3 Vie For Civilian-Review Seat

The first candidate is a Yale-trained young lawyer who works with one of the city’s most renowned civil rights lawyers on police-related cases.

The second candidate is the outreach supervisor for for one of the city’s anchoring social service agencies helping homeless kids confront racism and police profiling.

The third is a former New Haven Register police reporter and the creator most recently of a documentary about community policing in the Elm City.

Whom, among these embarrassment-of-riches very talented and qualified candidates, should a community management team choose to recommend as its representative for the evolving Civilian Review Board?

The answer, which unfolded at the regular meeting Tuesday night of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team (DWSCMT): All of them.

Less than a month remains before the May 9 deadline for community management teams to submit to the mayor names of suggested appointees the new police-monitoring Civilian Review Board (CRB), legislation for which was approved by the Board of Alders in January.

Per the ordinance, the 15-member CRB is charged ​“to monitor, review, and conduct independent investigations of civilian complaints of police misconduct by police officers.” It will have access to the same files available to the police department’s internal affairs division. It will hire independent investigators to conduct the probes, and make recommendations to the chief based on the findings.

A dozen of those 15 members will come from the community management team suggestions to the mayor, who will make the final selections
.

While there’s some confusion about the process and other management teams have been slow to organize their selections and submit name, neither was the case Tuesday night with the 25 participants who filled City Hall Meeting Room Two for the DWSCMT meeting

Led by the chairperson Caroline Smith, participants had been expecting to conduct a ranked choice vote and then submit the names in the order of the outcome.

To that end, the three candidates — writer, former police reporter, and documentarian Steve Hamm, Youth Continuum caseworker Elizabeth Larkin, and Alex Taubes, a Thomas Emerson Fellow at the David Rosen & Associates law firm — had all submitted brief letters making their pitches.

Smith had distributed those letters by email to the group’s membership. The ranked choice vote In which people select more than one choice, in order of preference) was to have taken place after each candidate made a five-minute presentation.

Then Smith explained a change of plans for two reasons.

“The ordinance doesn’t make clear that ranked choice is required,” she said.

And, secondly, ​“we have three very qualified candidates.”

She suggested therefore that each candidate still make the pitch, to be followed, by a voice vote to submit all the names, un-ranked, to the mayor.

“Members can write separately in support of individual candidates” to the mayor, Smith said.

That’s precisely what happened.

In their five-minute presentations, all the candidates called the unbiased pursuit of the facts the chief job of the CRB. The three had somewhat different emphases and takes on what they’d bring to the CRB.

“Showing the complainants a lot of respect and empathy as well as to make sure the facts guide the investigation” was the heart of Hamm’s remarks. ​“I was a journalist for 40 years. I’ve learned how to pursue the truth.”.

Hamm said that one of his chief take-aways from his upcoming film on community policing in New Haven, which is to premier on June 4 at the New Haven Documentary Film Festival, is that for community policing to work officers’ attitude is critical — the desire to serve and help being paramount, and force always the last alternative.

In order to make New Haven safe and just for her clients at Youth Continuum on Grand Avenue, Elizabeth Larkin said, ​“CRB members must acknowledge and talk about race.”

She said she sees one of the aspects of the CRB’s work as the production of ​“an annual report to the mayor to elevate the conversation about safety, race, and homelessness” in the city.

Alexander Taubes began his remarks by saying, ​“I would like to vote for Elizabeth,” which captured the serious, yet collegial, atmosphere in the room.

“I’m a civil rights lawyer,” he added. ​“There’s a lot of injustice in this city and many times, we [attorneys] can’t do anything. The CRB is a chance to short-circuit this and to get to misconduct if it occurs. The current situation is out of control.”

CMT participant Andrew Giering asked Taubes if he would absent or recuse himself in a CRB case on which he and his law firm might also be involved.

“I can abide” by that, Taubes said. He also said that he expects the CRB, as it evolves, to come to loggerheads with the police union and its contract.

There was a question for Hamm, based on his background and immersion in a community policing film, about how empathy might be instilled or taught as part of police training.

While Hamm conceded such an issue would not be at the center of CRB’s work, he said he was troubled by some of drill-instructor style training he witnessed: ​“I think no one who has been in the military should be hired by the police.”

Smith thanked all the candidates for putting themselves on the line to do the important work ahead. She called for a voice vote to send all the names, unranked, to Mayor Toni Harp, and so it was.

“The ayes have it,” she declared.

After the meeting, Wooster Square activist Cordalie Benoit said she will follow up on Smith’s suggestion to write a letter in support of a particular one of the three candidates.

She chose Hamm, she said, ​“because of his long ties to the community and his experience with the police.”