STAFFIERI, DOMINIC

Dominic Paul Staffieri, age 89, also known as “Stiff,” died on December 27, 2019 after a brief illness. He was the beloved husband of the late Marceline Staffieri. Born in Derby on July 10, 1930 to the late Dominic and Mary Macciocca Staffieri; Dominic was a graduate of Derby High School Class of 1947, where he played football for three years as the right guard. After graduation, Dom joined the National Guard and then went into the Army for two years. He was a Master Sergeant and served in mainly Italy and Germany. After an Honorable Discharge, he moved back to Derby. Dom married Marceline Tomassini November 7, 1953 in St. Mary’s Church in Derby. They remained happily married for sixty-four years until Marceline’s death in 2018. Dominic worked for Farrel Corporation in Derby and Ansonia for forty-three years. After retirement at age sixty-two, he became a bus driver for the Laidlaw Company for fifteen years until retirement at age eighty. Dom is survived by his children; Cheryl Loscalzo of North Haven and grandson Steven Loscalzo, Michael and wife Mary and grandson Gregory, all of Cheshire, and Dominic of California, his sister Helen Poliferno of Derby, and several nieces and nephews. Dominic was predeceased by his beloved siblings; Thomas Staffieri, Leonard Staffieri, and Lucy Niezelski. Dominic will be remembered as a loving husband, father and grandfather. He was a member of St. Rita Parish. Dom had a gift for mechanics and technology and love of building additions to houses. When he was young, he remodeled an old house from top to bottom. If his children needed help in their houses, he could do it all; electrical work, plumbing, gardening-you name it, he could do it. He saved everyone a ton of money! He especially loved fixing cars and watching football on T.V. For many years, he enjoyed doing things on his computer. In later years, Dom liked to have breakfast with his friends at the Valley Diner on Tuesday mornings. Dom loved his two grandsons and was known for helping with math homework and science projects. “Poppy” gave them matchbox cars and took them to Lyman Orchards, malls, and Stew Leonard’s in Norwalk. He was always available to drive them to work or school when necessary. He was also known for slipping them $20.00 to buy what they wanted. Dominic was a generous, hardworking family man and good friend. He gave good guidance and advice to his family and had a kind heart. Our Dad and Poppy will be greatly missed forever. His family would like to thank Montowese Health and Rehab Center for the excellent care Dom received.

Friends are invited to visit with his family on Friday, January 3rd from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. at BEECHER & BENNETT FUNERAL HOME, 2300 Whitney Ave, Hamden. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated in Divine Mercy Parish-St. Rita’s Church, 1620 Whitney Ave., Hamden at 11:00 a.m. followed by his burial with Military Honors in All Saints Cemetery. To send a condolence to Dom’s family, please see obituary at:

www.beecherandbennett.com. a lot of times the person that gets pulled over might be a minority. Like this thing that happened with Chris Rosario, that was not racial profiling. My police offer was out there doing his job ... He’s brand new. He has two years on the job ... it was right place at the wrong time. He was sitting in a place running everyone’s plate. This is the corridor where all the kids are coming in. The plate had been entered as stolen in error. This kid did his job, he was not racial profiling Chris.”

Though unrelated to the incident with Rosario, the advisory board for the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project has scheduled a public forum in Bridgeport for 5:30 p.m., Jan. 9 at the Government Center, so discuss it’s work and findings, and answer questions from the public. Perez said he plans to attend the forum and will have his own data to present.

“We don’t have the time to racially profile. This is not a bedroom community where you have police officers at the border to pull people over,” Perez said. “We don’t do that, we don’t have the time. We don’t do that in Bridgeport. This is the largest city in the state of Connecticut. We don’t have time for that.”

Rowena White, a spokesman for Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, said various departments and administration leadership for the City of Bridgeport will be present and participating in the January forum, including the Bridgeport Police Department, and the Mayor’s Initiative for Reentry Affairs.

“We look forward to a constructive and productive forum,” she said.

Consider the rest of the state

While Barone and the rest of the advisory board for the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project are always hesitant to get too excited about improvements in the data — it could just be a statistical anomaly, after all — they are optimistic the state’s law, amended in 2013, is working to curb racial profiling in the state.

“The findings from the 2018 analysis of Connecticut’s traffic stop data indicate that progress continues to be made in terms of the decision to stop a minority motorist,” Barone said.

The 2017 data, released in a full report in June 2019, identified the towns of Derby, Fairfield, Meriden and Wethersfield, as well as State Police troops C and K, for statistically significant racial disparities in traffic stops. Wethersfield is the only town to have been identified in all four of the previous reports.

In Derby, 38.5 percent of all traffic stops were minority drivers, though the town is only 20.6 percent black and Hispanic, according to the data. In Fairfield, where only 10 percent of the population is black or Hispanic, 31.5 percent of the traffic stops involved minorities, and in Meriden 56 percent of traffic stops were minority drivers while only 35 percent of the population there is black or Hispanic. That same year in Wethersfield, 53 percent of traffic stops were minority drivers, but only 12.5 percent of the population is black or Hispanic.

“The lack of a disparity statewide and the lower number of identified departments is a promising sign,” researchers wrote of the 2017 data. But, they added, “the data show that large and statistically significant disparities remain in terms of how minorities are treated following a traffic stop.”

A new poststop test for differential outcomes showed minority motorists received different dispositions (tickets, warnings, searches) after a stop is made, even controlling for things such as the basis for the stop and other potentially confounding factors, and similar evidence of adverse treatment was found statewide.

“The data suggests that the bar for searching a minority motorist is substantially lower than their white nonHispanic counterparts,” researchers wrote in the 2017 report. “Finally, the statewide hitrate analysis also found statistically significant evidence that the police were far less likely to be successful when searching a minority relative to a white nonHispanic motorists.”

“The 2017 started to tell us that the racial disparities in traffic stops as a state were getting smaller, and we were kind of cautious and we didn’t want to shine a light too bright on that because we weren’t sure if it was an outlier,” Barone said when presenting the preliminary 2018 findings to the rest of the advisory board in October.

“In 2018 the data got better again, and it’s not perfect. Racial disparities haven’t disappeared, but we’ve made really tremendous progress over the last 6 years in Connecticut. Every year we’re seeing fewer and fewer departments identified, we’re seeing fewer and fewer significant disparities identified on a statewide level.”