Hamden Tries Camden Cop Approach

As part of a new community policing initiative, Officers Craig Appleby and Chris Sheppard were walking back along the Farmington Canal Trail to the Highwood substation for lunch when they noticed something new. There was a door on a cement building beside the trail that was so overgrown it looked like a Mayan ruin engulfed by rainforest.

“Oh, they put a door on that,” remarked Appleby. ​“Probably because we stopped by,” he added.

That door had not existed a few days prior when Appleby and Sheppard had stopped into the building to see what was there. If you step in the wrong place, you’ll fall through the floor in there, Appleby said.

A moment later, the door opened, and a man and a woman stepped out into the light drizzle. 

“How you doing?” Appleby called over to them.

They peered back, looking tense. ​“Good,” the woman replied.

“You staying in there?” called Appleby.

“No, just getting out of the rain,” the woman replied.

“OK, sounds good,” called Appleby. He and Sheppard continued up the trail to the substation where lunch was waiting.

“We’ll have to go back there,” Appleby said to Sheppard. It’s an unsafe building, he said. The people who had just walked out were probably there the other day when the two officers stopped in, and put the door up afterwards to keep people out, he said. He would tell Adam Sendroff, who runs the Keefe Community Center, and he and Sheppard would go back to see if they need any services, he said.

A few days later, the officers went back with the fire marshal to inspect. Sendroff, who does not have his own outreach staff, notified Columbus House, which sent an outreach worker to see what the people living there needed and connect them with services.

Had Appleby and Sheppard been in their cars, they said, they likely would not have noticed the door. They may not have stopped into the building in the first place. They didn’t make any arrests or tell anyone what to do. They still managed to accomplish what department leaders hope will become a normal part of an everyday officer’s job in Hamden: talking to people, and finding quality of life issues.

Appleby and Sheppard are a part of the department’s Neighborhood Initiative Unit, which began this spring as a new community policing division. They, along with Officers Angela Vey and Enrique Rivera, are assigned fulltime to outreach-type beats.

During the academic year, Appleby and Sheppard are school resource officers at the town’s middle and high schools. But while school is not in session, they’ve been out walking every day. They walk or bike around neighborhoods, stop into businesses to chat with customers and owners, solicit quality-of-life complaints. They’re supposed to keep their ears to the ground and their faces out and visible for the communities they walk to get used to them.

Since an announcement last month, those four officers are not the only ones who are supposed to spend their shifts outside of cars talking to people.

In July, Mayor Curt Leng and Acting Police Chief John Sullivan announced that the department would launch a new department-wide community policing initiative based on the model of Camden, N.J., which has received nationwide acclaim.

“Focus will be placed on addressing quality of life issues, suppressing crime, and crime prevention,” a press release said. ​“Our residents can expect to interact with our officers more readily across the department and every day.”

In short, the new initiative means that every officer is supposed to step out of the car to talk to someone on every shift.

The directive is not limited to patrol officers. Detectives and higher-ranking members of the department are also supposed to leave the office and to get to know people in the communities they police.

“Essentially what the citizens should expect is their officers will be more visible and they should be more engaged with the community,” said Sgt. William Onofrio, who runs the Neighborhood Initiative Unit. The point, he said, is to ​“have officers be part of the community rather than just servicing them.”

The initiative is still in its infancy, its practical effects remain to be seen. Not everyone who spoke with the Independent about it was hopeful.

Community policing needs to start with conversations with the community about what it wants, said Councilman Justin Farmer. He said it should be led by the community, and not by the police department, and that community members should first determine the policies they want before the department institutes them.

“Why do we even have walking beats?” he asked. ​“Who decided that we should have walking beats? Did we actually have a conversation? Again, we need to be centering the community first. Not the police department.”

Camden To Hamden

Onofrio said the idea of following the Camden model came from Sendroff.

Onofrio and Sendroff have been working closely together for months. Shortly before the pandemic, Onofrio visited the Keefe Center. Sendroff gave him a tour and told him about the various resources it offers. Since then, Onofiro and the members of the Neighborhood Initiative Unit have helped Sendroff with the logistics of massive food distributions and have functioned almost like outreach workers for the Keefe Center. They’ve almost become ​“Keefe out in the field,” said Sendroff.

When Onofrio first stopped by the Keefe Center, Sendroff said, he was involved in discussions about what community policing could look like in Hamden. ​“One of the things I looked at and read about was that it’s not so much of a specific program but more of an overall philosophy.”

From Camden To Hamden

Fast forward to June. Sendroff (pictured above) was listening to a podcast. It featured a conversation between former New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram and former Camden Police Chief Scott Thomson. (Read the full transcript here.)

The Camden transformation has received national attention. President Barack Obama met Thomson in a 2015 visit to Camden, and invited him to testify in front of the taskforce on 21st century policing. In the wake of the George Floyd murder and the protests that followed, some have held up the Camden model as an example of when a city successfully disbanded its police force.

Of course, it’s not so simple, and Hamden cannot go the way of Camden entirely. In the 2000s, Camden was one of the most violent places in the country. In the city of 70,000, there were 42 homicides in 2007 and 54 in 2008, then 67 in 2012.

The city disbanded its police force, and instead turned policing over to a new county force. Disbanding the city’s department allowed the city to get rid of its police union, allowing it to make policing less expensive, and put more officers on the ground.

Suddenly, holding officers accountable was also much easier. In Thomson’s telling, the department began to focus less on arrests for minor offenses, and more on integrating officers into the community.

As Thomson told Politico in June, he said to officers ​“I don’t want you to write tickets, I don’t want you to lock anybody up. I’m dropping you off on this corner that has crime rates greater than that of Juárez, Mexico, and for the next 12 hours I don’t want you to make an arrest unless it’s for an extremely vile offense. Don’t call us — we’re not coming back to get you until the end of your shift, so if you got to go to the bathroom, you need to make a friend out there. You want to get something to eat? You better find who the good cook is.”

According to Politico, officers now call residents periodically to check in on them, and are often seen flipping burgers at cookouts with residents.

The department also instituted a number of progressive policing reforms, which some have argued were the result of pressure from activists, and not of police leaders themselves.

Among those policies are clear use-of-force policies that require de-escalation before any use of force, and a policy that requires officers to intervene if they see another officer violating policy.

In the podcast, Milgram, the former New Jersey attorney general, boils the model down to three main points. First, it focuses on hiring ​“guardians, not warriors.” Second is the focus on community, and third, the de-escalation and other strong progressive policies.

Sendroff told Onofrio about the Camden model of policing. Onofrio took it from there. Hamden’s police department is now in talks with Camden, as well as with the Department of Justice, about changing the way it does policing.

Onofrio said that shift commanders and supervisors will be responsible for making sure the officers under their command follow through with the directive of getting out of the car to talk to people. Officers will radio in and pull a case number when they get out of the car for a conversation or walk into a business so there will be a timestamp, location, and duration associated with whatever kind of outreach the officer decides to do that day.

“For this to work correctly, the officers have to be willing to do it themselves,” he said. But it really isn’t asking that much of them, he said. 

On top of requiring interactions with community members, Onofrio said the department would also be changing its use of force policy to require a de-escalation attempt before the use of force.

In the past, Hamden’s community policing efforts have involved sending officers to events like farmer’s markets and events for kids. It was often paid for with overtime. ​“That’s not going to happen anymore,” said Sullivan. The department no longer has the overtime budget it used to, so community policing, he said, will have to happen on regular hours.

On The Street

When Appleby and Sheppard walked by the now doored-off entrance of the building next to the canal trail, they were on their way back to the Highwood substation from a shift out walking around southern Hamden. Because of the rain, few people were out.

They had started the patrol walking down Dixwell Avenue, stopping in to businesses as they went. They popped their heads into an African braiding salon and asked how things were going, then at a convenience store nearby, where Appleby said the shopkeeper has been taking his time in warming up to the officers.

Jojo Lalo was behind the counter when Appleby stopped in to ask how things were going. Lalo told him that everything was fine.

“I tell you, we’re going to keep coming back,” Appleby said.

“OK,” Lalo said with a slight smile.

“He’s taking his time with us,” Appleby said once he was back outside on the sidewalk.

If Lalo has reservations about police officers stopping into the store where he works, he didn’t share them with the Independent. ​“Good, we feel good, we feel good,” he said when asked whether it makes him feel comfortable or nervous to have police stop by.

Larry Lucky (pictured above), who runs a barbecue business out of an old city bus, was pulling into the plot he rents at Dudley Street and Dixwell when the officers were walking past. They stopped to chat.

A few cars parked along Dixwell in front of the overgrown lot had been there for a long time. Lucky was getting ready to start serving from there regularly, and those cars might be a problem when customers arrived. The officers told Lucky that they were working on getting them removed.

A few days later, all but one of the cars were gone.

From Lucky’s bus, Sheppard and Appleby walked south along the canal trail to Church of Christ just over the border in New Haven. Volunteers were busy packing food into bags for a food distribution that would take place later that day.

Minister Norman Nuton (pictured above) came out to greet the officers.

“Do you guys have enough car seats?” Sheppard asked.

“I think we got three or four,” Nuton replied. He walked into the other room to check, and came back to report that they had 6.

Though the church is not technically in Hamden, Sheppard and Appleby have established a relationship with it and sometimes help out with the food distribution.

When Appleby and Sheppard went out walking around the neighborhood the next Friday, they stopped at a different food pantry. They ducked their heads as they stepped down the low-ceilinged staircase to the basement of St. Ann’s Church, where volunteers were preparing the day’s lunch distribution for the well-loved St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen.

Hadassah Fernandez (pictured above with officers) came out to greet them. They told her that pastor Nuton, just a few blocks away, had too much meat and needed someone to give it to. Fernandez arranged with the officers that they would drop it off at St. Ann’s the following Tuesday.

Unlike on the previous Friday, it was not raining that day. Sheppard and Appleby had started the late morning patrol by driving up Morse Street, then turning onto Winchester Avenue and then onto Goodrich Street.

At the intersection of Goodrich and Newhall Streets, they pulled over. They had recently brought lawn signs there telling people to slow down after the owner of the Harris and Tucker School on the corner told them that people often go too fast through the intersection and don’t obey traffic laws.

The issue will have to come before the traffic commission, said Appleby, but for now, the lawn signs will help.

But no one was outside on Friday, so they kept going.

“’Sup Prince! Israel! How y’all doing!” Sheppard shouted out the window to two men on the sidewalk as he and Appleby drove past.

The officers spent the rest of the shift walking around the streets just West of Dixwell in the southern part of town. The streets were mostly empty. In a normal year, they said, there would be people out on a warm summer midday. But it seemed that people were staying home because of the virus.

When they got to a store or a restaurant, they would stop in to ask how business was, or remark on the new air conditioning, and to ask if the business owner needed anything. Sheppard walked out of one convenience store munching a cookie sandwich — an appetizer for lunch, which was going to be lemon pepper chicken from Ali Baba’s Fusion.

But as they walked, they also took note of everything they saw. A group of teenagers rode past on dirt bikes. ​“That’s trouble,” Appleby said, watching them as they droned down the road.

On one side street, a man rode by slowly on a motorcycle wearing a helmet.

“He’s looking for a car to steal,” said Appleby.

“No, that’s not him,” replied Sheppard.

“You sure?” countered Appleby. The helmet obscured his face, and he didn’t take it off when he got off the motorcycle a dozen yards ahead of the officers.

“No, it’s not him,” Sheppard persisted.

Homelessness Soars

This summer, Appleby said, the number of homeless people has risen in Hamden. Usually there would be three or four who would spend the summer consistently living in Hamden. This year, they know of eight, and there may be more.

It can take time to get to know the homeless men and women in Hamden, said Appleby. But if you show that you’re just there to help, he said, they open up.

“Give him a little food, a little water, and he was more than happy to talk to us,” he said of one man he had met the other day.

Over the course of the summer, Appleby, Sheppard, and the other members of the Neighborhood Initiative Unit have been getting to know the people living under overpasses and in abandoned buildings. Since the officers are the people out walking around town checking in on people, they often meet the people living in the streets before anyone else who could provide services. They report back to Sendroff, who alerts Columbus House or another organization that then sends out a case worker.

Or, as of a few weeks ago, they can send out ​“Dr. Phil,” as the New Haven area’s homeless population affectionately calls the Cornell Scott Hill Health nurse practitioner who treks out to the camps of people experiencing homelessness to treat them where they are.

Phil Costello, director of Cornell Scott’s Healthcare for the Homeless program, went with Sheppard and Appleby a few weeks ago for the first time. His territory was previously limited to New Haven. As of this summer, he has expanded to Hamden. (Read more about Costello here.)

Sendroff said Costello will likely begin to accompany Appleby and Sheppard regularly as they make the rounds to Hamden’s growing homeless population.