Paul Bass Photo
Black officers with attorney John Williams outside City Hall in February at a protest sparked by the incident.
Investigators still don’t know who got on the police radio and uttered a racial slur last Dec. 30. But they now know that the slur didn’t come from someone using a New Haven police radio.
That word emerged from a Wednesday morning briefing between the top city cops and the FBI.
Chief Dean Esserman had asked the FBI to help investigate the middle-of-the-night Dec. 30 incident, in which someone got on the police radio, slowly uttered the word “nigger,” then signed off. The incident led to an immediate internal police investigation. It also led to a protest by African-American cops, who criticized police brass’s response to incidents of racism on the part of some members of the department.
The FBI informed New Haven Wednesday that, based on the results of a technical investigation, “the slur was not uttered using a New Haven Police Department radio. The radios are incapable of producing the identification signal that was detected,” according to a subsequent press release issued from 1 Union Ave.
New Haven detectives had been looking at one “person of interest” as a possible suspect, a young North Branford man arrested separately for impersonating a cop. (Read about that here.) Police spokesman Officer David Hartman Wednesday said that man is no longer a “person of interest” in the investigation.
“The amount of work that went into this investigation was remarkable,” Esserman was quoted as saying in Wednesday’s release. “This incident shook and offended every member of our department. Nothing but a thorough and vigorous investigation was called for in this case. We are grateful to the F.B.I. for the high-priority attention they’ve given to this most disturbing matter”.
What a waste of manpower. With so many issues facing the city the police choose to make a federal case out of one juvenile racist. The time spent on this and the Yale incident could be better used looking into unsolved murder cases, of which the city has plenty.