Activists decry lack of accountability
Those frustrated after chief’s car crash say Bronin is preaching, not practicing reform
HARTFORD – Activists for police reform in Hartford, including Mayor Luke Bronin’s harshest critics on the city council, say the police chief’s recent SUV crash has become a litmus test for their commitment to change, and they haven’t passed.
Concerns center around Bronin’s quick defense of Hartford Police Chief Jason Thody after his May 31 scrape with a guardrail in Chester came to light two weeks ago. Many also raise unanswered questions, such as why Thody wasn’t using a handsfree device in his city-issued vehicle, and the mayor’s dismissal of claims that there are inconsistencies in Thody’s story.
The chief has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
A state police investigation ended with no criminal charges, but the agency’s report and a 911 call from a witness to the May 31 incident have sowed fresh frustration among community members, says Marcus Spinner, a Hartford resident and mental health worker for the state who’s participated in a number of protests.
“It’s the slow trickle of information that’s coming up mixed with his lack of transparency that’s really the red flag,” Spinner said of Thody. “If we expect Luke Bronin to guide us into a new era of 21st century, accountable police, then he needs to hold the police chief accountable right now.”
Bronin has stood by Thody’s handling of the motor vehicle incident in his city-issued Chevrolet Tahoe, in which he reportedly became distracted by his phone while driving in Chester and struck a guardrail, causing about $3,300 in damage to the vehicle.
On Friday, Bronin said he will likely discipline Thody in the coming days. The Internal Audit Commission decides this week whether or not to launch its own investigation into any violations of city policy or procedure, and the Police Accident Review Board will also look at the crash.
“There were errors made here,” Bronin said. “I believe that they are errors of carelessness. They will very likely, in my view, still warrant discipline, but at the end of the day, they do not cause me to lose confidence in our police chief as our police chief.”
The errors he refers to are Thody’s admittedly distracted driving and Lt. Brian Bowsza’s initial documentation of the incident, which incorrectly stated that Thody reported the incident to state police and that the agency declined to respond or draw a case number.
Other discrepancies
Council members Wildaliz Bermudez and Joshua Michtom, both
of the Working Families Party, argue there are other discrepancies worth looking into.
Thody initially said the damage to the Tahoe would be less than $1,000, but it came to $3,300. He incorrectly cited a state law that state police officers must document any crash that results in more than $1,000 in damage, claiming it was a factor in his decision not to call 911.
Thody wrote in his statement to Hartford police that he pulled over to assess the damage to his car when it was safe to do so and then continued on to Hartford. But he told his direct supervisor Thea Montanez, the city’s chief operating officer, that he was actually planning to stop and change at his second home in Haddam, so he continued driving there because it was only two miles away and there was no breakdown lane for him to use.
In reality, his home is five miles away, and he had to pass two gas stations and a shopping center to get there — both places where he could have stopped to check the damage to his vehicle.
Michtom and Bermudez have called on Bronin to fire Thody, and say the mayor should have placed the chief on leave until state police finished investigating. They’ve filed a resolution to urge the mayor to suspend Thody while the city auditor is gathering evidence.
“At this point, we’ve received 3 different versions from Chief Thody on what occurred,” Bermudez said this week on social media, referring also to Bowsza’s erroneous report.
Democratic Council President Maly Rosado said she is withholding judgment on the issue until the audit commission or auditor releases findings.
“All the rumors going on, of course we have to listen to them. But at the end of the day, I want to see the report,” she said.
“I can say that I’m extremely proud how Chief Thody has handled the protests and when I have individuals from the Black Lives Matter call me and tell me they’ve had great conversations with Thody, that Chief Thody has gone to other cities with them, and we’ve had no loitering or riots, I have to be proud of that,” she added. “We don’t have a perfect police department, but they try to do a good job every damn day.”
Focusing on protests, not damage to vehicle
That the motor vehicle incident came amid widespread protests for police reform has also bolstered Bronin’s stance that Thody’s response to the incident was adequate, “as he was responding to an ongoing protest in the city.” The chief, too, spoke of the protests in his only public statement, saying his focus “that day, and the stressful days that followed, was admittedly not on the damage to my vehicle,” but on ensuring public safety during a time of protests.
Many of those rallying for reform, however, have a different perspective — that the demonstrations taking place across Connecticut were not an excuse for miscommunications, careless driving and sloppy police reports, but the very reason Bronin should take the incident more seriously.
“I think it’s very hypocritical on his part. He’s preaching so much — even on the Juneteenth march he was preaching so much about police accountability — but you can’t hold your own chief officer accountable,” said Madison Johnson, 19, who belongs to the group Black America Undivided, which organized Hartford’s Juneteenth event.
Johnson, of Manchester, was among the young Black activists who led several thousand people on a march from the state Capitol to the steps of Bronin’s home across from Bushnell Park and rallied until he joined them outside. Now, Johnson is frustrated that the public still didn’t know about Thody’s motor vehicle incident 19 days earlier, and she thinks questions remain about his activities at the marina that day.
“It seemed very sketchy to us, and I know also to a lot of other people, just because the incident in itself, they were not giving the public a lot of information about it,” Johnson said. “I think (Bronin)‘s just digging himself into a deeper hole by coming to his defense so quickly.”
Social media is also rife with posts accusing Thody of drunken driving, which he has denied in his police statement and to Bronin, who asked him on June 26 if he’d been under the influence at the time of the incident. Thody answered that he was not, but Bronin said he did not ask the chief whether he had anything to drink that day.
Bronin says he saw no reason to suspect Thody was drinking because the chief considers himself on duty 24 hours a day, and they’d been in contact earlier that Sunday.
Unsubstantiated rumors that the chief was intoxicated predate the release of the 911 call, in which a witness states the Tahoe was “going like a bat out of hell” on Route 154 after nearly striking a motorcyclist, the swerving into a guardrail near the ChesterHaddam line.
Ramon Espinoza, a former member of Hartford’s Civilian Police Review Board, said he thinks people suspect the chief was intoxicated because of the description of his driving and public knowledge of a decade-old blemish on his police record.
Thody was involved in an off-duty bar fight in 2010, when he was a lieutenant. Internal affairs disciplined him after determining he was combative and uncooperative with responding officers.
“You kind of wonder about Bronin’s judgment, too, because now you have this incident that’s raising a lot of eyebrows and has a lot of nuances to it and people are dissatisfied with the reasons and justifications and explanations that are coming out of City Hall,” Espinoza said. “It’s really fostering mistrust in law enforcement and in City Hall.”
A ‘car scrape’
Bronin on Friday said he’s never made a decision that hasn’t been criticized by someone, but added that he didn’t think it was fair to compare the bar fight and Thody’s “car scrape,” as the mayor has called it.
“This is a time and period in which the chief is responding nearly every single day to protests, handling them with I think great skill and a tremendous amount of hands on, personal engagement,” Bronin said.
He also maintained that he gives great weight to two basic facts that have not changed: Thody disclosed the motor vehicle incident to Montanez and to his department the same day, and it occurred while he was responding to a protest in Hartford in his official capacity as chief.
The same day in New Haven, protesters had shut down I-91 for an hour and then marched to the steps of the police department. Waterbury police arrested more than two dozen people outside their own department following a demonstration of more than 1,000 people that briefly shut down I-84.
In Hartford that Sunday, only about 50 to 100 people gathered outside the police department, according to the internal investigation into Thody’s car incident.
By the time Thody left the marina in Chester to return to the city, he’d been informed the protesters were stopped in front of Central Baptist Church downtown, having marched through the North End and down Main Street past City Hall.
By the police department’s count, the rally the previous day drew 800 to 1,000 people, who then marched to the public safety complex and the Capitol.
But Bronin says Thody knew that Sunday that he may need to go to a protest, and was preparing for one the next day by communicating with the mayor, his officers, community stakeholders and an organizer of the event.
The crash that day simply “was not viewed as a significant incident, as perhaps it should have been,” in comparison.
Spinner said that judgment has damaged the city’s message that it stands for change. The mental health assistant, who works for the Department of Public Health, said city leaders need to understand that calls for transparency apply to the small things, too, not just the extremes of police brutality.
“We all make mistakes. We do,” Spinner said. “But the first test in a new era in policing, which is a police officer makes a mistake on the job in a company vehicle, and they’re not treated like we are — they’re treated like another class of citizen. That tells me Luke Bronin is not operating in good faith.”