nothin Police Protest Sparks Dialogue At Mayor’s… | New Haven Independent

Police Protest Sparks Dialogue At Mayor’s House

Thomas Breen photo

Youth leader Jeremy Cajigas urges Mayor Elicker (right) to defund the police.

A Defund the Police” rally held outside Mayor Justin Elicker’s house turned into a wide-ranging conversation about City Hall’s policy priorities amidst the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement.

That conversation took place Friday late afternoon in East Rock outside of Mayor Justin Elicker’s house on Orange Street.

Roughly two dozen young organizers from Citywide Youth Coalition stood on the sidewalk outside the mayor’s home and made an in-person pitch for him to shift public money from law enforcement and towards social services like affordable housing and public education. They also called on him to support pulling city cops from public schools and replacing them with guidance counselors

If you really value Black and brown lives, if you value me as a student, then you need to start defunding the police,” Amistad High School student Julie Hajducky implored the mayor.

Friday’s rally outside the mayor’s house.

The political house visit and hour-long conversation represented the latest direct action from youth activists who have taken the lead in recent months in challenging city leaders and the broader public to radically reimagine the role of law enforcement in New Haven.

Since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day and the subsequent nationwide uprising against police brutality, this same local group has led a 5,000 person march from the Green to police headquarters in early June, a Black Liberation march and teach-in” in East Rock Park on Juneteenth, and another nearly-100-person march from the Green to police headquarters at the end of July.

At each event, they’ve pushed the same set of specific demands around diverting public funding from law enforcement to social services that get at the root causes of crime, poverty, and social instability.

Citywide Youth Coalition organizers Jaeana Bethea and Julie Hajducky.


We need to focus on prevention,” said fellow Amistad High student Jaeana Bethea, not on criminalizing people of color.”

Unlike at Citywide Youth Coalition’s previous recent actions — and unlike a late-night, much more contentious protest on the mayor’s lawn at the end of May—Friday’s rally at the mayor’s house resulted in a civil if impassioned conversation between the youth activists and the city’s top elected official.

For over an hour Elicker listened closely, described the processes by which local government functions, and detailed what actions his administration is taking — and which of the youth group’s demands he deems a bridge too far.

He said he does not support categorically defunding the police or removing School Resource Officers (SROs) from the public schools. That’s in part because many, many people in every single neighborhood around the city” tell him they want more police, not fewer, he said.

The mayor insisted, however, that his administration is not standing idly by as people around the city and the country call for a fundamental change to how policing works — particularly in regards to whether or not an armed officer is the best person to respond to every type of call for service that is currently directed to the police.

CAHOOTS, Not Cops

Political sidewalk chalk art.

Elicker said that his administration is currently exploring whether or not to create a crisis response team modeled after Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS program.

Under such an operation, social workers and mental health experts rather than armed police officers would respond to certain calls, especially those that involve homelessness, substance abuse, an overdoses.

In the CAHOOTS program (which stands for Crisis Intervention Helping Out On The Streets), cops don’t go” to these types of nonviolent calls, Elicker said. Because cops oftentimes escalate the situation, even unintentionally.”

The very facts that they wear uniforms and have lethal weapons can prove detrimental to making sure someone gets the help that they need in a given situation, he said.

The goal is that in the long run these types of response groups will be able to replace” some of the work that police currently do, he said, so that armed officers can focus instead on responding to shootings and other more volatile crisis situations.

Would the funding for such a crisis response team come out of the current police budget? asked New Haven native and recent Middlebury College graduate Wengel Kifle (pictured). If police are doing less work, we should take their money away,” she said.

Elicker said the city would like to commission a study on how to create such a program and how to run it. That study would also determine how best to fund it, he said.

As for SROs, the mayor said that a Board of Education working group is currently investigating whether or not to remove cops from schools entirely. He said he’s sympathetic to the argument that SROs are able to forge closer bonds with students and are better equipped than a police officer with no connection to a school to break up a fight without making any arrests. 

While he is open to having SROs not wear police uniforms, Elicker said, I don’t think it’s the right decision to totally eliminate the SRO program.”

Don’t Forget About Housing

Citywide Youth Coalition leader Jeremy Cajigas (pictured) asked Elicker about the group’s second defund the police” demand: That $20 million be taken out of the budget for police pensions and be allocated instead towards the development of affordable public housing.

We’re in the middle of a pandemic,” Cajigas said, and very soon, we’re going to face a mass eviction crisis.”

Will you shift money from police pensions to housing? they asked the mayor. And what else are you doing to ensure New Haveners can live in safe, affordable, convenient, and dignified housing?

First, Elicker responded, we cannot just take away money from police pensions.” That’s a legal obligation that the city has to make good on. And if the city tried to take money away from the police and fire pension fund, it would be sued, and the city would lose.

As for the need for more affordable housing, Elicker said, I agree this is a major, major issue.”

He said his administration is finalizing an inclusionary zoning ordinance that would require developers of new housing set aside a certain percentage of apartments at affordable rates.

And he said the city is pushing to update the city’s zoning code to legalize accessory dwelling units, which would immediately increase the housing supply in the city by allowing homeowners to rent out parts of their properties they cannot legally rent out.

Citywide Youth Coalition’s Ta’LannaMonique Miller told the mayor that the city doesn’t just need more affordable housing — it needs more affordable housing for families. More one bedroom apartments don’t help working families in New Haven,” she said. The city needs three bedroom and four bedroom apartments that don’t cost an arm and a leg for families to rent. And they can’t be owned by slumlords,” she said.

Ta’LannaMonique Miller (left) quizzes the mayor on city support for tenants facing eviction.

What about evictions? Miller continued. Is there anything the city can do to protect renters from being forced out of their homes once the state eviction moratorium expires next week?

We’re very, very scared about mass evictions” taking place towards the end of the month, Elicker said, particularly as the federal boost to unemployment has expired and so many people remain out of work during the ongoing pandemic.

The mayor said that the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) is working with New Haven legal aid to come up with a plan for providing some kind of legal help for tenants facing eviction.

He also said that the city is looking into providing direct cash support for renters to complement the renter support program set up by the state. We think the state should put a lot more money” in that program as well, he said.

Focus On Yale, Suburbs

Elicker called on the youth activists to direct their efforts to get social services funded towards places with much more money than the relatively cash-strapped city government.

Even if he did agree to every one of Citywide Youth Coalition’s demands and moved tens of millions of dollars from the police budget to education and housing, Elicker said, In my opinion, that’s a drop in the budget compared to what really needs to happen.

We need to fund social services. That needs to come from Yale University. That needs to come from the suburbs. You can protest in front of my house. You can protest in front of City Hall. But the real problem is at the Capitol, is at these places that have incredible amounts of money, and our city is working to grab up the scraps.”

Singing and chanting outside the mayor’s house.

Soon after 6 p.m., Cajigas told the mayor that the youth activists had hit the time limit for their scheduled rally, and that they were going to start heading out to enjoy the rest of their Friday night.

We appreciate you coming out to give us some clear answers,” even if the mayor didn’t categorically agree to any of the group’s demands. Cajigas said that the youth activists would continue trying to push the mayor to see these issues from their perspective — and ultimately to take more substantive action around defunding the police.

Click video below to watch parts of Friday afternoon’s conversation.

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