policy and Oversight Committee, comprised of statewide “stakeholders,” including the police, social workers, probation officials, and judges who meet monthly to evaluate stats, and make recommendations both for public safety and to keep under-16-year-olds out of the prison system.
The stats showed, Walker conceded, that New Haven is issuing detention papers for far fewer teen car-theft offenders than other municipalities. That has been a factor in organizing the 60-day New Haven experiment or study that Winfield announced.
“We’re going to be running a 60-day plan to lead us to either changes in law and/or how we operate,” he said.
“We’ve kept 7,000 out of arrest,” Walker added, “but something else is going in the community.”
Community members like Michael Frawley, a 50-year Westvillian, listened patiently to this discussion, acknowledged that compassion especially with young people is the better approach, and yet added, “Nothing’s been mentioned of parents’ responsibility. We’re missing the boat.”
“The parents’ conversation,” replied Winfield “is very complicated. They’ve reached out and they can’t handle them either.”
When audience member and the area’s Livable City Initiative Specialist Ray Jackson said he and his crew have been trying to mentor kids whom he spotted up to no good as soon as they raced out of their high school classrooms, that prompted State Rep. Pat Dillon to praise such spontaneous community volunteer mentorship and to raise the question of how school policies figure into the problem.
“I think we need to work with the school system about suspension,” she said.
Dillon called attention to the declining male enrollment at local colleges and added, “We’re not doing right by young men and that’s before we get to criminal problems.”
Walker pointed out that in the last year or two, “$2.2 million has been given to New Haven by the state for after-school programs, and many are doing a great job. We’re trying to create a different attitude about what a family is in New Haven.”
Yet several audience members would have none of it.
Over the Zoom, long-time budget critic Dennis Serfilippi said, “You public officials are nice people. But you’ve been in office for decades, and now to hear that we’re in a ‘conversation stage’ is disappointing.”
He also characterized how “[Mayor] Elicker let 82 seasoned officers leave” as “inexcusable.”
“I don’t feel safe in my own city. I carry Mace with me. My family and friends don’t want to come to Westville.”
Winfield retorted: “The ‘conversation,’ that is, the issue we face has not been going on for decades. Car thefts is a national problem and began at the pandemic. And there’s a plan emerging with the mayor and the chiefs.
“We can put kids in jail but the question is when. You need to understand the problem. Most of the kids are not repeating and do not belong in jail. We need the right solution.”
“The ‘decades-long problem,’” Serfillipi parried, “is the absence of a Westville police district,” and the chronic absence of police presence in the area.
That brought the two-hours-plus conversation back to where it had begun, with Lt. McDermott’s reprise of the dire officer shortage and the hope that the new contract, with more generous pay and benefits, will bring more officers on board, and fast.
Even if that begins to work, however, new hires would likely not keep pace, he speculated, with retirements, such that it will be at least two years before New Haven’s full budgeted complement of sworn officers is anywhere close to normal.
He bemoaned that for District 2, which runs from lower Whalley up to the Woodbridge town line (the second largest district, geographically, in the city), he has only two dedicated officers.
So he ended the meeting making an unusual request to audience members: To respond via an email he planned to send out, in a kind of unique ranked choice vote, to help him triage or choose which of several problem areas in the district — the crime-ridden motels on Pond Lilly Avenue, the commercial burglaries in Westville village, or the shootings and car thefts in the Rockview and other Housing Authority developments in the far west of the district, among others — residents would vote for him to try to focus on the most in the near future.
Nevertheless the meeting ended with sense of grit-your-teeth community optimism, that solutions, however painfully pokey, are on the way.
The police contract, recently ratified by union membership, goes for approval before the Board of Alders on Monday.
Long-time Westvillians Kate Bradley and Pat Kalba.