The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Bill to make fake police tickets a crime dies
HARTFORD — Connecticut lawmakers failed to pass a bill sparked by a high-profile fake traffic ticket data scandal that would have made it a felony for police officers to falsify tickets and other records.
The bill’s demise in the Senate on Wednesday, given its unanimous passage in the House just days earlier and backing by the governor’s office, had lawmakers scratching their heads on Thursday. Generally, bills sponsored by a Democratic governor are considered a sure bet for passage in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
Speaking Thursday, one day after the legislative session’s end, lawmakers offered a variety of reasons for why the bill died, ranging from running out of time to last-minute amendments.
“The crush of business, and too many bills, and not enough time,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, DNorwalk,
who ushers bills through the chamber, said when asked why the legislation didn’t even come up for a vote in the Senate. “There are always bills we wish we could have done.”
Governor Ned Lamont proposed the legislation in February after scandal engulfed the Connecticut State Police over an audit’s findings that hundreds of troopers submitted false and inaccurate data for tens of thousands of traffic tickets over the past decade skewing racial profiling data. Officials have stressed no drivers received such tickets.
A subsequent report commissioned by Lamont concluded most troopers likely did not intentionally falsify the records, chalking the problems up to carelessness, poor supervision and inadequate training. But at least a dozen troopers face department investigations examining if they purposefully fabricated data, and the U.S. Department of Justice launched a criminal grand jury
probe in the fall.
Concerns first surfaced in August 2022 when CT Insider reported how state police leaders in 2018 found four troopers for had submitted entered hundreds of fake tickets into a computer system to make themselves appear more productive to their supervisors. The troopers largely avoided serious consequences, and state police leaders did not alert prosecutors, even though they discussed among themselves that the troopers’ actions may have violated criminal statutes. Instead the cases were kept inhouse by the department until CT Insider’s reporting in 2022.
Lamont’s proposal would have made it a Class D felony — punishable by up to five years in prison — for officers to knowingly submit false information to a law enforcement database or written statements containing information an officer knew to be false.
The bill would have also required police chiefs to report criminal violations to prosecutors and any incidents of misconduct that involve an officer’s truthfulness to the state’s Police Officer Standards and Training Council. It would have also empowered the council to revoke the certification of an officer found to have falsified records.
A spokesperson for Lamont did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Duff said an amendment adopted by the House on Monday may have contributed to the bill’s failure. The amended version sent to the Senate exempted from public disclosure records related to formal complaints against officers until the allegations were fully resolved, legislative
records show.
“It could have taken the wind out of the sails,” he said.
State Rep. Steven Stafstrom, co-chairman of the judiciary committee where the bill began its path through the legislative process, said he was “disappointed” it failed to clear the Senate ahead of a midnight adjournment deadline Wednesday night.
“Frankly, it seemed like, with the Senate, it had less to do with the bill and more to do with the Senate, which seemed to be slow in taking action on a number of bills,” Stafstrom said. “It’s a bill that we will reintroduce next year given the broad support it had.”
Stafstrom, who cosponsored the amended version of the bill, added there was little “pushback” on that version, which passed the House with 149 votes in favor and none opposed.
Stafstrom said the amendment to the bill was made because “Republicans and some other members wanted to look at how much information about a complaint should be public until it’s substantiated.”
State Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven and a co-chair of the judiciary committee said: “This was a bill that we very much wanted to do.”
“The House added an amendment that exempted police records from (Freedom of Information Act requests) during investigations,” Winfield said. “Upon discovery of this, several conversations ensued, and there was an effort to address this amendment.”
In the end, Winfield said, the Senate ran out of time given the midnight deadline to adjourn.
“The process played out in such a manner that by the time all the pieces were in place, we weren’t able to get the bill over the finish line given the way
the final night played out,” Winfield said.
The House version of the bill was passed on Monday, leaving the Senate to act by the Wednesday night deadline to adjourn. If the amendment was removed by the Senate, the bill would have had to go back to the House for another vote.
State Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford and a co-sponsor of the House bill, said the amendment was known to Senate leaders, and the two chambers worked on slightly different language that could be accommodated before the deadline expired. But, Fishbein said, the Senate failed to take any action.
“They had two opportunities,” Fishbein said. “We came together and said ‘can we agree on this language’ and they didn’t initiate sending it to us.”
Stafstrom said he wasn’t aware of any solid opposition to the bill, including the felony provision.
“The opposition was relatively muted,” Stafstrom said. “The (state police) union would have rather have it be a misdemeanor than a felony but a felony has a longer statute of limitations.”
A spokesman for the state police union did not respond to a request for comment over the bill. Several Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield, did not respond to requests for comment.
Ronnell Higgins, commissioner of the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, said his agency, which oversees the state police, wanted the bill to pass.
“We were supportive of the legislation that would have made intentional falsification of traffic stop data a crime,” said Higgins, who took the helm in November after Lamont replaced the top two officials overseeing state police amid the scandal.
“The Connecticut State Police continue to take steps internally to strengthen our oversight measures, including expanding supervision and auditing functions and personnel, as well as robust oversight of data collection by state troopers,” Higgins added.
David McGuire, executive director of the Connecticut chapter of the ACLU, said neither lawmakers nor Lamont are doing enough to solve the problem.
“Despite public need, the governor and our
state’s legislators have not put in place permanent solutions to prevent similar misconduct moving forward,” McGuire said in a statement, adding the advocacy group would continue pushing for laws to prevent police misconduct.
“The police cannot proclaim they deserve hearsay exemptions — daring to say their records are unbiased and accurate — while simultaneously facing no consequences for recording false, sloppy data,” McGuire said. “Our communities deserve serious and effective efforts to identify and eradicate racial profiling, and our residents require legislative solutions, signed into law by our governor, that will ensure false ticket records can never again be submitted by police in our state.”