Allan Appel Photo
Armmand and Quinnipiac Meadows Alder Gerald Antunes at Tuesday night’s meeting.
With only a little more than a month left before the May 9 deadline for submission, only two of the 12 community management teams have sent in to the mayor their nominations for the city’s new police Civilian Review Board.
Some confusion reigns about aspects of the nomination process, like which specific application form is legal.
Those issues emerged at Tuesday night’s regular meeting of the Quinnipiac East Management Team (QEMT). The meeting drew a small crowd but triggered a big, animated discussion in the library of the Ross/Woodward School on Barnes Avenue.
On Jan. 7, after a campaign that spanned decades,the Board of Alders passed an ordinance setting up a newly strengthened version of the all-civilian police review board (CRB), which has the teeth of investigatory power and a budget.
Many questions remain, such as whether the CRB will have genuine subpoena power and whether the mandated $50,000 budget will be sufficient. Meanwhile, community management teams (CMT) are beginning to think about which of their members they might nominate to serve on the 15-member CRB. A dozen of those 15 members by the language of the new ordinance, must come from a pool of nominees from the city’s 12 management teams in the city’s neighborhood policing districts.
Jafferis presents.
Aaron Jafferis, one of the activists who has pushed over the past decade for the strengthened CRB, argued that a wider net needs to be cast. In addition to CMT recommendations, the process should include individual applications emailed directly to the mayor’s office for consideration, Jafferis suggested at the meeting.
Some of the best people in a neighborhood might not be known to a CMT, he said. Activists have been distributing an unofficial alternative form tot he official one used by CMTs, including an opportunity for interested parties to submit essays.
Esther Arrmand.
“The mayor’s office is not who chooses. The mayor wants the CMT to choose. That’s the concept,” replied mayoral aide Esther Armmand, who is helming the selection process. The vetting process at the mayoral level includes checking that an applicant is not serving on any other board or commission. It’s disqualifying, Armmand said, if you serve on another board or commission unless the applicant resigns in order to throw a hat in the CRB ring.
“The CMT should submit several choices,” added Quinnipiac Meadows Alder Gerry Antunes.
“She wants you to own your decision,” Armmand said of the mayor. “Put up three, or a fourth, but the decision should be grounded at the CMT level; the decision should be made there to come up with a representative.”
Armmand said she couldn’t comment on Jafferis’s advocacy for the alternate application form. But she repeatedly said that only one form is legal and that is the standard board and commission’s essay-less, nuts-and-bolt one-pager.
She reiterated that the CMT recommendation is critical, and if an advocate like Jafferis, for example, wants to put forth an applicant, it should be not to the mayor but to the CMT members. That’s where the debate should take place, said. Then the CMT makes its choices and passes those along to the mayor.
Official application for city boards, at right; advocates’ CRB application, at left.
Antunes said that he and his aldermanic colleagues, who will ultimately approve or disapprove the mayor’s choices, would like more information about candidates rather than less.
“We’ll ask the questions they won’t ask,” he said.
Armand said the mayor’s office is not that concerned that at this point so few CMT recommendations have come in. “We’re hopeful,” she said.
Just to help that hopefulness along, Armand said, “we’ll be sending out [a reminder] this week to the CMT teams.”
Why is it no one in this town can make a decision about anything??? Management teams couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag around here. I think the CRB should include Barbara Fair, Kerry Washington, Nate Blair, a Legal Aid lawyer, Bill Saunders, and Jennifer Klein. It should include an uneven # so there wont be ties on an issue. I dont want political hacks of any kind on the CRB. I want HONEST intelligent and empathetic people on it and participants can change as needed. It should be able to meet with the police as needed. Right now our cops seem to be an armed camp of unhappy individuals, impossible to deal with or even meet with until a regime change and a pay raise. I have given up trying to get Cotto, union rep, on the phone so he can simmer with the rest of them and I am glad cops are leaving because we can only afford 200 of them. Get real, New Haven.