Year Later, Slogans Morph Into ​“Resilience”

A year after cries of ​“Black Lives Matter!” and ​“Defund the Police!” filled the air — followed by ​“Stop the Violence!” — New Haven’s government has responded with a new department pursuing a new approach with a less chant-worthy slogan: ​“Community Resilience.”

That is the title of a proposed new city department that the Elicker administration unveiled at a universally-masked press conference held Monday afternoon outside the back entrance to City Hall.

The Community Resilience Department would merge city agencies and community ​“partners” under one roof to work together to address violence, prison re-entry, mental health, homelessness, and ​“crisis response” to incidents that counselors might handle better than cops.

Those challenges are intertwined, and addressing them together can best prevent violence and trauma before they occur or recur, the plan’s point person, city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal, said at the press conference.

“Hurt people hurt other people,” one of those city partners, Leonard Jahad of the street-outreach CT Violence Intervention Project, put it.

The new $6 million-a-year department would fall under Dalal’s aegis. Before it can be created, the Board of Alders needs to hold hearings and vote on approving funding for it. Most of the money would be transferred from existing departments. Another $2 million a year would come over four years from the federal pandemic-relief American Rescue Plan.

Dalal said the proposed department and strategy stem from 18 months of government wrestling with, first, an historic public-health pandemic, then calls for reexamining policing as well as stopping violence. It incorporates initiatives launched over the past year, from the soon-to-pilot Crisis Intervention Team to a prison reentry center opened at Project MORE.

Dalal described the main lessons policymakers have drawn:

• Trauma, mental health, homelessness, substance abuse, and violence often exist in combination to fuel personal and communal crises, and require a joint response. Mental illness and/or mental health problems can lead to homelessness, for instance. An estimated 80 percent of people returning home from prison have a history of substance abuse, and many face homelessness. And many end up in trouble again.

• People need to be ​“met where they are” with a strategy of ​“building on their strengths” to tackle those challenges, such as with a ​“housing first” approach for homeless people wrestling with addiction.

• Government and social service workers can’t help people overcome these challenges without first building trust.

• And perhaps most of all, ​“We can’t arrest our way out” of these problems.

A No-Longer-Divisive Mantra

That last statement came up again and again at the press conference. Dalal said it. Len Jahad said. Interim Police Chief Renee Dominguez said it.

The repetition of that mantra — along with the tenor and substance of Monday’s announcement — reflected the trajectory of public debate not only in New Haven, but nationwide, since the Covid-19 outbreak, the George Floyd murder, and then a rise in deadly gun violence swept the nation.

Before the world exploded in 2020, it was often cops, not protesters, who said that phrase. It was often cops, of all political persuasions, who maintained that cops can’t be social workers, don’t have the training to solve all of society’s broader problems. They don’t like the fact that they’re always reacting to problems that were already festering, and will continue festering, unless underlying social causes are addressed.

While many continued to believe that in 2020, it was policing critics who advanced that argument to call for smaller police budgets, amid the zero-sum restraints of strapped government budgets. And people who agreed on the fundamental argument nevertheless squared off as opponents in bitter political debates and street demonstrations.

Then violence escalated on the streets, and ​“defund” became a largely unpopular slogan, especially in urban neighborhoods. And federal relief flowed into cities — to the tune of over $100 million in combined aid to New Haven and another roughly $80 million to the city’s schools. So no longer did understaffed police departments have to compete with understaffed government and social-service agencies for dollars. Meanwhile, crisis teams of social workers, health professionals, cops, street outreach workers, and city government officials threw themselves into urgent quests to tamp down violence, house the homeless safely, craft a New Haven version of increasingly popular ​“crisis intervention teams” to offer non-police or not-just-police responses to troubled, freaked-out people involved in difficult situations.

Amid nuanced deep dives into the roots of the crises (like this latest entry from ProPublica), it turned out that opponents with genuinely different theoretical outlooks also shared some fundamental premises about concrete action. A possible new way forward emerged, under a coordinated ​“community resilience” banner.

“We cannot arrest our way out of it. We do not want to be reactive,” Chief Dominguez said.

Even before the recent calls for change, the police were always asking themselves after a shooting, ​“What did we miss?” she said. She noted that New Haven police were already working with key players in the new proposed Community Resilience Department — Clifford Beers, Jahad’s street outreach worker program, the city’s youth and prison reentry and homeless outreach teams. The new city department and strategy ​“puts our heads together all in one place.

“A piece of that is still going to be the police department,” Dominguez stated. ​“But we know we cannot do it alone.”

The Details

Click here to read the proposed ordinance the Elicker administration has submitted to the Board of Alders to support creating the new department. The above chart shows which new positions would be created with American Rescue Plan dollars.

This chart shows where existing dollars would be transferred to the new departments.