"I thought this was a bad idea for a bill at first."
Colin McEnroe
A public hearing on Mondayheard residents' input on a proposed bill that would clarify state laws on police officers' authority to make arrests outside of their jurisdiction.
Speaking on WNPR's Where We Live,panelists broke down the origins of the bill and the issues surrounding it.
The panel includes host John Dankosky, WNPR's Colin McEnroe, political science professor Khalilah Brown-Dean, and political analyst and columnist Bill Curry.
Below is a transcript of the conversation.
HOST JOHN DANKOSKY: [To Colin McEnroe] Earlier this week, you attended a public hearing on legislation stemming from a dispute between former major league player Doug Glanville and the West Hartford police. Can you just explain exactly what this public hearing was about?
COLIN MCENROE: If you remember what happened, the West Hartford police were looking for a guy who was going door-to-door offering to shovel snow, which turns out to be against a municipal ordinance in West Hartford. [They] couldn’t find the guy on the east side of West Hartford; crossed over into the West End [of Hartford].
The cop was looking for an African American guy with a shovel. He found one -- a guy was shoveling out a driveway in the West End. He asked the guy, “Hey, you trying to make some money shoveling snow?” He turned out to be talking to a millionaire former baseball player and ESPN sports analyst.
So, the answer was kind of “no.”
The encounter didn’t go very well. It wasn’t handled particularly well. It's something Doug has gone on to write about and think about. He said to me that it really has consumed his thinking a lot over the last year.
"The more police know the people in the neighborhood, you don’t really have to ask so many of those questions."
John Dankosky
So the bill that’s being considered, it addresses one tiny facet of that -- and not so much the racial profiling as the question of whether police enforcing a municipal ordinance – they’re not in hot pursuit of a felon, they’re not trying to catch some guy whose criminal act they’ve witnessed– they’re just enforcing a municipal ordinance. Should they be able to cross city lines?
He and [State Representative] Matt Ritter think that that’s already wrong. I think they think that it's against state statutes. They want to make that more clear.
I asked Doug about it. He said that when police encounter civilians, there’s just a lot of things that can happen. A lot of things can go wrong. It could have been a teenage kid that he’d hired to shovel his driveway who didn’t answer responsively, and that guy gets patted down, and they find something. Over the past year, we know these kinds of stories.
So, he’s just sort of saying, let’s try to limit this contact. It’s not really necessary. The police couldn’t have probably done anything with the illegal snow-shoveling guy if they found him in Hartford anyway.
I salute this guy. He's really stayed with this. He's done his homework. I thought this was a bad idea for a bill at first. The more I talked to him, the more I though he’s gotten really smart about this.
DANKOSKY: It seems as though we’re having a public hearing about this little municipal zoning ordinance. We’re not talking about the thing we should be talking about, once again, which is about why a cop would come up to a black man in this position, versus probably a white homeowner in exactly the same position.
"If he were not a former baseball player, not a millionaire, would his voice and his experience still matter in the same way?"
Khalilah Brown-Dean
KHALILAH BROWN-DEAN: I understand the legislative interest in this, but I think the broader question is also: what we need to address?
If he were not a former baseball player -- not a millionaire -- would his voice and his experience still matter in the same way?
If he were a resident of Hartford who said, ‘Look, I’m just a homeowner here,’ would he still have that voice? Probably not.
So how do you use this experience to address these broader issues to get something done satisfactorily in terms of policy, but to also say we all need to check our biases, and how we interact, because there is the potential for very negative detrimental outcomes.
DANKOSKY: But there is something to what Colin was saying, though, about any way we can limit the times and the ways in which police might have to have an unpleasant encounter with any individual. It maybe lessens the opportunity for some of the things that we’ve seen over the course of the past year that we don’t want to see happen.
On the flip side of it, of course, is the more police know the people in the neighborhood, the more they know the people in the neighborhood, and you don’t really have to ask so many of those questions, and have those confrontations, because you know who that is: that's Doug; he lives there.
BROWN-DEAN: And that’s sort of the behind community policing, of knowing the areas you’re in. I think limiting that kind of contact is important, but I think we have to address what happens when the contact does occur. You can’t limit everything, how do you change the dynamic once that contact does occur?
MCENROE: Just talking to Doug, one thing I realized is there’s two sides, and they see this -- what you might call “the decision tree” -- differently. The cops see the decision tree as branching off into all these things, a lot of benign encounters, and maybe that one jackpot encounter where they wind up catching somebody they needed to catch.
So that’s how they see the decision tree branching out.
A lot of people of color in this country see the decision tree branching out a different way: maybe a few benign encounters, and then a whole bunch of different things that wind up with things going wrong, or as you saw in the Ferguson report, they get a $50.00 citation. They miss a court date; they wind up with a warrant. That’s how they see the decision tree.
Those are two very different visions of how it can branch out.
DANKOSKY: Bill?
"We've seen that there needs to be more training, more transparency, more civilian accountability."
Bill Curry
BILL CURRY: The bill Colin was talking about, that would try to minimize the number of unpleasant encounters, and the other piece of it is that you try to minimize the unpleasantness of each encounter and that is by training police.
There is a problem here. The Ferguson report isn’t just about Ferguson, and I was so disappointed watching the reaction to [Mayor Bill] de Blasio in New York from the police, and how bitter that became, and how quickly that became so bitter.
For someone to say there’s a problem here of racial relations; there’s a problem here of racial understanding; that immediately polarizes the community, and sets off so much of the police community not only on the defensive, but on the offensive.
Clearly, we’ve seen that there needs to be more training; more transparency; more civilian accountability. We need all of those things, just to help the millions of good cops do a better job.
Ryan King is an intern at WNPR.
