State To Help City
Solve Shootings

Paul Bass Photo

A new investigative crew is moving into police headquarters to revisit non-fatal shootings that fell through the cracks.

The chief state’s attorney’s office has sent two staffers, Michael Sullivan (pictured) and Joe Howard, to set up the new shootings unit.

Sullivan and Howard showed up at Tuesday morning’s weekly Compstat statistics and strategy meeting at police headquarters at 1 Union Ave. to introduce themselves, and their new mission.

The new unit will eventually have seven or eight members and be up and running in a few weeks on the police department’s third floor, according to Sullivan, a former New Britain cop who’s currently a supervisory inspector in the chief state’s attorney’s Rocky Hill office. (Howard, an inspector, is a retired New Haven cop.)

The unit will focus on non-fatal and unsolved shootings so the department’s regular major crimes squad can focus on the current, pressing murders and other more serious shootings.

It will work hand in hand with the Department of Corrections as well as with state prosecutors. New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington has assigned a prosecutor, Kevin Doyle, to handle all shooting cases coming out of the unit, Sullivan said.

Police Chief Dean Esserman said the New Haven department will assign some members permanently to the new shootings squad. It will also include some other cops on a temporary, rotating basis. This will be a teaching unit,” he said. Esserman made a point Tuesday morning of thanking Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane, Dearington, and State Police Commissioner Reuben Bradford for helping to make the new unit happen.

The unit is modeled on a similar effort the state’s attorney helped launch in Hartford last year. Sullivan said it has dramatically reduced the number of shootings there. (Click here to read a Hartford Courant story about that effort.)

People who commit one shooting often have committed others and will continue to if not caught, Sullivan noted. And such repeat shooters represent a tiny fraction of a city’s population. So a unit like his can make a big difference in reducing street violence, he said.

New Haven had 133 reported shootings last year. So far this year it has had nine.

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