Police Reform Ideas Offered At CT Task Force Meeting

CONNECTICUT — The state Police Transparency and Accountability Task Force plans to make recommendations on best practices for police and some ideas discussed this week included civilian oversight of complaints made against officers, offloading some police officer duties to others, and immersing officers into their communities.

The task force, which met Monday, was created by legislation last year and includes current and former members of law enforcement, state legislators, criminal justice academic experts and others.

Task force chairman Daryl McGraw said that just because Connecticut hasn’t had violent protests doesn’t mean that the state isn’t without its own issues. The difference is Connecticut can reform police practices before a George Floyd incident, he said.

“We have these problems let’s be clear ... we do have police brutality issues, we do have racism issues within the police departments and within our state,” McGraw said.

Task force member State Sen. Gary Winfield, a Democrat from New Haven, said there will be a big legislative push in Connecticut for a comprehensive police reform bill. Winfield has been one of the leading state legislators advocating for criminal justice reform.

“I couldn’t even describe to you what the emotions are,” he said. “What I do know is that waking up is a difficult thing to do when you’ve been asleep for a long time. This country has been asleep to the fact that at its very foundation there are some very ugly poisonous thing.”

Connecticut passed a police accountability law in 2019 that bans police from firing guns at moving vehicles unless there is an imminent threat to life. It also mandates the release of police video recordings within 96 hours.

Milford police Chief Keith Mello said there is now a lot of energy behind police reform that can change more than laws and regulations. Mello is the chairman of the Connecticut Police Officer Standards and Training Council which sets regulations for officers across the state.

“I’ve been doing this a while and I haven’t seen anything like this and this is an opportunity because this is going to change behavior,” he said.

The POST Council will put in a new mandate for all officers in Connecticut that will ban choke holds and neck restraints, Mello said. Connecticut's police officers aren’t trained in the use of choke holds and it’s considered deadly force in Connecticut.

“This is an opportunity, these protests are important because we can pass laws, we can talk about mandates, but you can’t just mandate and legislate behavior," he said. “It's up to us as chiefs to manage culture and get everyone on that bus.”

One possible difficulty with reform is that each police department has individual union contracts that come with their own time limits and reporting requirements. Sometimes they can get in the way of making change, Mello said.

Mello said police provide a variety of services in modern times, but some such as helping the homeless population or dealing with mental health issues may be better handled by professionals in those areas. Gov. Ned Lamont echoed the same thought during a news conference held later in the day.

Norwalk police Chief Thomas Kulhawik suggested looking into pairing officers with mental health professionals to better handle some situations. Officers get some mental health training, but it doesn’t rise to the level of a professional.

There has been a growing push on deescalation training to prevent situations from turning physical, Mello said.

“Use of force unless absolutely necessary should be viewed as a failure,” he said.

Retired New Haven police Sgt. Shafiq Abdussabur said that Connecticut should immediately stop police from enforcing motor vehicle equipment violations which are often used for racial profiling purposes and put police into more confrontational situations.

He also suggested a universal complaint filing system for the state instead of each department setting its own policies. Data on the number of complaints could then be universally tracked and publicly reported. It’s a change that could be made quicker than others.

“My personal opinion, community policing does not work,” he said. “Community-based policing got us to where we are right now, because we’ve been using it for literally like the last 15 years easily.”

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He said communities don’t need “feel good techniques,” and that the policing model used by western society had some systemic issues.

State Rep. Joshua Hall, a Democrat from Hartford, said the internal review process at police departments should be ended and instead there should be community oversight.

“There is a sense that they are not going to be held accountable for their actions whether it's as simple as the way they talk to somebody, the way they interact with somebody or going as far as ending someone’s life,” Hall said.

McGraw, a senior reentry analyst at Central Connecticut State University, suggested looking at a system where officers who get a certain number of complaints against them go before a civilian review board. He also said the problem of police assaulting people isn’t just white officers assaulting black people; he said he was assaulted by a black officer.

Wallingford police Chief William Wright said that police chiefs can set the culture in a police department, but ultimately first-line supervisors are the most important part to drive the culture to the officers they supervise.

“The chief can have the message that he or she wants delivered pushed down and if it doesn’t get through and into that first line supervisory level then all of the work that is done administratively is lost,” he said.