The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘THE POLICE ARE GOOD PEOPLE NOW’
3 years after profiling scandal, Latinos applaud efforts to heal
EAST HAVEN >> Sitting inside the dining area of My Country Store, owner Marcia Chacon smiled as she started explaining how last year, she and her husband expanded their convenience store to include a buffet section serving Latin cuisine.
The bodega on Main Street is a meeting place for many Latinos in East Haven, who congregate there and in a few other shops and cafes dotting this historically blue-collar town.
Hung high inside the shop, almost touching the ceiling, a collection of Mexican soccer jerseys greets customers looking to purchase soda.
Across from the cash register station where Chacon is usually posted, there’s a large beverage cooler topped with flags of various Latin American countries.
The flags follow a motif that permeates the entire shop, which is bursting with bright colors from both the products in the convenience store and the large life stills of Latin America plastered on the dining side of the bodega.
“You used to not be able to live in East Haven because of the racism. It’s not the same.”
— Vicky Friere, Alex Grocery employee
Nearly everyone who walked in during a recent breezy afternoon greeted Chacon cheerfully. It’s a habit that extends outside meeting places such as My Country Store and onto the streets where many immigrants — especially those from Latin American countries — continue to greet strangers like next-door neighbors. It offers a sense of familiarity that is comforting.
“Things have changed,” said Chacon, speaking in Spanish. “They have returned to normal.”
The change Chacon is referring to is the relationship between Latinos in East Haven and members of the town’s police force. The relationship in the past had led to a national scandal, the conviction of four officers for civil rights violations and put a black eye on police, the community and the town’s leadership.
But for many Latinos, that black eye is healing.
Annely Ardon, who’s been working six years at Alex Grocery, agrees Latinos and police officers have turned a corner after a very difficult period. Speaking in Spanish, Ardon says at least three East Haven police officers speak Spanish fluently and more importantly, the Spanishspeaking officers have told them they’re there to help.
“The police are good people now. They’re excellent,” Ardon said.
Vicky Friere, a co-worker of Ardon’s, shared her sentiment. She said officers stop by weekly to check in and greet them.
“You used to not be able to live in East Haven because of the racism. It’s not the same,” Frere said, speaking in Spanish.
And it’s also not the same for Chacon, whose store was at the center of the case against the four officers. Chacon said she and her husband now feel comfortable talking to and even calling the police in case of an incident; this proved true a few weeks ago when Chacon called police to help mediate a situation with an angry patron at a bar she and her husband recently purchased.
How it started
Latinos haven’t always lobbed kudos at police officers. The norm was much different as recently as three years ago. Back then, some of Chacon’s Latino patrons would call ahead, she said, asking if there were any members of the East Haven Police Department nearby. The officers were known to park outside her shop, intimidating and harassing patrons.
The Rev. James Manship of St. Rose of Lima Church, which serves a predominately Latino population in New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood, recalled when he first heard of the alleged abuse. It was May 2008. A parishioner came to him, bloodied with a split lip. The harassment had turned violent; Chacon’s store morphed into a ground zero of sorts after Manship was arrested there for attempting to record police behavior.
“It just escalated after that,” Manship said. “More and more people being harassed and stopped; the store owners were starting to feel the officer’s excessive vigilance.” A year later, Manship would be arrested at My Country Store after he recorded police removing license plates from a wall inside the store.
The harassment led to a civil rights lawsuit — where Chacon was the lead plaintiff — and a subsequent investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that began in 2009.
The fallout was striking: A sweeping federal indictment accused Sgt. John Miller and Officers David Cari, Dennis Spaulding and Jason Zullo of widespread civil rights abuses. The four officers were arrested in January 2012 on charges ranging from unnecessary force, falsifying reports and using their arrest powers to cover up officers’ actions. Miller was the supervisor and the indictment labeled the three officers as “Miller’s Boys,” a description Miller said was false. All were found guilty and sent to prison.
The allegations of civil rights abuses by police officers and Mayor Joseph Maturo’s now-infamous line when asked what he’d do for Latinos — “I might have tacos when I go home, I’m not quite sure yet” — put a national bulls-eye on East Haven, with many characterizing Maturo, the town and its residents as racist.
The investigation also resulted in a separate but related $450,000 civil rights settlement; the entire consent decree is expected to cost the town nearly $3 million by the time it’s completed.
Moving forward
In December 2012, East Haven officially entered the consent decree with the Justice Department. The standards to be enforced included specific plans to create bias-free policing, monitor use of force, searches and seizure, guidance on policies and training, ways to handle and measure civilian complaints, plans for supervision and management and community engagement or oversight.
“When they say make a federal case out of it, it’s not just a cliché, it’s a last resort for communities,” Manship said.
In signing the consent decree, the town pledged to move forward, and much has changed in East Haven.
In its one-year progress report released January 2014, the DOJ commended the East Haven Police Department for its progress after signing the consent decree. The 94-page report was based on data collected from December 2012 to June 2013. It was a glowing review of the department’s development, calling the progress “remarkable.” It found a decrease in the number of Latino drivers being stopped and that police had worked to revise 85 policies within the last 12 months. Maturo lauded the report, saying it demonstrated to him and the public that the department was committed to the changes.
And according to several Latino residents, the fear they once felt when encountering the men in blue, whose motto is to serve and protect them, has subsided.
Ardon and Chacon credit East Haven police spokesman Lt. David Emerman and the other officers who speak Spanish with helping to narrow the gap.
Several years back, Emerman, who is an 11-year veteran of the department, said he was the only officer out of approximately 50 who spoke Spanish fluently. The department’s two-year progress report is set to be released soon, he said, and the department now has at least five officers who speak Spanish, with at least two other officers who speak it fluently. Those two officers, Jonathan Andino, who is of Puerto Rican decent, and Nezar Belhna, who speaks several languages, were hired within the past two years. One officer in-training also is fluent in Spanish, Emerman said. Emerman’s Spanish was fostered while living in Ecuador, which is where a majority of the Latinos in East Haven are from.
“We have officers who probably don’t speak Spanish who they go and visit (shop owners) too,” Emerman said.
The regular business visits are not related to the Justice Department consent decree and are, instead, part of the department’s community policing efforts, which Emerman said are beneficial because they give business owners a better feel for the officers patrolling and protecting their businesses.
“That’s just one of our initiatives,” he said. “We are trying to stop in and speak to the business owners more frequently than we used to.”
Manship said he’s also seen changes in the way the Police Department treats the Latino community and he hasn’t had any reports of harassment brought to his attention.
“There’s positive change in the policing of East Haven,” Manship said. “The harassment has stopped. The profiling has stopped.”
Some of the changes enacted by the Police Department include a school visitation program that helps children meet and greet officers from the department. This action is beneficial, Manship said, because it helps parents of Latino children gain a level of comfort that wasn’t necessarily present a few years back.
“It’s those kinds of things that are really, really important,” Manship said. “We have change coming in from two directions: The consent decree, which is trying to retrain and develop a culture in the Police Department, and then a changing demographic in the town of East Haven. Change is inevitable and it’s not just going to come from a court decree and law, but also going to come from a changing community and people’s own conversions in their own heart.”
Chacon said Emerman stops by her shop regularly, usually to say hello, greeting her like most of her patrons.
Optimistic about the future
Chacon said that for her, the changes in the department were not noticeable until about a year ago, after the prosecution of three former East Haven officers believed to have been responsible for the most nefarious crimes against residents.
“Before that, you could still feel the fear,” Chacon said. “It was about a year ago when you could start noticing the change a bit.”
Klever Cordova has been living in East Haven for 10 years. He said that some of his friends were pulled over by local police and he knew harassment was inflicted on other Latinos.
“Now, you don’t see a lot of that,” Cordova said in Spanish, adding, “I never had problems with the police. They never stopped me in East Haven.”
Maturo said that the community strives for a feeling of unity, which includes Latinos and any other segments of the population.
“I think the facts show that the relationship between the Latino community and the police department and the government of East Haven has improved tremendously,” Maturo said. “Traveling within the Latino community, I see that they feel much more comfortable with the government, the Police Department and their community.”
He said the local government has worked to improve relations for the entire community, not just a single group of the communit y.
“We are all one community here,” Maturo said.
Chacon said she’s been in the United States for 20 years. She opened her first business, a money-order office, in Branford in 1997 before opening My Country Store in 1999.
“We are not doing anything bad,” Chacon said. “All we do is come here to work. The only thing we want is to, yes, abide by the laws of this country but to be allowed to work in peace.”
According to 2010 Census data, 10 percent of East Haven’s population is Latino, an increase of 145 percent from the 2000 Census count. That percentage still places the town below the state’s percentage, which is 15 percent.
Chacon is optimistic, but cautious. Her shop is growing. Chacon estimated the shop lost 65 percent of its business during the worst of the harassment — what she calls “exaggerated abuse.” But these days, you’re more likely to find a smile on her face than a look of concern.
“You’re still left with a little bit of fear,” Chacon said. She uses a Spanish term, “feliz de la vida” which roughly translated means “happy as can be,” to describe how she’s now feeling despite the changes. “That thorn, that fear is still there because of what happened, not because of anything they’re doing now.”
Manship is far more optimistic, as he said the changes are not necessarily the end of the road, but rather the start of a new path.
“Good habits, when they’re practiced well, and often, become virtues,” Manship said. “Now it’s about deepening the culture and broadening it over the next two years. It’s something that’s going to stay.”
Chacon has her fingers crossed.
“As of now, things are going well,” Chacon said. “We don’t want this to be temporary. We want this to be definitive. We want this to be the way it stays.”