Local NAACP investigates area police practices

In response to last year's shooting death of 21-year-old Malik Jones by East Haven police officer Robert Flodquist, the Greater New Haven National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is in the midst of a detailed investigation into the practices of area police.

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Greater New Haven NAACP President Roger Vann said his organization has found that the harshest complaints involving police brutality or excessive use of force come from New Haven.

Dubbed "Operation Blind Justice," the initiative aims to measure the extent of police bias against minorities during routine motor vehicle stops by using volunteer residents to monitor and report inappropriate actions by police officers.

"We're trying to develop a mechanism to monitor a long-standing problem in communities of color--that of police profiling," Roger Vann, president of the Greater New Haven Area NAACP, said. "Profiling" is the illegal practice of stopping drivers suspected of a traffic violation for no reason other than their race. According to Vann, Operation Blind Justice volunteers must participate in a training program to learn about their rights as drivers, and must pledge to report every time they are pulled over. Most of the volunteers are black, although there are a number of Hispanic and white volunteers as well.

With the help of the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Inequality, and Politics, the New Haven NAACP has spread the program across the state. According to Vann, 300 volunteers are currently participating, well in sight of the state goal of 450. The Center has used public seminars to recruit volunteers and publicize Operation Blind Justice since its inception in August.

"We provide a platform to keep the issue current, to build on the momentum that the Malik case generated and keep it going," Center volunteer Tamara Jones, GRD '00, said. African-American Studies and Political Science professor Cathy Cohen, director of the Center, is working with the NAACP to design a scientific statistical survey and analyze the data as it is reported.

The New Haven Police Department (NHPD) said that it will support Operation Blind Justice. "It will keep officers on their toes, and that's a good thing," Public Information Officer Judy Mongillo said. "Any police officer making a motor vehicle stop should do so in a courteous and professional manner in accordance with the law."

Since the police department does not track motor vehicle stops by race, there are no available statistics about profiling and police harassment of minorities. The NHPD tries to combat bias through cultural diversity programs at its training academy. "We recruit, train, and hire according to a community philosophy....That's part of why [people] want to be New Haven police officers," Mongillo said.

Despite these efforts, Vann said the harshest complaints received by the NAACP--those involving police brutality or excessive use of force--come from New Haven, even though the greatest number of complaints come from nearby suburban areas. Mongillo asserted that in recent months, however, most citizen complaints only involved verbal abuse.

Vann said that he NAACP plans to publish its findings after six months of reporting and again after one year, eventually providing the basis for a potential lawsuit against a police department in Conn. "If the information that we gather supports the anecdotal evidence that we've heard over the years, there's a possibility of a civil suit being brought against the police department in question," he stated.

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