Remembering police who serve community

When Donald Trump recently called on police to feel free to get rougher with those they arrested, some of the most effective pushback came from police officers themselves — the very ones the president must have thought would be delighted by his get-tough message.

Police leaders from Suffolk County on Long Island, where Trump spoke, to Los Angeles condemned what he said in the firmest terms, reminding us that in our society, punishment is to be imposed after conviction, not administered at the back door of a police car on the way to the station.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that police were often grateful consumers of any lawand-order politician’s pandering, however shameless, however in conflict with the fundamental principles upon which the American criminal justice system is based.

How did these police leaders come to be some of the strongest voices setting us straight on what police in a free society should and shouldn’t do? Part of the answer can be found in the career of Edward U. Morrone, New Haven’s police chief from 1977 to 1981. Morrone died last week at 83.

I first met him early in the summer of 1968, when he was a supervisor of patrol officers, on the job since 1957, and I was a law student placed in New Haven by the University of Wisconsin’s Police Internship Program, operated by Professor Herman Goldstein, one of the great figures in the development of what are now widely-embraced ideas on how police should operate in the communities they serve — for the well-being of the communities and for the well-being of the police too.

The label “community policing” is often applied to these notions, although Morrone didn’t much like the term and Goldstein called it “Problem Oriented Policing” in recognition of the fact that each call presents a problem for which standard law enforcement is just one of a range of possible responses, and not always the best one. But in many respects it came to the same thing: police are there to serve their communities, every part, every population, and to understand that everyone wants fair and effective high-quality police services.

They can do this best when they get to know the communities they serve and when they feel respected as the problem solvers they are in their everyday work. Ed Morrone understood and embodied these principles in every aspect of his remarkable life and career.

His beginnings were humble in the extreme: he was the youngest of the eight children of Italian immigrant parents; they lived in a small house without plumbing or electricity on a dirt road in the Annex section of New Haven. He graduated from Wilbur Cross High School, where he was a fine athlete, and in time became a New Haven police officer.

By 1968, when we first met, he was a patrol sergeant and already a serious thinker about how a police department should operate. It was evident that he took great pleasure in providing thoughtful and effective police services and in leading those he was supervising to do the same. He always thought of the patrol function as the heart of police work, even though as he rose through the ranks he became a plain-clothes detective and later headed the Gambling and Narcotics Squad. But when he became chief in 1977 he thought it was important to go back into uniform, both as a nod to the uniformed patrol side of the department and as a reminder that the police are sworn officers operating under civilian control.

While Morrone was indisputably a model of the enlightened police chief — open-minded, inquisitive, empathic, sincerely committed to our great constitutional principles, willing to take the heat of holding badly behaving officers to account — what really set him apart among such leaders was his mastery of the nuts and bolts of basic police work: the police who, in Bob Dylan’s phrase, chase after the criminals and catch ‘em, and the patrol officers who work hard to constructively respond to the astonishingly wide variety of problems called in to the department.

He was a pioneer in directing and assessing patrol responses through use of the flood of computerheld information suddenly becoming available in the 70s. And he was ruthless in his determination to assess the results of his policies through the hard data becoming more and more available, and to make changes in any of his policies to make them perform better. I had the good fortune to see all of this close up when he asked that I be appointed his department counsel.

I have no doubt that if Morrone had been chief when Trump told the Long Island police not to worry about getting rough with prisoners, he would have been at the heart of the police pushback. He knew wrong from right, he knew what worked and he knew it was part of his job to say so. His time as chief wasn’t the longest but the accomplishments, innovations and advances he packed into his time were remarkable; their influence is felt to this day, as current New Haven Chief Archie Campbell readily attests.

Morrone became chief when the department was embroiled in scandal and left with honor when the turning of the political wheel brought a new mayor who wanted an old-style chief. His next destination was as head of security for the Meadowlands complex in New Jersey, something of a dream job that combined his love of police work, football and horse racing.

The next years brought jobs in Hartford for Morrone and his wife Dominique Avery; they settled in Simsbury where they and their daughter Carola put down deep civic roots. In his final years he came full circle, happily spending time playing bocce and Italian card games at an Italian-American club geographically located far in geography and time from that dirt road in the Annex. But in the deepest sense, it was right next door.

How did these police leaders come to be some of the strongest voices setting us straight on what police in a free society should and shouldn’t do?