Steep Drop In Domestic Dispute Arrests During Covid

Local domestic dispute arrests have plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic even as domestic dispute calls to the police have remained relatively flat in comparison to last year.

The police chief heralded those stats as evidence of the department’s success in stepping up its efforts to resolve disputes without making arrests during the current public health crisis.

Police Chief Otoniel Reyes presented those numbers Thursday afternoon during Mayor Justin Elicker’s daily coronavirus-related virtual press briefing, held online via the Zoom teleconferencing app and on YouTube Live.

Reyes shared the domestic dispute call and arrest numbers as part of a larger slide deck showing graphs and data from this week’s CompStat report, which tracks crime statistics by category and location and compares them to those from previous weeks and the previous year.

Click here to download Reyes’s slide presentation, and here to read the latest weekly CompStat report.

Overall, Reyes (pictured) said, calls for police service have been down since the start of the pandemic in mid-March (or, as the police chief’s charts indicate, in the 11th week of 2020).

The chief’s slides showed that, between mid-March and early May in 2019, New Haveners called the police between 1,250 and 1,400 times a week. During that same time period this year, the overall calls for service have dropped to between 1,000 and 1,200 a week.

Arrests across all categories of crime are similarly down during the pandemic.

Last year, city police arrested between 11 and 14 people a week from mid-March to early May. This year, those total arrest numbers are closer to 8 to 10 per week.

The decline in arrests is even more stark when looking at domestic disputes.

Calls for service in regards to domestic disputes are down slightly during the pandemic time period, from roughly 70 to 90 a week last year between mid-March and early May to closer to 60 to 70 during that time this year.

Domestic dispute calls resulting in arrests, however, have fallen off a cliff (see top of this article).

Last year, between mid-March and early May, the number of weekly domestic arrests ranged between 17 and nearly 40. This year, that number has only cracked 10 a week once, and has hovered closer to 5.

Reyes said the year-over-year drop in arrests overall, and in domestic disputes arrests in particular, results from police working extra hard to not conduct custodial arrests at a time when the courts are either closed or working at significantly reduced capacity, and when the city and state are trying to limit incarceration.

“Many times we’re taking alternative actions other than arrests for these calls,” Reyes said about domestic disputes in particular.

When asked for examples of such alternatives, Reyes mentioned an officer issuing a misdemeanor summons to asking some to leave a space and making sure they have somewhere else to stay. All in an effort to reduce the number of people entering the criminal justice system during the pandemic.

“On the lower level calls, a breach of peace or a disorderly conduct, someone having an argument at home, in the past we might have been more included to do a custodial arrest to mitigate that issue,” Reyes said. Now officers are working hard to find an alternative.

When asked if this reduction in arrests will continue post-pandemic, Reyes said, ​“We certainly don’t strive to make arrests. Anything we’ve learned from the policing we’ve created throughout the pandemic that is worth sustaining, we will consider” keeping.

“We strive to not make arrests, and defuse situations as much as possible.”

Criminal justice reformers throughout the state have urged the state to release as many prisoners as possible during the pandemic because of the difficulties of maintaining social distancing and clean hygiene while behind bars. They’ve also called on municipalities to reduce their numbers of custodial arrests to stem an influx of people into the criminal justice system for those same reasons.

The mayor noted that the police chief and the city health department have also worked to reduce the number of people detained at the 1 Union Ave. lock-up to just a handful per day.

Other updates included:

• The city now has 1,848 confirmed positive coronavirus cases and 75 related fatalities. City Health Director Maritza Bond said 6,845 New Haveners have been tested for the coronavirus so far, with 32 percent reporting positive and 68 percent negative.

• New Haven Public Schools Chief Operating Officer Michael Pinto said that the school system has distributed 253,953 free meals so far since the public schools closed in mid-March and converted over three dozen public school buildings into meal distribution sites.

Pinto also said that the school system will be hosting ​“reverse parades” on Friday at Celentano School at 9:30 a.m., Barnard School at 11 a.m., and Jepson School at 12 p.m. At these ​“parades,” teachers and administrators and students and families will drive to their respective schools and, at socially safe distances and by staying in their cars, honk and cheer and reconnect — at a distance. This is a way to ​“keep kids engaged and reconnect teachers,” Pinto said.

• Elicker stressed the need to ​“transition from testing symptomatic to asymptomatic people” at the city’s five testing sites in order to increase the number of people getting tested so that public health experts can identify where the virus is in a community, who needs to quarantine, and who needs to isolate before there is a verified vaccine.

Click here for a complete list of local testing sites and hours, and for instructions on how to register for a test.

Also Thursday, Board of Education member Ed Joyner released this video hailing communal efforts in the face of Covid-19.