Racial profiling/police mess could cost East Haven millions

The racial-profiling-and-cop-brutality scandal now engulfing East Haven could cost taxpayers millions of dollars and years to overhaul their police department, according to experts and the experience of other cities hit with similar shitstorms.

Those same experts say the criminal arrests of four local cops — and the possibility that up to 15 could eventually be indicted — makes the East Haven case one of the most unusual in the history of U.S. Justice Department actions against city police agencies.

Angry local taxpayers don’t have to look very far to find the right people to blame, and it’s not the federal investigators and prosecutors involved, says David A. Harris.

Harris is a University of Pittsburgh law professor specializing in police practices, racial profiling and cases where cities have been placed under federal consent decrees to stop cops from violating people’s civil rights.

“It’s a shame the good citizens of East Haven are going to be paying for this,” says Harris, who adds people will understandably be asking why they must bear “huge sets of disruptions and costs.”

“The reason is because your own public officials allowed this police department to go completely out of control,” Harris says. “Either they stood by and let this fester or they actively helped create it.”

If East Haveners accept that verdict — and many clearly don’t want to — the guy sitting on the hottest seat would be Mayor Joseph “Taco” Maturo. He hired Len Gallo as police chief back in 1998 and brought Gallo back from administrative leave after Maturo narrowly won last November’s mayoral election.

Gallo, who was just allowed to retire, is believed to be the “Co-Conspirator 1” mentioned in the federal indictment of four East Haven cops arrested last month. East Haven and state officials say privately as many as 15 local police could be indicted by the time this mess is over.

East Haven’s troubles could serve as a hellish warning to any other Connecticut cities or towns that may have similar police problems. The U.S. Justice Department announced last year that it has opened a record number of investigations (as many as 17) of local police departments around the nation.

Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Detroit, Oakland and even the small city of Steubenville, Ohio are among the places that have experienced the kind of federal civil rights consent degree that is expected to be placed on East Haven.

All those communities saw federal monitors installed to effectively take control of local police. Most of the consent decrees ran at least five years. Expensive new police training was ordered, new computer systems installed, and special tracking and reporting programs set up to check on individual police actions. Policies on the use of force and the handling of citizen complaints were reformed, and the way cops investigated and disciplined themselves were totally revised.

“[In East Haven] it’s going to run into the millions of dollars,” one state official estimated privately.

John DeCarlo, a former Branford police chief who is now an associate professor at the University of New Haven, says East Haven may find it less expensive to comply with a federal order than other cities. He says East Haven does have a modern computer system already, and that retraining programs might not be “that huge in a 50-man department.”

But East Haven may be unique because of the arrests of local cops on criminal charges resulting from a federal grand jury probe that’s paralleled the federal civil rights investigation.

Federal prosecutors allege that these officers deliberately and routinely harassed Latinos, assaulted prisoners in handcuffs, slammed defendants’ heads against cell walls until they were bloody, intimidated other cops from reporting such violations, and then tried to cover up their illegal acts. All four officers have pleaded not guilty and a lawyer for former Chief Gallo insists his client has never been involved in wrongdoing or any coverup.

“Having arrests made as part of these kinds of investigations is highly unusual,” Harris says of the Justice Department’s history of similar civil rights investigations involving police misconduct.

“The federal government does not file these things lightly.”
Convicting cops of criminal wrongdoing is pretty freaking tough.

“Police officers in general get the benefit of the doubt from the public,” Harris points out. He says attempting to paint police officers as the bad guys “turns the world upside down” for Joe Average Citizen, and prosecutors know it.

So having the feds indict even four officers in East Haven (with potentially more to come) “is an indication of just how bad the conduct was,” Harris says.

One area of major concern with East Haven cops that was mentioned repeatedly in both a federal civil rights report and in the indictment of those four officers was “unreasonable force” used against Latino suspects. A civil lawsuit that’s been filed by Latinos who were allegedly harassed and brutalized by local police includes chilling allegations of cops handcuffing people and then repeatedly shocking them with Taser weapons.