Howard responds to crash crisis
State rep. calls for changes to police to curb deaths
State Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, on Wednesday slammed what he sees as the hypocrisy of state officials calling for more enforcement to curb increasing traffic deaths in the state.
“The reason that we are here is because recently the governor and the commissioner of public safety held a press conference, and to use the commissioner of transportation’s word, there’s a crisis on our highways. That’s something we’ve been saying for a long time,” Howard said at a General Assembly Public Safety Committee news conference in Hartford.
Howard, the committee’s ranking member, said he too is concerned with the spike in fatal car accidents and motor vehicle-related crime, but they are the result of years of policies and legislation that have undercut the effectiveness of the state’s law enforcement officers and led to a statewide crisis in morale, recruitment and retention issues for police departments.
Howard, who also is a Stonington police detective, pointed to legislation that limits consent searches, officers’ ability to pull over drivers and interrogation tactics as well commute sentences and erase criminal records as some of the causes of the morale issues and increase in fatalities.
He said pending bills will worsen the problem.
The legislature is currently considering a bill that would prohibit officers from stopping vehicles for minor traffic violations such as burned out taillights, obscured license plates or window tint that is too dark.
Proponents of the legislation argue that these “secondary stops,” disproportionately impact racial minorities, and the bill will increase racial equity in policing, strengthen community trust and allows officers
to focus on more significant public safety issues.
Opponents argue that the stops often lead to arrests for more significant crimes such as drug and weapon possession or capturing individuals with outstanding warrants.
Gov. Ned Lamont has proposed legislation that would make intentional false statements by law enforcement officers in a report a felony.
Lamont’s proposal comes in the wake of a 2023 Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project report that said intentional false reporting of traffic stop data skewed state racial profiling data to inflate the number of white drivers pulled over during a seven-year period.
Howard pointed to results of an investigation released Feb. 1 that showed no widespread malfeasance on the part of police. He said he approves of making intentional falsification a felony, but questions why the bill singles out law enforcement officers while leaving out employees at the Centralized Infractions Bureau, unsworn records clerks and crime scene technicians, and dispatchers who also contribute to police reports.
Howard wants to see the governor’s bill amended so it does not target a single profession, and he wants to see his colleagues in the legislature reject the secondary stops bill.
Howard said he wants to see accountability for wrongdoing, but also have officers recognized for doing the job the right way.
When reached by phone after the press conference, Howard said he also wants to see legislation passed that would place time limits on internal affairs investigations so that officers can be cleared in a timely manner and return to duty instead of having investigations hanging over their heads for an indeterminate amount of time.
He also said he would like to see legislation protecting officers accused of misconduct by not allowing the release of their names pending the outcome of an investigation.
“I’m not here to blame the fatalities on our highways on a specific bill or on a specific legislator. It doesn’t do any good. We have to fix a problem in our state, and in order to do that we have to recognize how we got here, and in order to get where we have to go, we have to take a different course,” he said.