A city priest crossed into East Haven to document what he called systematic and sometimes violent police harassment of Latinos — only to find himself arrested and his camera confiscated.
The priest is Father James Manship, pastor of the Saint Rose of Lima church in Fair Haven. He is scheduled to appear in New Haven’s State Superior Court Wednesday morning in connection with his arrest by East Haven police.
As the head of a parish with a growing population of newcomers from Latin America, Manship has been an outspoken advocate for Ecuadorians and other immigrants.
The priest’s advocacy work has recently extended across the nearby border into East Haven, where Latino business owners say that East Haven police have been targeting their customers for harassment. The business owners said that Latino customers are afraid to come to their shops, for fear of being threatened and ticketed by police officers.
East Haven police adamantly denied targeted or harassing Latino businesses or customers.
On the evening of his arrest, at around 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 19, Father Manship walked into My Country Store, a convenience store in East Haven run by Ecuadorians. Inside, the police were removing over 60 expired license plates that had been hung as decorations in the store. The license plates were government property, the officers had said, and they were confiscating them.
Manship entered the shop, took out a digital camera, and began videotaping the East Haven police officers who were removing license plates from a wall in the rear of the store.
The officers immediately ordered Manship to stop videotaping, seized his camera and put him under arrest, according to Manship. Within minutes of his arrival, everyone in the store fell silent as Father Manship was led out in handcuffs. He was charged with interfering with a police officer and creating a public disturbance.
Click the play arrow to see Manship escorted in handcuffs from My Country Store. The shop’s security cameras recorded Manship entering as an officer was leaving, carrying license plates. The arrest occurred off camera.
As of Tuesday, 12 days after Manship’s arrest, a police report had not yet been filed, according to East Haven Police Department spokesman Lt. Joseph Slane. Slane confirmed that Father Manship had been arrested but said that he couldn’t provided any details.
Security Cameras
“The police have always come in, to buy ice creams and snacks. They never said anything about the license plates,” said Wilfred Matute, the owner of My Country Store, taking a break from stocking the shelves on a recent evening. Matute (at left in photo, with his wife, Marcia Chacon, next to him) said that some officers had even admired the license plates, until one officer suddenly ordered them taken down.
“He said, ‘This is illegal. This is for the government. You rent the plates from the government. You have to give these to me right now,’” Matute recalled.
Matute said that he had showed the officer the price tags still on some of the plates from when he had bought them at tag sales. But the officer was unmoved, and Matute took down the license plates one by one with a screwdriver.
After the police arrested the priest, they noticed that the store was equipped with security cameras. Elio Cruz, a leader in New Haven’s Virgen Del Cisne Ecuadorian community, was in the store that night. “When [the police officers] realized there was videotaping from My Country Store, they went crazy,” Cruz recalled later. “They said it was illegal and they tried to grab the computer.”
Matute said that three officers entered the back room without his permission and searched the shelves in his storeroom. When they found the hard drive containing the store’s digital security camera footage, they wanted to take it, but Matute wouldn’t let them, he said. Matute said that the officers then called a detective to bring a video camera to record the security footage off of the computer screen, but the detective’s camera didn’t work.
Click the play arrow to see three East Haven police officers searching the back room and talking to Matute about his security camera computer and monitor, in the back left, behind the brown bookcase.
After 45 minutes, the police left, with most of Matute’s license plate collection. They let him keep a few antique plates, including two from Matute’s native Ecuador.
Asked why the police would have searched the backroom for the security camera footage, Slane said, “I have no answer for that.”
“A Toxic Iceberg”
“My arrest is the tip of a toxic iceberg,” said Father Manship, during a recent visit back to My Country Store. Manship said that there has been an ongoing campaign of racial profiling, threats, and discrimination perpetrated by the East Haven police department against Latinos and Latino businesses in East Haven.
According to Father Manship, and Latino business owners interviewed, members of the East Haven police department make a practice of parking their cruisers outside of businesses like My Country Store, Guti’z Bakery, La Bamba restaurant, and Los Amigos grocery, waiting for Latino customers to exit and then pulling them over as soon as they drive out of the parking lot. The police then allegedly shout and swear at the drivers and passengers, demanding identification, car registration, and insurance. Latino drivers have been issued exorbitant tickets, had their cars towed, and been told to get out of town, the business owners said.
The owners said police officers punch holes in licenses and throw out-of-state licenses to the ground, saying that they are worthless. Two store owners said that the police ripped in half the license of one out of state driver.
In the most egregious example of alleged police action against Latinos, Father Manship and Elio Cruz said that the East Haven police department recently arrested four Latino men, and beat two of them up in the police station, splitting their lips and bruising their faces. One of these men was sprayed with pepper spray while handcuffed in the back of a cruiser, on the way to the station.
“That’s the kind of thing that’s happening here. They’re torturing people,” said Manship.
Four different Latino business owners said that although the police harassment has come from several officers, there is one officer in particular responsible for the majority of the harassment. But Manship thinks that the problem is greater than any single individual.
“One has to ask about policy and procedures in the East Haven police department,” Manship said. “Officers aren’t supervised and given training on how to deal with a diverse community.”
“There’s a breakdown of internal control,” he said.
“Terrorized”
Father Manship said that police harassment in East Haven has been going on since June of last year. Before that, racial profiling had begun on Route 80, where East Haven police were pulling Latino drivers over for harassment.
“They’re stopped for nothing,” Manship said. “They’re singled out because they’re Latino over and over and over again.”
Since the harassment moved to East Haven, Latino businesses have suffered. Customers are afraid to come to the stores.
Matute, who has owned My Country Store (pictured) for 10 years, said that the police patrol his parking lot and confiscate out-of-state license plates from cars parked in front of his store.
He said his customers are stopped when they drive out of the parking lot. They are ordered out of the car and told, “You need to go to New Haven, where the garbage is.” and “I don’t want to see you in this town.”
Matute’s brother-in-law, Fernando Chacon (at right in group photo above), said he was handcuffed for driving a car with tinted windows. Chacon demonstrated how the officer had threatened him with a ballpoint pen, holding it at his neck. Chacon was given a $250 ticket.
As a result of the harassment, “the customers don’t come,” Matute said. “Everybody calls me and says ‘I can’t come to the store.’”
Matute said that he has started giving out PINs for international calling cards over the phone to his customers, because they are afraid to come to the store to buy them. He has a box full of calling cards in use that his customers have promised to pay him for.
With no customers coming in, Matute is worried about paying his bills. “I need to pay the rent, to pay for the lights,” said Matute. He has an $800 electricity bill due next week.
“These people are on the point of losing their businesses,” said Father Manship. “People are terrorized. That’s the word they use.”
Asked about police harassment of Latinos, Slane, the police spokesman, said that cars are towed for a variety of reasons and “people are going to get tickets if their cars aren’t registered.”
Are Latinos being targeted specifically? “I don’t believe so,” he said, declining to comment further.
“People Are Afraid”
Down Main Street, Guti’z Bakery storeowner Pedro Gutierrez said that he calls it “the show.” It starts at 6 p.m. when the police cruisers park outside and wait for Latino customers to emerge from the bakery so that they can pull them over as they pull away from the bakery.
“When someone leaves of our color, the police come.” Gutierrez said recently, sitting in his brightly-lit bakery.
“But when the people are white, they’re not bothered.”
Gutierrez (pictured with his son, Adrien Gutierrez, and an employee, Tania Chacon), originally from Ecuador, has lived in the U.S. for 22 years. He became a citizen a year and a half ago.
Now, he said, his customers don’t want to come to pick up their fig bread, Colombian pastries, and roasted chicken. Gutierrez said his customers tell him that his bread has become “the most expensive in the world” at “three dollars for a loaf plus three hundred dollars in tickets.”
Guti’z has been open for only six weeks. Gutierrez said that he talked to the East Haven construction department and the zoning board and got approval and encouragement for his business. “Then the police come from the other side, trying to push the businesses out,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not just.”
“It is a bitter experience,” said Louis Rodriguez, owner of Los Amigos Grocery (pictured), further down Main Street. Rodriguez said that police cars regularly park at a nearby gas station, where the officers can keep an eye on Los Amigos as well as La Bamba restaurant, across the street, and be ready to pull over Latino drivers.
On Friday night, Rodriguez was standing in the front of his store, surrounded by racks of Latin music CDs. In addition to groceries and CDs, Los Amigos also does money orders and ships packages internationally. Rodriguez also has a small cyber-cafe and a video-conferencing room, where customers can have video conversations with loved ones in other countries.
Rodriguez carried his toddler, Edward, into the video-conferencing lounge, a small room with couch and a large, flat-screen TV with a video camera. On the wall was a mural of a tropical beach. Before the police harassment began, Rodriguez said, the room was always booked. Now, “it’s been two months without a client.”
“We considered the economy, but it’s not the economy. The problem is the people are afraid,” Rodriguez said. The storeowner has called his customers, who told him that they were too afraid to go to his store.
Rodriguez and Nardo Marin, the owner of the La Bamba restaurant across the street, both said that East Haven police have punched holes in drivers’ licenses after pulling people over. A friend of theirs, driving with an out of state license, had his license torn in half by a police officer after performing a U‑turn on Main Street.
Narcisa Ortiz, a New Haven resident, said that she was given a $158 ticket last week for driving with a Wisconsin license. She said the officer told her that he would arrest her if he saw her in East Haven again.
On Saturday night, Ortiz was at Los Amigos to send a package of clothes and shoes to her nine-year-old daughter in Ecuador. To avoid the police, Ortiz had gotten a friend to drive her to the store and had chosen to come at night.
Ortiz is fighting her ticket, but Rodriguez and Father Manship said that most Latinos stopped by East Haven police don’t have the resources to do so. They can’t lose a day of work to go to court.
Police Respond
At 8 p.m. on Saturday night, East Haven police cruiser number 27 was parked at the shuttered gas station near Los Amigos Grocery and La Bamba. A young, dark-haired police officer was shuffling through traffic tickets. Asked about the charges that police officers park outside of Latino businesses waiting to pull over customers, the officer said, “We park all over East Haven.”
He declined to comment further, saying only, “We target high-crime areas, that’s it.”
One of the problems with these out of state license plates is that individuals to avoid properly registering their vehicles in CT keep these expired out of state license plates. I myself was hit by a driver (Latino) with an out of state license plate who sped away and left me with a baby and a pregnant wife in the car. This is also true for many immigrants who drive with PA plates...the same story. This is not only directed to Latinos but to anybody how thinks they are smarter than the rest of us. The police should stop everyone to see how long they have been in the city no matter what nationality and to reminfd them they need to get CT plates.