Twenty-four firearms sat on a table on the third floor of New Haven police headquarters Wednesday instead of in the hands of criminals looking to shoot people in the street.
The police put that display out to make that point.
The 24 guns were among 100 that cops have now seized to date in 2021 in connection with arrests of 99 individuals, Acting Police Chief Renee Dominguez announced at a press conference.
That compares with about 150 guns seized overall in 2020, she said.
The police chief and the mayor put the weapons on display to stress that the department is working hard, with officers putting in overtime, to address the upsurge in shootings this year, including 17 homicides so far. The increase in shootings began last year, mirroring a nationwide spike. The city recorded 29 nonfatal shootings between Jan. 1 and July 6, 2019; 46 nonfatal shootings in that period in 2020; and 60 nonfatal shootings during that period in 2021.
Police also called the Wednesday press conference to announce that they made an arrest within 24 hours this week in a nonfatal shooting.
The shooting occurred on Valley Street Monday at 4:48 p.m. Police developed leads thanks to cooperation from people in the community, according to Dominguez. They arrested an 18-year-old New Haven man across town on Tuesday and charged him with first-degree assault and criminal discharge of a firearm, among other offenses.
“Without the community, we would not have” made the arrest so quickly, Dominguez said.
This year’s homicides and nonfatal shootings have resulted from a range of causes, from a rise in domestic violence, to gang-related disputes, to “other anomalies,” Dominguez said.
The press conference came two days after mayoral candidate Karen DuBois-Walton criticized Elicker and Dominguez for not informing the public enough about what’s going on with all these shootings.
DuBois-Walton also called on Elicker to reassign Dominguez back to assistant chief and find a different chief.
Elicker doubled down at Wednesday’s press conference on his support for Dominguez.
“I have been deeply impressed by the chief’s work,” Elicker said. He said the police can do a better job of letting the community know about good work they are doing.
“On Monday, we explicitly called for more communication from the police department and the acting chief. I’m glad to see that the Mayor and acting chief are following our lead, and I hope that they have the same public response when the next shooting or the next killing happens as they did when they made this arrest,” DuBois-Walton stated in a release issued after the press conference.
“I applaud the police department for their work in solving this crime.
“It’s vital that we improve our rate of solving crimes to begin to slow the cycle of violence in our city, and hopefully this arrest will help to bring some peace to all involved. But community policing and violence prevention require much more than solves and arrests, and I hope that our police and this Mayor will continue to sharpen their focus on ways to prevent these tragedies from happening in the first place.”
“Community policing,” Elicker declared at the press conference, “is alive and well.”
When is Elicker going to talk about AMR's lackluster performance and the fact that when it comes to transporting Black and Brown people to the hospital, most folks rather find alternative means of transportation because AMR takes way too long. Recently, while transporting a Black man from the Westville area to Yale emergency, no sirens or emergency lights were used, the ambulance drove slower than traffic despite the fact that the individual on board was elderly and having chest pain. Is that what community policing looks like Elicker?
Or here's another great one, also yesterday morning in the Yale ER, a young Black woman was having mental health issues and was obviously scared, very reactive. After sedation did not work to 'calm her' six white police officers were brought in to restrain her, while Black and Brown staff watched helplessly as she cried out, begging not 'to be taken'. After putting her in a pod for a few where she kept trying to set herself free, she was carted off elsewhere by the same six officers while staff looked on. Moments after that, a Black man was also restrained by the aforementioned white officers also was very resistant to 'being calmed' and begged not to be locked up. Is this what community policing looks like Mr. Elicker? Sounds like the lynching never ended, just got revised....