Re: 6/22/00 - Cops in Chaos; Lies, coverups, harassment, brutality - and a slow death for community policing?
Cops in Chaos
Lies, coverups, harassment, brutality - and a slow death for community policing?
By Paul Bass
Anthony Clarke flipped a cop the bird as he drove by. At least the cop said so. Clarke denies it.
Whatever the case, the cop screeched his car to a halt in front of a New Haven motel room the night of Sept. 2. He was livid. He hopped out, grabbed Clarke in a choke hold, threw him on the police car. He bent Clarke's wrist, slammed his head on the car, then socked him in the chest.
The cop then let Clarke go with a warning: "Get the fuck in the room and don't come out."
This is Clarke's version, anyway. Clarke, a 41-year-old truck driver, filed a complaint with the New Haven police department's internal affairs bureau. He said he never flipped the bird -- and in any case, didn't deserve roughing up.
Two weeks ago he found out that a powerful guy agrees with him: Police Chief Melvin Wearing.
Wearing wrote Clarke a letter. He said he agreed that Officer Milton Jackson had acted in violation of police department rules. "I reprimanded Officer Jackson," Wearing reported, "counseling him about the appropriate use of force and about courtesy toward civilians." Then he thanked Clarke for complaining -- "helping us to hold the members of this department to the highest standards."
This is the celebrated new New Haven police department, right? The once-notorious thug army that has become a national model of enlightened, community-friendly law enforcement?
Little more than 10 years ago, brutality victims had to sue the department for remedies. Even when the victims won in court, the chief would make a point of praising the thuggish cops for "aggressive" policing.
Nowadays the chief looks into complaints, takes action, thanks the complainer, sends an anti-brutality message.
But wait. The officer in this case certainly never got Chief Wearing's message. This incident occurred just a month after Jackson -- a brand-new cop -- had returned to the job from a suspension. And that suspension was widely seen as a slap on the wrist. Wearing recommended suspending, not firing, Jackson after he lied to investigators about his role in an on-duty sexual romp with civilians in a police substation. Will this new reprimand have more impact?
Anthony Clarke's lawyer, John R. Williams, isn't impressed. What does Williams think about the current scandal engulfing Wearing's department, over a grand jury investigation into why detectives hid crucial evidence in a 1996 murder?
"This case is a symptom," Williams says. "The department is in complete chaos. Chief Wearing has been a very, very weak chief. The result is the department doesn't have any sense of control. It is running itself."
Sure, Williams is pleased with Wearing's letter. He doesn't believe New Haven has returned (at least not yet) to the bad old days when street cops were so out of control, and department brass so unrepentant, that Williams could send his kids to college just on the fees from lawsuits against the department.
"Wearing's heart is in the right place. But he is not tough enough to run the department," Williams observes.
He's not alone. The current scandal has exposed not just an egregious coverup in a single case, but an entire police department in danger of collapse. The cops are reeling from unattended-to systemic problems, low morale and a sliding back from the progress that made New Haven one of the country's best- and most humanely policed cities. In the '90s, New Haven became known as a city that ended the war between police and citizens of poor neighborhoods, that enlisted cops and Yale shrinks as partners in tending to troubled kids, that ran tutoring programs in substations, that shut down SWAT teams and no-knock raids of drug houses and instead gave addicts safe needles and referred them to drug treatment.
Now, "things are going backwards," reports one department veteran who flourished in the '90s community policing era. "It's weak leadership, but it's more than that. The people in leadership positions may have looked like they were buying into kinder, gentler community policing. But as soon as they have a chance, they're Marines again."
As the current scandal unfolds, it brings into view deeper problems, a portrait of a department in chaos. Among them:
- Except in a few instances, police misconduct routinely goes unpunished or underpunished.
- The detective division has been run by cops who feel accountable to no one but themselves.
- The internal affairs unit has a new boss who sexually harassed his second-in-command and has little experience with internal investigations -- beyond having been investigated for his own brutal incident.
- Female cops report a return to tolerance of rampant sexism.
- No longer does top management identify talented cops and groom them for new challenges and responsibilities.
(For recent articles on such problems, see this list of 'Cops in Chaos' articles newhavenadvocate.com
The scandal's basic facts are bad enough. Top detectives hid, rather than pursued, an interview with a key witness to the 1996 murder of North Havener Philip Cusick in New Haven's Fair Haven neighborhood. The interview tape disappeared. The transcript remained locked in a supervisor's drawer for two years. A possible murderer and accomplices were left free, unquestioned by cops who knew where to find them. After a department whistleblower's complaints about the coverup were ignored for more than a year, he went to State's Attorney Michael Dearington, who succeeded in getting a grand jury to investigate.
Meanwhile, top cops have changed their versions of what happened, meaning at least someone is lying. The coverup has turned into a coverup of a coverup. (See accompanying story, "A Scandal Timeline," below.)
That means the scandal has landed with a thud at Chief Wearing's door, stopping-point for the proverbial buck. He's standing largely alone, with few allies.
"Mel Wearing's leadership is compromised," says criminal lawyer Michael Jefferson, who, like other cop-watchers, has noticed growing community complaints of police misconduct. "He doesn't seem to have a handle on the internal operations of the department. Folks are doing what they want to do, with or without his approval. If he doesn't know what's going on, he should know. He should seriously consider stepping down."
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Dazed & Confused
For now, Wearing appears to face no immediate pressure from the mayor's office or the police commission to quit. They publicly proclaim their confidence in the chief. Mayor John DeStefano says this episode will prove a learning experience for everyone, himself included, about the need for "a stronger set of expectations and consequences for behavior in the police department."
In Wearing's three years as chief, New Haven crime has dropped to its lowest levels in three decades. He has no intention of hanging up his badge.
People may call him a weak manager. But you can't accuse Wearing of being a weak person. He speaks his mind; he broke with most law enforcement officials in 1997 by blasting an East Haven cop's killing of unarmed New Haven motorist Malik Jones. Wearing stands his ground when he disagrees with his boss. Last year, for instance, he refused to reopen a different murder investigation after DeStefano publicly called on him to do so because of questions raised by an FBI investigation. Amid the intense pressure and embarrassment of the current scandal, Wearing vows to fight on.
He acknowledges that the scandal has evolved into the biggest test of his three-year tenure, a "crisis" that has "rocked the integrity of the department." Yet he continues to maintain that this episode is largely isolated: "The city's in great shape. The only shadow now is the Cusick case."
"I think I'm handling the crisis well," Wearing says. "I've been screwed over to get here [to the chief's job] for 31 years [on the force]. I've been stabbed in the back, pissed on, shit on. You learn to have a tough skin, do what you have to do."
It took a while for Wearing to grasp the magnitude of even this one incident. In early May, as the scandal unfolded, he sounded confident that he and the department would get past the episode. He sounded doubtful that much more would come of it.
It finally took the mayor to convince Wearing to take more action, months after Dearington's probe began, even more than a month after the New Haven Register broke the story and weeks after grand jury convened. A frustrated DeStefano personally visited Wearing and assigned day-to-day oversight of the scandal to City Hall staffers and mayorally appointed police commissioners (some of whom have never been big Wearing fans). Finally, Wearing put on indefinite paid leave his top two detectives, Capt. Brian Sullivan and Lt. Ed Kendall. Sullivan, his trusted chief of detectives, implicated Wearing by accusing him of ordering the murder investigation stopped. Wearing wrote a June 7 letter to the mayor officially removing himself from the inquiry. (He rightly argues that he needed to remove himself because his name had come up. He waited four weeks after Sullivan's accusation to make the move.) DeStefano has inserted himself more actively into the day-to-day affairs of the police department, not just the scandal.
Meanwhile, the contents of the hidden report have become public -- and shown that the department hid a smoking piece of evidence and allowed a possible killer to roam free, unperturbed, unquestioned, for two years. The story has gone national.
Leaning back in the swivel chair behind the desk in his long, angular office on the department's third floor last week, Wearing wonders aloud about the scandal's momentum. He speaks almost as much to the ceiling, or to himself, as in answer to questions.
How could this have happened without the chief knowing?
"Nobody picked up the phone and called me" with questions about the existence or whereabouts of this crucial witness statement, he claims. "North Haven [police]. Mike Dearington's office. My people. I'm thinking, we're solving cases. And this is going on two years."
What about regular staff meetings where the chief discusses the progress of open cases with his department heads?
"We had weekly meetings. It [the interview with the eyewitness] never came up once," Wearing insists.
Shaking his head, he wonders aloud about Keith Wortz. He's the patrol officer who spent two years complaining that higher-ranking officers were covering up a murder, the cop who finally went to prosecutor Dearington this year after his complaints got nowhere at 1 Union Ave.
Wortz had met with the chief a year earlier to discuss his complaints about the detective division, about Sullivan and Kendall. He wrote a formal internal complaint which allegedly mentioned the hidden eyewitness interview.
Wearing remembers talking with Wortz only about Wortz's frustrations over being reassigned from a narcotics task force to patrol work.
"Keith Wortz was disgruntled. I like Keith Wortz. I thought he was a good police officer." Wearing's hands shoot into the air. "I thought I was helping him" by reassigning him to a job with more overtime potential.
The most confusing part of it all for Wearing -- the part that stings most -- is Capt. Sullivan's insistence that Wearing ordered him to stop the investigation into the North Haven murder. He speaks of having to look Sullivan and Kendall in the eye last month when he told them to pack up and leave the building.
"It's very difficult for me to deal with. I worked with these guys. They were out 3, 4 in the morning [at murder scenes]. They had a good record solving cases.
"But he lied. He screwed up and he tried to cover his own ass."
Wearing leans forward, stares me in the eye. He puts Sullivan's charge in the context of three decades of slights and hurdles people have placed before him in the police department. "I'm not going to let somebody lie on me and get away with it."
Sullivan aside, whether Wearing can navigate his way through this crisis depends on the message he takes away from it.
In fact, the Cusick case has brought into view plenty of shadows, all leading to a central question: Who's in charge at 1 Union Ave.?
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Whither The Revolution?
That's a life-or-death question in New Haven. Wearing inherited the leadership of a revolution when he became chief in 1997, a community-policing revolution dependent on strong leadership.
Wearing's predecessor, Nick Pastore, basically blew up the department in 1990. The force was notorious for harassing gays, beating up blacks and Latinos. The department even had its own gang, nicknamed the "Beat-Down Posse," which roamed neighborhoods to rough up teenagers on corners. The previous chief, William Farrell, publicly commended brutal cops after the city had to shell out tens of thousands of dollars in excessive-force suits.
Pastore cleared out the old guard, dismantled the BDP, ushered in neighborhood substations and walking beats, brought in new female and black and Latino and gay cops. He pioneered teams of cops and Yale child psychiatrists -- now a national model -- working with young kids who'd been exposed to violence.
Most important, Pastore made examples of brutal cops. He reassigned a high-ranking bully to the animal shelter. He sparked union protests by -- gasp -- bringing violent cops up on charges before the Board of Police Commissioners. He drove off the force a detective accused of involvement in the narcotics trade.
On top of it all, Pastore's intelligence teams helped break up drug gangs that had fueled a record murder rate. Crime plunged.
Pastore's secret: Strong leadership. Or, if you prefer, fear.
Some cops hated him. They called him crazy. Some liked him. They called him visionary. No one doubted that he would have their badges if they failed to adhere to the program. None doubted that he took the side of citizens concerned that cops are often too rough and need reigning in. (Objectivity alert: I'm an unabashed admirer of Pastore and his philosophy. I did consulting work on criminal justice issues for the D.C.-based foundation that Pastore went to work for after his retirement from government.)
Wearing, Pastore's assistant chief, inherited the job suddenly in February 1997, when a personal scandal ended Pastore's career. The city looked to Wearing to perform a delicate task: bring continuity to a scandal-torn department, maintain the community policing model, but also somehow incorporate "zero tolerance" of nuisance crimes like loud music and ATVs on sidewalks. Self-confident, calm, Wearing succeeded in keeping the ship afloat.
But his message -- endorsed by other city officials -- proved too complex to transmit. In other cities, too, community policing suffered from a mixed message of simultaneously embracing the community and "zero tolerance." Wearing stated repeatedly that he would not permit a return to brutality. But how do you do that while also encouraging cops to get "in people's faces"? It's a subtle message, even for a chief who uses power to instill fear, who keeps track of his managers' workloads, who finds out about problems before the politicians or even most other cops, who "gets in the face" of his own supervisors. Wearing does none of the four.
So while the Beat-Down Posse didn't resurface, the community began hearing more reports of police misconduct. Cops displeased with Pastore spoke of how they now had a "real cop" for a chief, one who "lets us do our job." Sometimes that was good. Sometimes it wasn't.
And when trouble brewed -- which it does in any department -- Wearing sometimes failed to take serious notice.
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Detective Dawgs
Take the detective division. Wortz wasn't the only complainant. A female detective filed a lawsuit claiming sexual discrimination. A second cop, Kelly Dillon, filed internal complaints along the same lines.
The pending suit, filed in April 1999 by Detective Lisa Fitzgerald, gives voice to the resentments of other women in the department.
In her suit, Fitzgerald states that Capt. Sullivan and Doug MacDonald (then a supervisor in the division, now assistant chief) routinely kept her and other women away from important assignments and opportunities for overtime. She endured "continuous demeaning, harassing, humiliating and discriminatory treatment," her suit states. MacDonald nicknamed her "secretary," ordered her to bring him coffee, refused to give her a key to the unit that the males received. Fitzgerald states that she complained directly to MacDonald about this treatment. His alleged response: she "would just have to put up with it and ... things would never change because of what she represented."
At one point she had to go over Sullivan's head to then-Chief Pastore to get equal treatment. Pastore granted her a reassignment from narcotics to the then-all-female sexual assault and bias unit (which is also part of the detective division). Sullivan retaliated with continued discrimination, according to the suit.
In November 1997, a male detective joined the all-female unit. According to the suit, male superiors took work away from women and gave it to the man and gave him more overtime and better assignments. What's more, the male detective made regular hostile comments to women in the unit, according to the suit. So Fitzgerald filed a formal union grievance on March 10. Three days later she, not the male detective, was abruptly removed from the unit. She "was given no notice and no time to complete her cases or to deal with seriously traumatized victims of sexual assault, most of whom are female. No male detectives had been transferred out of this unit without two weeks notice or an opportunity to close up the case," the suit states.
Dillon's complaints echoed Fitzgerald's. She described a hostile work environment, demeaning treatment of women, a disparity in overtime work and good assignments.
Neither MacDonald, who has stayed out of the public light since the scandal broke, nor Sullivan returned calls for comment.
Wearing's view today? "I try to make the workplace a good place to work. It's different today. We have a lot of women, minorities. Sometimes when people don't get what they want, they try to make it something else. These kinds of sexual harassment complaints ... people bring them these days. A lot of them are unfounded. But we investigate all cases."
The message sent is ... ?
The culture of unaccountability spills over into everyday work. One Spanish-speaking detective was caught on tape apparently distorting a Spanish-speaking eyewitness's account in translation and steering the witness to the mug shot of a suspect. He denied it in court, then finally admitted it on cross-examination. (See "Numero Dos," Advocate, June 15.) The detective remains on duty.
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Spillover
Meanwhile, tension grew under Wearing between the detective division and the state's attorney's office. That's a problem. The state's attorney's office must work with the cops to prosecute cases.
It's tough to pin down the source of the conflict, but not its existence. Some suggest State's Attorney Dearington bristled at Wearing's public criticism of the Malik Jones shooting after Dearington exonerated the officer. ("I'm a proud black man. I'd make the same decision again" to speak out, Wearing says.)
Others point to cases bungled by the detective division, such as the arrest of the wrong man in a murder at Chapel and Day streets. (The state's attorney's office found the right guy.)
Still others suggest that Dearington's office grew frustrated because Wearing appointed weak or inexperienced supervisors, partly a result of a wave of retirements, or that Wearing failed to monitor supervisors closely enough.
Dearington and Wearing deny any tensions, beyond what Wearing cites as a typical kind of personality conflict between Capt. Sullivan and one of Dearington's inspectors. "He does a fine job," Wearing says of Dearington. "I'm doing a fine job."
But the frayed institutional relationship proved key to how this current scandal metastasized. Dearington and Wearing were unable to get together on investigating or addressing the coverup. So Dearington felt he had to turn to a grand jury, a highly unusual move, even for a prosecutor more focused on police corruption than Dearington.
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No Problem
The detective division wasn't the only source of problems Wearing didn't take seriously enough early. He appointed an inexperienced head of internal affairs who himself had a brutal incident on his record, in which he allegedly roughed up a guy strapped to a hospital gurney. This same cop, once named to head internal affairs, proceeded to be caught on tape sexually harassing a female deputy. The deputy took the tape to Wearing. Wearing gave the supervisor an oral reprimand and left him on the job.
Meanwhile, internal affairs came late to the case of the missing tape in the Cusick murder -- after the state's attorney. Once involved, it at times descended to Keystone Kops procedures. At one point it prevented Lt. Ed Kendall from bringing his attorney into a questioning session, despite clear wording in the union contract permitting him to.
In another incident, Wearing resisted calls from community leaders -- and the mayor -- for a new investigation into a double murder after an FBI report called the case into question. The FBI concluded that a crooked cop had framed two men for a murder they didn't commit. Wearing refused to reopen the case. He said he believed the right guys went to jail. He disparaged the FBI investigation.
The first allegations of Wearing's laxness arose last summer, after rookie cops engaged in an extended menage-a-quatre in the Brookside police substation during working hours. Police commissioners claimed they learned about the incident from the New Haven Register, not Wearing himself. Wearing proceeded to push for the cops to be suspended for six months but not lose their jobs.
Most of all, while Wearing and the department basked in lower crime rates and continued national recognition for model programs, no new model ideas emerged. Energy was leaching from existing ones.
The most damning revelation, though, may come from Wearing himself. Why would Capt. Sullivan claim that the North Haven murder investigation should stop "per the chief" if it weren't true? Because, Wearing says, cops invoke the chief's name "all the time" -- whether or not they're really speaking for him.
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"Give Me a Commendation"
Mel Wearing doesn't appreciate being called weak. He can't know everything his subordinates do, he says. He "jumps on" investigating complaints as soon as he receives them. The Board of Police Commissioners, not he, decided to suspend the cops in the substation sex case rather than firing them. (The board acted on his recommendation, though.) The lesson he took away: He should have notified the commissioners about the incident immediately. "People in high places want to be notified. No problem. I don't think I did that well early on. Now 3, 4 in the morning, I call people."
More important, Wearing says, are other incidents where he took tough stands. He pushed out of the department a high-ranking cop caught stealing evidence from the property room and reselling it. "A lot of people in high places loved him. Nobody dealt with him for years. Mel Wearing dealt with him," Wearing says.
He ordered improvements in the handling of evidence in the property room. He suspended a cop found to be consorting with loan sharks. Wearing wonders why nobody mentions that when criticizing his discipline record. "Police officers consorting with organized crime -- that's more egregious" than most other cases.
"People should give me a commendation for cleaning up this police department, for bringing integrity to it," Wearing proclaims.
Last week he promoted two women, giving the woman who had been sexually harassed in internal affairs the number two position in the detective division. Yet even then Wearing comes under criticism, because she has no experience in the detective division. Others who wanted the job, including women, do have experience there. Some in the department smelled the stench of politics in the move.
Some black activists defend Wearing as a victim of racism. They note that much of the criticism comes from white cops, especially those who have always run the police union as a club for often brutal white cops who never accepted the shift away from the vision of police as an occupying army that does no wrong.
"These guys sit in a room thinking they could undermine the chief. They're trying to come back with that Farrell stuff," argues Hill neighborhood Alderman Anthony Dawson, a critic of increased police brutality in the past few years. He specifically criticizes union president-for-life Louis Cavalier. "The chief is doing the best he can. The kind of corruption that was already in the department before he got there, you can't hang at his doorstep."
Cliff Pettaway, president of a grassroots brutality watchdog group called the All-Civilian Review Board, also credits Wearing with "trying to diversify and make the department run fair. He can only do so much."
Pettaway notes that all the cops so far shown to have acted unethically in the current scandal are white (as is whistleblower Wortz, whom Pettaway calls the story's hero). Pettaway also notes the Board of Police Commissioners is ultimately responsible for suspending and firing cops. He faults them for not sending a stronger message about misconduct.
Cavalier couldn't be reached for comment.
Ethnic and racial strife have always permeated New Haven's department. The '70s and '80s saw the so-called "Gaelic-Garlic Wars" between Irish-American and Italian-American factions. In the '90s it became more black against white, as white cops who dominated the union tried to thwart the advancement of black cops and stop the department from disciplining white cops for violence. At one point, white cops staged a three-day sickout against Chief Pastore for disciplining a killer cop. The cops slashed police tires, jammed police radios and left black cops and Pastore to work 72-hour shifts while three murders took place in one weekend across the city.
But the union lost its attempt to roll back community policing.
So while Wearing can justifiably portray some of the sentiment against him as racially motivated, he can't use race as a cover for weak leadership. Because strong leadership can beat the union.
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No "Water Boy"
And the criticism doesn't come just from white corners. It came one recent Saturday night at Knickerbocker's Golf Club in Newhallville. The normally ultra-cool Wearing nearly lost it that night.
The story, in different forms, quickly made the rounds in town, reflecting how the scandal's humbling pressure, the questioning of Wearing's leadership, have cut to a raw nerve.
Wearing ran into Newhallville Alderman Willie Greene that night. Wearing's department had recently arrested the outspoken alderman for putting a relative's emissions sticker, not his own, on his car.
Prosecutors quickly dropped the case. The arrest came after the city went after Greene for back taxes on his car, and after the cops towed his car because, they claimed, they thought it was stolen. Greene apologized to his constituents for screwing up, but also blasted the city for what he considered obvious retaliation for his outspoken anti-City Hall views. He felt Wearing's cops acted as a political retribution arm of City Hall, a charge officials hotly deny.
So, as he nursed a beer at the Knickerbocker's bar while watching a Lakers' game, Greene wasn't excited to see Wearing approach him.
Wearing won't discuss the incident. Here's Greene's version:
Wearing approached with outstretched hand. No hard feelings, he told Greene. "I was just doing my job."
"You go back to your end of the bar while I still have any respect left for you. I'll stay at mine."
"This is my club," Greene says Wearing responded. Wearing is an avid golfer. Knickerbocker's is a golf club. Greene doesn't hit the links.
Greene's response: "I don't give a damn if this is your club." It's open to the public. He paid for his beer. He told Wearing again to move away. Then Greene, a needler by nature, says he added: "Go over there and be the nice little water boy that you are. There's not enough money in the world that I would take to be a water boy" for Mayor DeStefano.
Wearing lost his temper. Friends had to usher him away before trouble started.
Mel Wearing is not a water boy. He's his own man. That's why the mayor's intercession in the scandal must be so humiliating. It's also why this scandal -- and the department's larger problem -- belong at his doorstep.
That has left Wearing, an avid golfer, little time for the links these days, he claims. "I used to be good," he says. But he hasn't played a round with his friends for at least three weeks. He has managed to make it to the driving range. He's doing his best to keep his swing in shape.
<pbass@newhavenadvocate.com>.
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A Scandal Timeline
Nov. 5, 1996
Friends Billy Clark and Philip Cusick drive into New Haven. Near the corner of Atwater and Dover streets in the Fair Haven neighborhood, someone shoots into the passenger side of the car, killing 23-year-old Cusick, the passenger.
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Nov. 6, 1996
Cusick's body is found dumped across the street from his North Haven home. Blood is found at a Meriden trailer park where Clark lived and apparently took the body before dumping it.
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New Year's Day 1998
Having run out of leads, the North Haven cops, who are leading the investigation into Cusick's murder, appeal to the governor for help. He agrees to offer a $50,000 reward for information that helps solve the murder. North Haven cops -- who have encountered a bizarre lack of cooperation from New Haven police, who won't even acknowledge that the murder happened on their turf -- post reward notices on poles in Fair Haven. City government immediately takes down the posters. Official reason: They're unsightly.
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February 1998
Two New Haven police detectives, Stephen Coppola and Edwin Rodriguez, find a member of a Fair Haven gang called the Elm City Boys with a story to tell. They take him to police headquarters and tape a statement. The witness says he and other gang members were selling drugs at Atwater and Dover in November 1996. He says he saw a dealer with a gun walk to the passenger side of a car. He heard shots fired. Then the dealer ran away, saying, "I got him, I got him," the witness states. The cops show him mug shots of gang members they know by name and address. The witness picks out the ones he says were involved, including the alleged shooter.
The detectives don't track down the suspects. They don't tell North Haven about the statement. Instead, soon after, the division's leader, Capt. Brian Sullivan, orders the investigation stopped. A transcript of the eyewitness interview ends up in the drawer of Sullivan's second-in-command, Lt. Edward Kendall. It stays there for two years. The tape of the interview disappears.
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September 1998 |
