Connecticut Town Grapples With Claims of Police Bias

East Haven, Conn. - Since 2008, officials in East Haven, Conn., a working-class suburb with a long history of toxic relations between the police and minorities, have played down Latinos’ complaints of accelerating police harassment and brutality.

Local officials appeared unperturbed when the Justice Department opened a rare investigation last fall into allegations of discriminatory policing in the town and Yale law students went to court to force the release of police records. The police chief denied any bias and blamed any problems on the failure of federal immigration policy. The mayor said she was unaware of any racial discrimination and supported the police.

But in recent days, the town seemed to have turned an unexpected corner.

In an unusual step, the Justice Department warned the town attorney in a letter on April 15 that its preliminary review showed the Police Department was a shambles, with no modern rules of conduct for officers, no check on their use of force, inadequate training and no functioning citizen complaint system.

On Wednesday, the mayor, April Capone Almon, backed by a quick and unanimous vote of the police commission board, ordered the veteran police chief, Leonard Gallo, to turn in his badge and gun, placing him on administrative leave.

And on Thursday, just as the Yale students completed a damning analysis of recent traffic tickets — almost 60 percent went to people with Hispanic surnames, who make up about 6 percent of the town’s population — a different revelation became an Internet sensation. Weeks earlier, the mayor had donated a kidney to Carlos Sanchez, a local office worker she barely knew.

If that gesture might someday be remembered as a turning point in the town’s troubled relations with its Hispanic population, Mayor Capone Almon maintained that she had never thought of it as a way to build bridges.

“He was just a person who needed help,” said the mayor, who has recovered from the operation on April 8. She was bracing for a round of national television and radio interviews about her organ donation to Mr. Sanchez, who had posted an appeal on Facebook.

To Valarie Kaur, one of the law students who prepared the complaint to the Justice Department and battled for police documents under the Freedom of Information Act, the spotlight on the town was a chance to highlight the larger issues at stake.

“This is a promising moment for East Haven,” she said. “In the midst of a national debate on policing and immigration, East Haven has the opportunity to lead by example — to change the culture of the Police Department, enforce the law and protect all its residents.”

The mayor, who was arrested in September after she tried to stop a police officer from towing cars at the beach, would not say whether her decision to put the police chief on leave with pay was a first step in changing the department’s culture.

Instead, she pointed to the statement she made when she released the Justice Department’s letter: “My concern is how to prevent this from exposing the town to liability, which would ultimately cost taxpayers money.”

A Democrat who was re-elected to a second term in November, Ms. Capone Almon said she had not changed her views on the town’s Hispanic community, which has nearly quadrupled in the past two decades to about 1,900 people, according to census estimates.

“I have a wonderful relationship with the Hispanic community,” she said. “The Hispanic community has concerns with other departments in town, and I have done my best to remedy that situation.”

Along Main Street on Thursday, there were conflicting opinions about her action. George Jennett, 63, a livery driver, seemed to waver between sympathy for the mayor and support for police efforts to catch drivers without licenses or registration. “I don’t see it as racial profiling,” he said.

But many Hispanic residents, including citizens and legal residents with businesses on Main Street, have reported being pulled over while driving or being accosted in parked cars by police, apparently because of their appearance. And the law students’ data, analyzed by statisticians at Yale, support that perception.

To combat racial profiling, Connecticut law requires police officers to report the race or ethnicity of those they ticket or arrest. But officers mischaracterized the race or ethnicity of the vast majority of those they stopped and gave tickets, the report said. They checked off “Hispanic” or “White/Hispanic” for 22 of the 373 legible tickets, but reported nearly all as “White.”

In fact, of all 376 traffic tickets issued on Main Street and Route 80 from June 2008 to February 2009, 210 — or 56 percent — were given to people with Hispanic surnames, the report found. One officer issued nearly 80 percent of his tickets to people with Hispanic surnames, yet reported that nearly 97 percent went to whites.

The Justice Department is investigating traffic stops that allegedly turned into brutal encounters, some involving the use of Tasers or pepper spray on handcuffed Latinos. It is also looking at complaints of retaliation against those who publicly complained.

Marcia Chacon, a parishioner at St. Rose of Lima Church, was one of the first to speak out last spring after her pastor, the Rev. James Manship, was arrested at her store on Main Street as he tried to videotape a police visit. Afterward, she said, patrol cars waited outside the store; officers stopped her and her husband as they tried to drive home.

Now, she feels vindicated. “I feel happy and content that justice is being done,” she said.

NY Times