New Top Prosecutor Called Out

New Haven’s new state’s attorney equated black-on-black crime with police shootings of unarmed citizens — and got a lesson in response from a room full of people seeking to improve relations between law enforcement and the community.

The lesson in false equivalence took place at a justice forum hosted Tuesday afternoon by U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly.

Part of National Community Policing Week, the event brought cops, prosecutors, and community members together to discuss ways to further the dialogue that has been fostered between both groups in New Haven.

Patrick Griffin, a veteran prosecutor who this summer was appointed New Haven’s state’s attorney upon the retirement of Michael Dearington, made a plea to members of the community seated around the conference table at the U.S. Attorney office on Church Street for help dealing with the scourge of gun violence in communities. Griffin is the top official responsible for prosecuting state crimes in New Haven.

“I saw a statistic the other day and there has been more kids killed in Chicago than young people who have been killed in Iraq,” he said. ​“We’re not dealing with the gun violence in communities.”

He said he wants community members to work with young people before they fire a gun, thus ending the life of the person who has been shot and their own life because they’re likely going to jail when they are caught by the police and prosecuted. He said he also wants them to address the issue of ​“no snitching” so that guns don’t stay in the wrong hands, and help cultivate a culture of cooperation with law enforcement that gets the 2 percent to 3 percent of the people who are actually committing most acts of violence in communities.

“Certainly, if a police officer does wrong, the officer has dishonored his badge, dishonored his oath, and needs to be held accountable. But we also have to take into account the people who are doing crimes in the very neighborhoods that are hurting so badly,” he added. ​“We need to come together there and really not be divided and look at this scourge of gun violence from both sides. Not just from the law enforcement side, because violence is being done daily.”

Griffin never mentioned the race of the young people dying in the streets of Chicago, or that of the people around the table sitting in front of him. But for the record, they are in both cases, mostly black and Latino.

Those who had been invited to the table Tuesday vowed to do their part. But they also challenged Griffin to expand his own thinking about the separate and complex problems of crime between citizens and extrajudicial killings of citizens by police officers, who are empowered and paid by the government to protect lives.

“No Snitching” For Cops

When regular citizens commit crimes, police departments and prosecutors work as long as they need to catch the person responsible and send them to prison. But the same system of justice has often let officers who shoot and kill unarmed citizens not only go free, but in many instances keep their jobs even in a state like Connecticut where cops have committed crimes and been arrested, noted Tai Richardson.

Richardson, who grew up in Newhallville, came to the Tuesday event to represent his fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc.

“There is a perception that there is a no snitching policy among police officers,” Richardson said. ​“There are great cops. For the great cops that see things that are wrong, even if you’re not going to be a whistleblower on somebody, at least have a conversation and acknowledge the pain that someone is seeing or feeling as a result of what’s happening.”

He said it’s very difficult to convince the community to speak up when they don’t believe cops are willing to be courageous enough to do the same. He also cautioned against making a correlation between an officer-involved shooting and violence in a community.

“Unfortunately, I have to fight this every day in my community, but they don’t take an oath to serve and protect,” he said. ​“We have to separate the two. We cannot make that correlation because if you do it in this room and it strikes a nerve, it’s definitely going to strike a nerve in the community, and actually push the divide further.”

Daly said that police officers should be, and are, held to a higher standard. But she said it also is true that to get a violent offender off the street, prosecutors need the help of the community.

Richardson suggested that if law enforcement wants help from the community, it must recognize the generations of mistrust that have developed around policing. He commended the work that has been done in New Haven to revive community policing and walking beats, but said there also is work to be done insuring that there isn’t a dual system of justice — one for police and another for ordinary citizens.

Valerie Schultz-Wilson, Urban League of Southern Connecticut CEO & president, pointed out the problem of easy access to the very guns that Griffin would like to see off the street. She pointed to the lax laws of other states with low criteria for obtaining a gun and that require even less from the people who legally sell guns.

“You can’t talk about getting guns off the streets in Chicago and out of the hands of felons when we’re not talking about the access to guns,” she said.

Griffin said he didn’t disagree about the the problem of easy access. But he also pointed out that it would be 200 years before the last gun in the United States is fired.

“What I’m suggesting to you is to get the gun out of the hand of young people before he or she can use it will save two lives or multiple lives,” he said. ​“When a young person fires that gun his life is altered forever; he’s altered another person’s life forever.”

Daly said that statistically there are only a small percentage of people responsible for the vast majority of gun violence in inner cities.

“It’s not thousands and thousands of people, and if we can figure out who these people are we can radically change the lives of people in these communities,” she said. ​“You’re right about guns, but there are so many guns out there. And in most gangs there’s just one gun. It’s a hard issue to attack but we want to make these cases and the level of cooperation is not always there. We had a case here with a high reward of $25,000. Two women and a little boy were killed. Nobody even called.”

Daly admitted that ultimately that case was successfully prosecuted, but she suggested it might have been easier to do if the community had cooperated.

Truth & Reconciliation

New Haven Assistant Police Chief Achilles ​“Archie” Generoso, a lifelong New Havener who grew up in the Hill, said Project Longevity — a joint federal-city anti-gang violence effort — is improving relations. He said there was a time that after a shooting or murder in a particular neighborhood the police would flood that community and stop every person walking.

“We would shut down everything,” he said. ​“And what did we do [because of that]? We alienated everybody in that neighborhood.” He said that the reality is that it was only a small percentage of the people in the neighborhood creating havoc, but everyone was paying for it. Project Longevity uses data to identify the small percentage of problem-creators, and then to focus attention on them.

“As a police officer I apologize for that,” he said of the old methods. ​“That wasn’t our intent. We thought we were doing good because we shut down crime. We really didn’t shut crime down. We delayed it for a while. Because as soon as we pulled out of that neighborhood the crime started happening again. We were wrong. We made a mistake. I acknowledge that. We did the wrong thing. We’re getting a little smarter now.”

He said now, at least in New Haven, the goal is to use ​“focused attention” to make life hard for the small number of people who are killing people. And part of that work is done through Project Longevity. The program puts gang members and those who are deemed violent by the department because of past behavior, or are most likely to shoot and be shot, on notice that if someone connected to them starts up the violence, the police will be coming after them. The program also gives them the alternative of going straight with the help of many community leaders.

“We do this with the support of the community and service providers,” Generoso said. ​“We speak in one voice.”

Retired New Haven police Det. Stacy Spell, who now oversees Project Longevity, said that though generational mistrust exists, the community has to take a proactive role in building relationships with law enforcement as well as with each other. Spell, who also is a community activist from the West River section of the city, said he’s not talking about fostering the kinds of relationships that protect actual criminals, but that are willing to out those individuals regardless of who they’re related to because they’re destroying the neighborhood.

“We can no longer wait for the calvary to come into our community. We have to realize that we are the calvary,” he said.

Trust Earned

The Rev. Steven Cousin Jr., pastor of Bethel AME Church, said that trust is building in New Haven. So when he recently saw young men in a car, wearing ski masks and holding what looked like assault rifles, he called the police and he gave his name. It turned out they were paintball guns.

“Any other time I would not have given my name because I know the street side of things,” he said. ​“But because I’ve developed a relationship with officers in the New Haven Police Department, I felt comfortable calling them.”

Brent Peterkin, the state coordinator for Project Longevity, put the whole conversation, held in the city that was home to the gun that purportedly won the West, into the context of America’s relationship with guns and violence.

Peterkin told the room that he recently paid a visit to a young man in Hartford who was shot and paralyzed after a friend threw a rock at a car, shattering the car’s window. The driver of that car circled back to the rock thrower and opened fire, injuring the young man. Peterkin said when he visited the young man, who is now a quadriplegic, he was using the little bit of physical movement he had left in his hands to play a video game.

“He’s playing ​‘Call of Duty,’ which is a shooter game,” Peterkin said. ​“Even a victim of gun violence is still enthralled with gun violence, whether fictional or real. There’s an issue with that because whether we’re talking about law enforcement, or the murderers of Trayvon Martin or Jordan Davis, who weren’t officers of the law, these are individuals who were legally allowed to carry a firearm, but yet chose not to de-escalate a conflict. They are similar to African-American and Latino men in communities of color whether they are in illegal or legal possession of a firearm. It’s when you have that gun, its what you choose to do with it.”

He said Project Longevity cannot stop the ​“iron pipeline” of guns coming into Connecticut. He said the goal is to implore people to make a rational decision through group accountability. He said group accountability has to happen for officers who use their guns without restraint.

“They don’t speak to the nobility of their profession, just as the men we deal with through Project Longevity don’t speak to the nobility of their communities,” he said. ​“We have bad apples on both fronts.”

He said he believes the key to changing that dynamic in communities is reconciliation. He said the young men and some women that Project Longevity works with don’t see themselves as part of a community supported by churches, schools, and other organizations. And they definitely don’t see the police as a resource, and instead, take matters into their own hands.

He also pointed out that police officers who don’t live in the communities they police and see their work as something they do for an eight or 10-hour shift don’t see themselves as part of the community either. He said all of that has to change.

“And it’s a love affair with gun culture on both ends,” he said. ​“You have cops in love with their firearms. They love that part of the job and some of them will actually go against their training. Not in Connecticut, but we see that on video footage. With Tamir Rice. That’s not tactically sound to just run up on someone like that. You’re putting yourself and your partner at risk. That’s you having this intense proclivity to shoot and discharge your weapon. It’s an American problem.”