More recently, Ocean has still not met with members of the Lenox Street Tenants Union that formed in November, despite the union’s push to engage in collective bargaining. 

Four of the five tenants unions that have formed in New Haven have been at Ocean properties, where they have raised complaints of poor living conditions and miscommunication.

Mark Washington, a leader of the city’s Blake Street Tenants Union, claimed that Ocean rarely responds to tenant complaints except for matters concerning rent.

“[Ocean will] only respond when [tenants] say something about money. Other than that, they don’t respond — pretty much at all,” Washington said.

The pattern of unresponsiveness, along with thousands of housing code violations, has had legal consequences for the company. Ocean Management has been sued in multiple criminal court cases, with four of them taking place in a span of less than one year.

Unusual transfers of property ownership

Most of Ocean’s properties are characterized by a highly unusual trend of changing ownership, wherein specific properties change ownership from one subsidiary to the next within a short span of time. In some instances, properties have been transferred three or four separate times to different subsidiaries belonging to Ocean.

One such example, obtained through publicly available property records, outlines the ownership history at one of Ocean’s properties, a two-unit townhouse located at 171 Cedar Hill Ave. in Cedar Hill.

Listed among owners are a succession of three subsidiaries affiliated with Ocean — Super Zen LLC, Naiman Michal Shlomit LLC and Nahal Kibbutzim LLC — all of which are filed under the ownership of Ocean Management LLC, according to state business records.

In January 2015, Super Zen LLC purchased the property from its prior owner. A little over a month later, the property was sold to Naiman Michal Shlomit LLC before being transferred to Nahal Kibbutzim LLC on August 31, 2022.

These successive transfers of ownership are a common pattern for Ocean. Between June 2023 and January 2024, Ocean and its subsidiaries sold 71 properties. Sixty-four of these properties had been transferred through at least two different subsidiaries affiliated with Ocean prior to sale. 

Property transfers raise legal questions 

One reason for using subsidiaries is to limit a company’s liability. If an LLC wants to further diminish the risk associated with a particular property, it might transfer ownership to different subsidiaries to ensure that one subsidiary’s legal challenges do not affect the others. In the event of a court case against one of the subsidiaries, this business structure protects the assets of the parent company as well as its other subsidiary companies. 

On their own, property transfers can be a standard business practice. However, such transfers can be deemed fraudulent if a company makes them with the intent to avoid paying debts. 

Under Section 52-552e of Connecticut’s Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act, transfers are fraudulent if they are made with “actual intent to hinder, delay or defraud any creditor of the debtor” and debtors “engage in a business or a transaction” that renders their remaining assets “unreasonably small in relation to the business or transaction.”

In other words, if transfers are made with intent to defraud creditors, and debtors also sell off a large proportion of their assets by engaging in these transfers, these business practices are considered fraudulent. 

According to the act, a creditor is any person with a right to payment from the debtor. This includes “judgment” payments that are determined by the outcome of a court case, which could apply to tenants in housing court.

In the case of property transfers between Ocean’s subsidiaries, large assets were transferred from one business entity to another. Additionally, if these property transfers were made as a purchase of assets, the new subsidiary would not assume pre-existing liability associated with the property. This would mean that if a tenant sued its landlord for a housing code violation, the original subsidiary would still be liable. 

Ultimately, this strategy creates a loophole that protects the assets of an LLC and may help a company avoid paying its debts, including fines incurred in housing court.

For example, if Super Zen LLC had transferred a property to Naiman Michal Shlomit LLC as a purchase of assets, then Naiman Michal Shlomit LLC would not assume the liability associated with the property. This would mean that if a tenant living at the property sued its landlord for a housing code violation, the original subsidiary — Super Zen LLC — would be liable for these complaints. However, because the subsidiary has since transferred its assets, the tenant may not be able to recover money from the case.

Gary Kaufman, a corporate attorney based in New York, explained that if a tenant were to sue a subsidiary company for a housing code violation, they would not be able to reach assets of the parent company or the other subsidiaries that the parent owns.

“You can go downstream but you can’t go upstream, so to speak … if you sue the parent, you can attack the subs[idiaries]. But if you sue the subs[idiaries], you can’t attack the parent,” Kaufman said.

If such an intent were sufficiently proven, this could suggest that Ocean was conducting transfers to avoid paying fines in court cases where it was sued for housing code violations.

Kaiser remembered that he and Lieberman ran against each other for the position of chairman, and Lieberman received every vote but one — Kaiser’s own.

Howard Gillette ’64, a managing editor for the News during Lieberman’s chairmanship, said that his near-unanimous selection distinguished him as an accepted leader among a class of highly accomplished News staffers. 

According to Gillette, Lieberman’s involvement in campus leadership led him to Mississippi in the fall of 1963 with a group of News staffers organized by University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49 DIV ’56 to participate in the civil rights movement by campaigning for NAACP leader Aaron Henry.

Ahead of Mississippi’s 1963 gubernatorial election, Henry had organized the Freedom Vote Campaign, which rallied Black voters to participate in a mock election in which Henry was a candidate. The campaign’s goal was to combat disenfranchisement in the state by demonstrating Black voters’ desire and ability to vote. 

In a column published in the News titled “Why I Go to Mississippi,” Lieberman wrote that while the mock election was, to him, “not the most exciting” civil rights project, it represented an important effort to end the exclusion of Black Americans from elections.

“Our nation is emasculated as long as some of its rightful participants are excluded,” Lieberman wrote. “If I am able to carry across the concept of voting and the need for an all-out voter registration effort to 25 or 50 or perhaps 100 Negroes who have never been so confronted before, then I will return to New Haven with a sense of satisfaction. I go to Mississippi because I think this can be done.”

Lieberman’s Mississippi trip curiously resurfaced in 2006, when Connecticut State Treasurer Henry Parker questioned whether the trip — which the senator referenced in campaign speeches throughout his numerous electoral bids — had actually happened.

Gillette recalled that Lieberman’s campaign staff had contacted him about verifying that Lieberman had traveled to Mississippi. Gillette, who had not been on the trip, believed that Stephen Bingham ’64, a fellow News staffer who would later be tried and acquitted for suspected involvement in activist George Jackson’s escape from prison, would be the best source to confirm Lieberman’s participation. 

Bingham told the News that he does not recall Lieberman going on his trip to the South — at least not in the initial group of around 20 Yale students who traveled and attended training together.

However, according to Gillette, the reason Lieberman may have missed the first days of the trip was to orchestrate an activist stunt at the News.

As Yale College made small steps toward loosening their policy on including women on campus — namely, allowing women into the Linonia and Brothers reading room, which was then a gentleman’s lounge — the News published on its front page: “Girls Continue to Flood Admissions Office With Applications.” The article announced a rally for the upcoming weekend — Parents’ Weekend — outside Woodbridge Hall and encouraged visiting mothers to join in solidarity with women seeking admission.

According to Gillette, the women’s letter-writing campaign to admissions and the “boisterous” rally that followed were organized by Lieberman himself.

“It was the Civil Rights Era — people were marching, people were doing these things,” Jethro Lieberman ’64, another News editor who had no relation to the senator, recalled. “Joe had been a public high school student in Stamford. This was the Kennedy years, and that’s just where most of us on the News were.”

Lieberman matriculated to Yale Law School immediately upon finishing college and started practicing law in New Haven after graduating in 1967. 

In 1970, Lieberman, 27, successfully challenged incumbent State Senate President Ed Marcus in a Democratic primary. Lieberman spent the next 10 years representing New Haven in the Connecticut State Senate, including six as Democratic Majority Leader. 

“A lot of people in the Democratic Party weren’t so interested in having Lieberman go up against Marcus and so it was very hard for him to find volunteers,” Gruber said. “He went to the Yale Law School, and he found what he described as his ‘very affable fellow from Arkansas’ named Bill Clinton.”

Clinton LAW ’73 was one of several law student volunteers on Lieberman’s underdog campaign. 21 years later, Lieberman returned the favor, becoming the first Democratic senator to endorse Clinton’s presidential campaign, though he eventually became a fierce critic of the President during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In 1980, he left the State Senate to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in Connecticut’s 3rd district, which includes New Haven, but lost to Republican Lawrence DeNardis.

In 1982, he ran for Connecticut Attorney General. Gruber recalled that Matt Lieberman, Lieberman’s son, described the race as “make or break” for his father’s career: if Lieberman lost the race, he might have returned to law and forgone politics.

Lieberman won, and he held the position for six years.

Taking the national stage

In 1988, Lieberman — still Attorney General — ran against Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker, a popular figure among Democrats for his tough questioning of President Richard Nixon as a member of the Senate Watergate Committee.

“Lieberman was very much a longshot candidate,” Steiger remembered. 

At the time, Steiger was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages leaned right. He recalled several conservative columnists endorsing Lieberman as Weicker increasingly voted against the Republican party line in Congress. 

Meanwhile, Lieberman had garnered a favorable reputation for his record as a consumer advocate during his tenure as Attorney General. 

One of Lieberman’s early supporters in the 1988 election was conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. ’50, whom Lieberman had befriended at Yale through the News. Buckley created a political action committee, BUCKPAC, on Lieberman’s behalf, which sent donors bumper stickers with statements such as, “Does Lowell Weicker Make You Sick?” and “Republicans for Weicker? Yuck.”

Lieberman won the 1988 election by just 10,000 votes, upsetting the more liberal incumbent. He was reelected to the Senate three more times, including in 1994 with the largest-ever margin in a Connecticut Senate race and in 2006 as an independent after he lost the Democratic nomination. 

In the Senate, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Lieberman introduced legislation that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Senator Chris Murphy also credited his efforts to combat climate change for laying the groundwork for the 2022 passage of $369 billion in funding for climate and clean energy programs. 

As one of his last achievements in the Senate, Lieberman led a successful fight to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, which banned openly queer people from serving in the military.

Former New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said that Lieberman had always been responsive to the needs of New Haven. He was a “local guy” in the city, DeStefano recalls, whom “you would see at Claire’s [Corner Copia].”

DeStefano said that when, in 2007, New Haven introduced the Elm City Resident Card for undocumented immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security started what he viewed as “retaliatory raids” in the city’s immigrant communities. 

“Joe got the Secretary [of Homeland Security] on the phone to me the same day,” DeStefano said, adding that Lieberman helped stop the raids in the city. “That’s what Joe was really good at —  responding to particular needs that affected people in their lives.” 

In August 2000, Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore picked Lieberman as his running mate. The Gore-Lieberman ticket, which won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, lost the general election to Republican President George W. Bush ’68 and Vice President Dick Cheney after a recount and Supreme Court challenge in the crucial swing state of Florida.

Lieberman’s selection made him the first Jewish American to run for vice president on a major party ticket.

Throughout Lieberman’s political career, he maintained his Jewish observance.

Eden Migdal ’26, Lieberman’s granddaughter, recalled that Lieberman would walk home from the Senate with security personnel on Friday nights, declining to drive on Shabbat.

During his vice presidential campaign, Lieberman made repeated assurances that he would be able to balance his observance of Jewish custom with the demands of the office.

Gruber said that Lieberman’s observance was a significant help in his many elections in Connecticut, making him an appealing candidate to Catholic voters.

“They appreciated a man of faith, even though it wasn’t their faith,” Gruber said.

In 2003, Lieberman announced his campaign for president. Running as a more conservative alternative to candidates Howard Dean ’71 and John Kerry ’66, the eventual nominee, Lieberman’s campaign announcement was attended by protesters from the group Jews Against Occupation, the News reported in 2003.

Emmaia Gelman, a member of Jews Against Occupation, a group that criticized Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and conduct toward Palestinians during the Second Intifada, was present at the protest. Gelman recalled her fellow organizers objected to Lieberman’s support of Israel, as well as the Iraq War.

“The Iraq War was absolutely important to us,” Gelman said.

A “stubbornly bipartisan” career 

Throughout his career in the Senate, Lieberman made conservative friends and often reached across the aisle in his work. 

He stood with his Democratic colleagues on domestic policy issues, like climate change, abortion rights and gay rights, but departed from them on foreign policy. 

In 2003, Lieberman, who consistently approved of American military interventions abroad, staunchly supported the Iraq War. He stood behind Bush as the president signed a resolution authorizing the invasion of  Iraq. 

In November, he won the general election with over 100,000 more votes than Lamont, becoming the first independent candidate to win a Senate seat in Connecticut since the emergence of the modern two-party system. Lieberman started his last term as a senator in January 2007 as an independent caucusing with Democrats. 

“When you have a long-term incumbent, the election really isn’t about party label or even about the opponent. It’s about whether people want to change or not,” DeStefano said. “I think it was a statement by the electorate saying, yeah, he’s doing a good job.”

Gruber speculated that Lieberman was blindsided by losing in the Democratic primary and that the loss contributed to his shift away from the party.

In 2008, Lieberman endorsed Republican John McCain, a long-time friend, in the presidential election and spoke at the Republican National Convention on McCain’s behalf. For some time, he even contemplated sharing the ticket as McCain’s running mate.

In 2009, Lieberman clashed with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act. 

While Democrats debated President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, Lieberman came out in opposition to a government-run healthcare insurance option, or public option, even when its scope was reduced to Americans over the age of 55.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who represents New Haven, was a friend of Lieberman’s and endorsed his 2004 presidential campaign, which he cut short after disappointing results in early primaries. However, in 2009, when Lieberman opposed the public option, DeLauro called on him to step down from his Senate seat.

“I was angry at him and talked to him about it. We were dealing with potentially having a public option, and he came out in opposition to that,” DeLauro told the News. “I still believe it was the wrong policy. But I spoke to him and we have remained friends for many, many, many, many years.”

Lieberman eventually cast the 60th vote needed to pass the legislation, but his opposition to a public option forced Democrats to exclude it from the final bill. 

Upon his death, Lieberman’s political contemporaries, including Lamont, DeLauro and Sen. Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73 released statements acknowledging their disagreements with the senator but affirming respect and gratitude for years of public service.  

When asked by the News about Lieberman’s legacy, Kaiser, his college friend and longtime peer, emphasized his character over his policy accomplishments. 

“Will he be remembered at all? Yes, he will,” Kaiser said. “Because he was the first Jewish candidate for vice president and because he was an extremely decent person who everybody liked. He’ll be a symbol of likable decency, that might survive for a while. But his contributions were temporal, temporary.” 

The Yale College class of 1964 will celebrate its 60th reunion in May.

PROFILE: Ellen Cupo’s fight for New Haveners, from Yale to City Hall

Ellen Cupo serves on the Board of Alders, works at Yale, organizes for her union and is raising two young children. It all amounts to a campaign for the future of her hometown.

By Staff Reporter Ethan Wolin

Published on February 21, 2024

At 6:01 p.m. three Tuesdays ago, after checking in with the colleagues beside her, Ellen Cupo gaveled in the first 2024 meeting of the Board of Alders Legislation Committee. There were just a handful of onlookers, mostly local officials — a far cry from the night before, when pro-Palestine protesters disrupted a mayoral address. In the quiet after the storm, city business plodded on.

That was only the beginning of Cupo’s week. Wednesday brought another aldermanic committee meeting and Thursday a Zoom conference about the replacement of a Christopher Columbus statue that once stood in her neighborhood. On Friday, Cupo took her two young children to her in-laws so she and her husband could get up on Saturday to canvass for Democratic Town Committee members.

“A lot of my friends who don’t live in New Haven, who don’t do the work with me — the constant refrain is, ‘Ellen, why are you doing more? Like, do less,’” she told the News. Her answer? “I’m doing what I want to do.”

For Cupo, representing the 4,300-odd residents of Ward 8 in New Haven’s version of a city council is a side gig, even if it feels at times like a full-time job. During the day, she works at Yale as the assistant to the chair of the Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, supporting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies as well.

But perhaps her deepest passion — where her day job, her political advocacy and her family history converge — is Local 34–UNITE HERE, the union of Yale’s clerical and technical workers, for which she serves as a volunteer organizer and an executive board member. Although Cupo speaks of separating her life’s strands into different “silos,” a common posture unites them.

“She has an incredible sense of justice, gets really mad when things don’t seem just,” Ian Dunn, Cupo’s husband and the communications director for Local 34, said. “She gets incredibly passionate when the contract is violated or when workers aren’t getting a fair deal.”

Injustice may anger Cupo, and bureaucracy may busy her, but she is almost always cheerful, freely doling out kind words. The ten people interviewed for this article — family, constituents, Yale colleagues and local politicos —  also repeatedly mentioned her attention to detail, her warmth toward other people and her jam-packed schedule. “She’s a force of nature,” Maureen Gardner, the WGSS registrar, said.

“New Haven is really lucky to have Ellen. And I think that Ellen is also really lucky to live in New Haven.”

—Charlotte Eliscu, Cupo's friend and former coworker

Cupo with her one-year-old daughter Ada and her four-year-old son Hunter (Ethan Wolin)

Cupo has spent all but four of her 35 years in New Haven and now finds herself at the nexus of the city’s relationship with Yale, its biggest employer. Sworn in last month for her third term as an alder, she embodies the dominance of Yale’s unions in city politics, which some New Haveners have criticized as privileging Yale issues, and what happens when activists take over the government.

Charlotte Eliscu, a onetime coworker at a communications firm whom Cupo likened to an older sister, said Cupo draws inspiration from a desire to keep the city hospitable for future generations of locals.

“New Haven is really lucky to have Ellen. And I think that Ellen is also really lucky to live in New Haven,” Eliscu said. “She wants to make it better, and she wants to make sure that her children can have the same experience.”

Raising kids, representing neighbors

On Nov. 5, 2019, Ellen Cupo gave birth to her first child, Hunter, while coasting to victory in her uncontested alder election.

The idea of running for the Board of Alders had come from Aaron Greenberg GRD ’19, who had stepped down from the Ward 8 seat earlier that year and whose replacement was not seeking a full term. So Cupo spent the summer politicking in the city as her pregnancy progressed, pitching a platform of housing affordability, jobs and what she called “developments built in the character of our neighborhood.”

“I felt like I could do anything,” she said. “I felt strong. I felt brave.”

Cupo with her husband, Ian Dunn, and two-month-old Hunter at her first Board of Alders inauguration in 2020 (Courtesy of Ellen Cupo)

But just over two months after her inauguration, COVID-19 sent Board meetings to Zoom, leaving Cupo to legislate virtually with 29 other alders she barely knew.

Then, in June 2020, amid a nationwide movement for racial justice, the city took down the Christopher Columbus statue that stood in Wooster Square Park, at the center of Cupo’s historically Italian neighborhood, provoking protests. A special committee that Cupo sits on approved a new statue depicting an Italian immigrant family, which is set to be unveiled in June, she said.

Her paternal great-grandparents were among the Italian immigrants to New Haven, but Cupo only moved to Wooster Square in 2015. After she and Dunn got engaged in 2018, the two moved into the two-bedroom second floor of a house less than a block from Frank Pepe Pizzeria, with a backyard where the children can play. The couple pays $1,400 a month in rent, Cupo said, to a landlord with whom they are friends.

“He could easily charge market rate for our house, and we wouldn’t be able to live there anymore,” Dunn said. “It’s a question of, is this a city for us?”

The current boundaries of Ward 8, to the east of downtown New Haven (Board of Alders online ward map)

Ward 8 extends beyond Wooster Square to parts of the Mill River district, Fair Haven and the Annex, and so does its alder’s advocacy. In 2022, pregnant with her daughter Ada, Cupo helped rally resistance to a proposed strip club near Jocelyn Square.

Owing largely to time off after Ada’s birth, Cupo’s attendance rate at full Board of Alders meetings dipped below 60 percent across 2022. She missed six consecutive full Board meetings last winter, absences which she told the New Haven Independent were a result of sickness in her family.

“We missed her when she was on maternity leave, and we’re really glad she’s back,” Sarah Greenblatt, the president of the Historic Wooster Square Association, told the News.

Wooster Square Park, where a Christopher Columbus statue stood until June 2020 (Ethan Wolin)

After two uncontested elections, Cupo faced her first challenge last year, from Andrea DiLieto Zola, a Democrat-turned-Republican and local business owner. Cupo said she took the race seriously, although, in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, it posed little threat.

Cupo trounced Zola, 410 votes to 72 — but not before a contentious debate in which Cupo criticized Zola’s Republican affiliation and Zola hit back at Cupo’s union allegiance. When the two candidates were asked to compliment each other, Zola drew gasps for focusing on Cupo’s absences during maternity leave.

“Being a woman who’s working as a mom, no matter what political party you’re representing, isn’t an easy job at the end of the day, and we’re constantly working,” Zola reiterated in a recent interview with the News.

Joining the family union

Before she was a mother, Ellen Cupo was a child of Local 34.

Her mother, a medical research assistant, and her father, who worked in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, met while organizing the union in the early 1980s. By 1988, when Cupo’s mother was helping negotiate Local 34’s second contract, she was pregnant with Ellen.

Cupo protests in 2016 during negotiations for a Local 34 contract. (Courtesy of Ellen Cupo)

“Growing up, I knew what it took to win the union, and the difference it made for working-class folks in the city,” Cupo said.

The family lived in Fair Haven. As she attended both Wilbur Cross High School and the Educational Center for the Arts, Cupo said she noticed that most of her friends’ parents did not own their homes as hers did.

One time in high school, Cupo and a friend were sitting on Cross Campus when a Yale security officer kicked them out. “I knew I didn’t belong on Yale’s campus,” Cupo said.

In the years after graduating from New York University with a degree in communications and a load of student debt that brought her back to live at home, Cupo applied to 12 jobs at Yale but did not get interviews, she said. That changed in 2015, thanks to the job placement program New Haven Works recently launched by the Board of Alders.

Almost as soon as she landed her first Yale job, Cupo joined efforts to push the University to hire more New Haveners. She was arrested at a protest blocking traffic outside Yale-New Haven Hospital. Two years later, she got to know Dunn as they spent time on Beinecke Plaza with graduate students, including Greenberg, who were on a hunger strike for union recognition.

“You can have a department, or an administrative staff, that just wants to push paper, but they’re not really into the intellectual mission of the department,” Ferguson said. But not Cupo. ”

—Professor Roderick Ferguson, chair of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Cupo’s first labor fight as an organizer came in 2018, when she supported a Divinity School employee who had been mistreated by an overbearing boss, according to Cupo. She recalled a meeting in which a group of colleagues, including ones preferred by the supervisor, joined the aggrieved union member, sitting across a table from higher-ups.

“That was the fight through which I learned how to organize,” Cupo said. “That was also the point that I was like, okay, I’m doing something important and I’m doing something good for people.”

Nowadays, Cupo works tucked away in the cozy WGSS third-floor hallway in William L. Harkness Hall, next to the lawn from which she once was removed. As assistant to department chair Roderick Ferguson, she handles a variety of administrative tasks, from awards and fellowships to faculty searches. During work hours, Cupo said, she ignores calls and emails about city business and typically limits union organizing to lunchtime and her two 15-minute breaks.

Cupo at her desk in William L. Harkness Hall (Ethan Wolin)

“You can have a department, or an administrative staff, that just wants to push paper, but they’re not really into the intellectual mission of the department,” Ferguson said. But not Cupo. Ferguson said that she shares an interest in “promoting equality, promoting social justice, diversity.”

In late November, Cupo was one of three administrative employees to sign an open letter defending students who had been targeted by a so-called doxxing truck amid campus tensions about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. One of the truck’s targets, a graduate student who works with Cupo and who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of further targeting, told the News that Cupo’s signature touched them.

Fighting for change in the long run

Cupo got off work at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 6. There was no time to get home for a shower and a bite to eat, so she stopped at Burger King before heading to City Hall to preside over the Legislation Committee for the first time this year.

The committee’s work spans a variety of policy areas, but this meeting had only one item: a measure to exempt certain city officials from the requirement to live inside New Haven. Cupo, who has chaired the committee since September 2022, called on each speaker as the six alders reviewed the proposed text and questioned mayoral appointees.

“Regardless of what’s going on, she’s always upbeat, she’s always prepared,” Ward 27 Alder Richard Furlow, a committee member, said in an interview. “I think that’s what makes her so easy to work with.”

(Ethan Wolin)

But formal protocols are not second nature to Cupo. Several times during the meeting, Furlow, the Board’s majority leader, whispered to her some procedural reminder. Because of her job, Cupo said, she attends fewer ribbon cuttings and press conferences than the stereotypical local politician. She prefers meeting constituents at regular “office hours” at a neighborhood coffee shop.

On Monday, Feb. 5, Cupo and some colleagues had the official duty of escorting Mayor Justin Elicker into the Aldermanic Chambers for his State of the City speech. When pro-Palestine protestors halted Elicker’s speech by shouting for a Gaza ceasefire resolution, Cupo said she watched with mixed feelings: sadness and fear, sympathy for the activists’ cause yet qualms about their relentlessness.

When it comes to demanding action from those in power, Cupo said, “I have more often been on the other side.” She said she returned home that night moved by the protesters’ anguish. Yet she has not decided where she stands on the resolution, given her constituents’ varying views.

“I focus my efforts in New Haven specifically, right, because this is where I can make change,” she said.

Cupo turns to watch pro-Palestine protestors disrupting the mayor's State of the City speech on Feb. 5. (Yurii Stasiuk)

As a means of making local change, the New Haven Board of Alders moves slowly, but also just as fast as some members’ busy lives can sustain. Cupo described reading reams of official documents in the evenings, and fielding daily questions and complaints from constituents about everything from speeding cars on Chapel Street to indecent images posted outside a strip club.

Alders tend not to propose policy initiatives of their own but rather vote on proposals that come before them, sometimes after making amendments. The vast majority of votes are unanimous. Cupo said she has no aspirations for higher office but plans to keep running for her alder seat as long as she can fight for New Haveners’ housing and jobs and for Yale to give the city more money.

“I focus my efforts in New Haven specifically, right, because this is where I can make change,”

—Ellen Cupo

In other words, she sees the long run. When Cupo meets a new member of Local 34, among her first questions is, “What do you want to win in our next contract?” she said. “Everything that we have — paid time off, overtime, all of our benefits — are only because there have been people over the last 40 years who have fought like hell to get them and then to keep them.”

Cupo would know. Her parents, now retired, receive pensions on par with the salaries they earned while working. When Cupo and Dunn need help, they look after Hunter and Ada.

Correction, Feb. 21: This article was changed to reflect the correct name of the Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the year when Cupo first moved to Wooster Square.

Correction, Feb. 21: A previous version of this story misstated the regularity of Cupo’s “office hours” with constituents; they are not every week.

UP CLOSE | “Meeting people where they are”

New Haven’s harm reductionists take new approach to drug overdose epidemic

By Staff Reporter Sadie Bograd

Published on April 3, 2023

Jess saved her friend’s life last year. 

Jess, whose last name has been omitted to protect her privacy, has used intravenous drugs on and off for the last 15 years. That day, she had just gotten high when she began to notice the signs of an overdose in her friend: pale skin, slowed breathing and unconsciousness. 

Jess was terrified, but she was also prepared. She was carrying Naloxone, also known as Narcan, a medication that reverses opioid overdose. After learning about Narcan through a training program in Bridgeport, she knew how to inject the Narcan spray into her friend’s nostril, roll them onto their side and wait for them to recover. 

Without her training, Jess said she might have made the common mistakes that many people do when they witness an overdose, like putting the victim in a cold bathtub — which increases the risk of shock — or leaving them on their back — which increases the risk of aspiration. 

“I’ve used [Narcan] a few times on people,” Jess said. “If I didn’t have it, I don’t know what would have happened to the people that I was with, if they would have still been alive today.” 

Naloxone training and distribution is one example of a growing approach to drug use known as harm reduction. Rather than pressuring people to quit using drugs entirely, harm reduction advocates accept the reality that people use drugs and try to ensure that they do so as safely as possible, a marked change from traditional abstinence-only responses. Studies have shown harm reduction techniques to be among the most effective at reducing overdose deaths and the spread of disease while increasing the number of people who engage with treatment and social services. 

Harm reduction is most commonly associated with efforts to distribute safe drug use supplies like Narcan, fentanyl test strips and clean syringes. But it also encompasses efforts to provide warm clothes and feminine hygiene products, to reduce the criminalization and stigma of drug use and to address systemic inequities in housing and healthcare. 

“There will be behaviors that people do that are risky, but there are ways to support people… and to affirm the fact that their lives have value,” said Emme Magliato ’23, a student ambassador for the Sex Workers and Allies Network, a harm reduction organization focused on street-based sex workers, many of whom use drugs. “In its core, [harm reduction] is a very liberatory practice.” 

Drug overdose deaths have increased more quickly in Connecticut than the national average. (Courtesy of Sadie Bograd)

New Haven was one of the birthplaces of harm reduction in the 1980s, when activists established one of the country’s first needle exchanges to combat the AIDS epidemic. Now, the spread of the opioid epidemic has encouraged a broader acceptance of harm reduction work. 

1,425 people died of an unintentional drug overdose in Connecticut in 2022, including 130 in New Haven alone, as compared to 728 deaths statewide in 2015. Nationally, the opioid overdose death rate has increased sevenfold in the past two decades, from 3.3 deaths per 100,000 in 2001 to 24.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2021. 

Almost all harm reduction practitioners unite around a single catchphrase: “meeting people where they are.” Across New Haven, dozens of actors — from mobile outreach teams to healthcare clinics and homelessness service providers — are striving to do just that. Although they struggle with limited funding, legal constraints and widespread stigma, they continue to promote what they see as a more ethical and effective response to an overwhelming overdose epidemic.  

Delivering supplies, and much more

When SWAN’s gray minivan pulls up at the corner of Ferry Street and Grand Avenue, its doors emblazoned with the words “OUTREACH” and “FREE NALOXONE,” people are ready for it. The nearby lot is a popular site for drug use, and many people approach the van as soon as it parks. 

Magliato hops out of the passenger seat and strikes up a conversation with the first woman in line. 

“Do you need alcohol swabs? Antibiotic ointment? Do you need cookers? Do you need condoms? Narcan?” Magliato asks. While the woman fills her bag, Magliato writes down her birthday and a careful record of everything she takes. 

SWAN distributes safer drug use supplies, but also backpacks filled with warm socks, personal hygiene products and flashlights. (Sadie Bograd, Contributing Photographer)

Inside the van’s trunk is a stockpile of resources to distribute to New Haven’s sex workers, unhoused residents and people who use drugs. In addition to hand warmers, flashlights and medical supplies, Magliato passes out materials that help reduce the risks of drug use. There’s Narcan, a nasal spray which can reverse opioid overdoses. Test strips for fentanyl, the highly potent opioid that was responsible for over 90 percent of Connecticut opioid overdose deaths last year. Sturdy Pyrex pipes, which decrease the chance of injury while smoking crack. Clean syringes, to prevent the sharing of needles and the spread of diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C. 

SWAN and its fellow harm reduction organizations attempt to disseminate these supplies as widely as possible and through a variety of strategies. 

Mobile outreach teams like SWAN’s bring harm reduction materials directly to the people who need them. Their services are deeply valued by the people who rely on them — one woman asked Magliato for Narcan, saying she had overdosed just the day before. 

The New Haven Health Department has also provided harm reduction toolkits to organizations that regularly work with people who use drugs, like the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, post-incarceration resource centers and methadone clinics.

“My philosophy is, whenever I go somewhere, I want to make it rain Narcan.”

—Phil Costello, clinical director of the Healthcare for the Homeless program at Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center

Other groups try to make sure that Narcan is as broadly accessible as possible, recognizing that drug use occurs in every community. Kara Sepulveda, public health program assistant at the Quinnipiack Valley Health District, explained that QVHD and the New Haven Health Department are trying to “normalize being prepared for overdose response” by offering naloxone training at a range of locations, from restaurants and warehouses to libraries. Their work may be made easier by last week’s FDA approval of over-the-counter Narcan sales.

“My philosophy is, whenever I go somewhere, I want to make it rain Narcan,” said Phil Costello, clinical director of the Healthcare for the Homeless program at Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center.

Andressa Granado and Kara Sepulveda demonstrate how to use Narcan during a training at a New Haven liquor store. (Courtesy of Andressa Granado)

Frederick Altice, director of the Yale School of Medicine’s Community Health Care Van, noted that fentanyl test strips have also become increasingly important, because they enable people to avoid consuming unsafe drugs and alert others when a dangerous batch has entered the supply. 

Advocates emphasized, however, that harm reduction is about more than just clean syringes and Narcan. 

SWAN helps its members with “literally anything and everything,” said program manager Jaclyn Lucibello, as she prepared to drive a SWAN member to her methadone clinic. Providing warm clothes, tents and menstrual products is another way to help people who use drugs stay safe. Lucibello also emphasized the importance of connecting people to medical care and housing; it’s near impossible to recover from opioid use disorder if you don’t have a stable place to live, she said. 

Combating stigma to keep people alive

Harm reduction advocates distribute as much Narcan as they can. But Narcan won’t help if there’s no one to administer it.

“The way to keep people alive is to not have them use alone,” Costello said. “This is probably the single most important thing for opiate users.”

“The way to keep people alive is to not have them use alone. This is probably the single most important thing for opiate users.”

—Phil Costello, clinical director of the Healthcare for the Homeless program at Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center

In the face of widespread stigma, people often feel pressured to hide their drug use from family and friends, according to Costello. They use drugs alone, making them more likely to die if they overdose. 

Stigma prevents some people from accessing harm reduction supplies at all. That’s one reason why the Community Health Care Van is trying to establish three harm reduction vending machines across the city. Altice explained that these “user-friendly and minimal contact” devices would let patients who have registered with the syringe service program collect clean syringes and Narcan.

Broadly, though, harm reduction advocates want to eliminate stigma from the start. 

Magliato explained that a core tenet of harm reduction is that people who use drugs are people, and should be treated as such. She added that although this shouldn’t be a radical statement, people with opioid use disorder are often reduced to their addiction. 

“My favorite part of working [at SWAN] is just getting to see people and tell them ‘Have a good day’ or genuinely ask how they’re doing,” Magliato said. “Because most often they will not have that interaction until the next time they see you.” 

SWAN employees Emme Magliato and Brandy Robinson gather supplies before their outreach run. (Sadie Bograd, Contributing Photographer)

Robert Heimer, a Yale professor of epidemiology who has studied harm reduction for over 30 years, said the people who are most at risk of overdose death are those who have just gone through an abstinence-only treatment program — even more so than people who receive no treatment at all. Abstinence-only programs have high relapse rates, but patients tend to feel ashamed about their continued drug use, leading them to use alone. Their tolerance also goes down during treatment, increasing the risk of overdose.

“How do we make [drug use] seem more of a normal activity, instead of making solitary drug use seem like the only solution to keeping your drug use secret and yourself protected from going to jail, from being stigmatized, from being ostracized?” Heimer asked. 

Heimer added that stigma is perpetuated in many ways. People in abstinence-based treatment are often called “clean” — implying that people who use drugs are “dirty.” Opioid use disorder is treated as something shameful, instead of a medical condition that changes the brain, making it impossible to abstain from drug use without experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms. 

Heimer said that stigma can even prevent people from accessing effective treatments for opioid use disorder. Methadone and buprenorphine are long-acting opioids that block opioid withdrawal while inhibiting the effect of heroin and fentanyl, preventing people from getting high. 

“Methadone and buprenorphine produce a stable level that allows people to feel normal: not too high, not too sedated, not too close to losing consciousness and not going into withdrawal. And it allows them to pursue a more normal life,” Heimer said.

According to Heimer, medications like methadone are the most effective treatment available — much more so than abstinence-based treatments, which have a high relapse rate. However, instead of being treated like any other medicine, they are stigmatized as “trading one drug for the other.” 

Safe spaces for safer use

Apart from stigma, people who use drugs don’t always have a safe place to go. Especially among the unhoused community, drug use often occurs outside or in public spaces.

Evan Serio, program manager at the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, said that public restrooms are a common site for drug use. In recognition of that fact, DESK has implemented a three-minute knock system: every three minutes, a staff member knocks on the bathroom door to get a verbal confirmation that the guest is still conscious and has not overdosed. 

With this, many community members have sought to establish dedicated spaces where people who use drugs can safely congregate. In Fair Haven, a team of community leaders — including representatives of the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance, the Fair Haven Community Health Center, Junta for Progressive Action, SWAN, the Board of Alders and the New Haven Police Department — are trying to establish an engagement center on Grand Avenue.

Mark Jenkins, executive director of the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance, described the center as “a haven to get many of those folk who publicly loiter in that area, to give them a space off of the beaten path where they can congregate without persecution or prosecution.” 

The benefits, Fair Haven alder Sarah Miller explained, would be twofold. The center would provide a welcoming space where guests could access medical care, syringes and other services. It would also alleviate residents’ concerns about public drug use and drinking, especially in the neighborhood’s main commercial corridor. 

Miller added that the potential location, at 229 Grand Ave., is key to the proposal’s success. 

“We want those services to be available, but we don’t want them right in the middle of our commercial district,” Miller said. “[The proposed site] is close enough to where the activities happen in the center of the neighborhood that we think it’s realistic people would go there, but it’s not as visible as it is right now. It’s not as disruptive to the healthy economic development of our neighborhood.” 

Jenkins and Miller both indicated that the city withdrew its initial commitment to fund the center last year, instead prioritizing funding for a syringe and litter collection team.

Benjamin Oldfield, chief medical officer of Fair Haven Community Health Care, said the team hopes to open the engagement center later this year, adding that they have “two promising funding opportunities.” 

SWAN volunteers assemble safer drug use and safer sex kits. (Sadie Bograd, Contributing Photographer)

Separately, a group of harm reductionists and government officials are pushing for Connecticut to pass a senate bill that would establish three pilot “harm reduction centers.” Unlike the planned Fair Haven engagement center, these centers would be explicitly intended for drug use: places where people could openly consume drugs in the presence of trained health care providers, who would provide treatment in the case of an overdose. 

More than 120 such overdose prevention centers exist around the world, including the recently-opened OnPoint facility in New York City. To date, Heimer said, not a single person has died at one.

State Senator Saud Anwar, a co-sponsor of the legislation, said the pilot centers would be located in the greater Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport areas. New Haven Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal expressed support for the legislation at a public hearing on March 22.

“One option is to say that we accept that people are going to continue to die, and probably the number is going to increase … If we refuse to accept that, then we say, ‘What works and what doesn’t work?’” Anwar said. “Frankly, it’s not rocket science. We are basically doing what has been proven to be effective, and not in one place, but multiple places.”

Anwar explained that many people fear that overdose prevention sites will enable increased drug use or encourage people to start using drugs. The data, he said, shows the opposite — overdose prevention sites simply provide a safer place for people to consume controlled substances that they were already going to use. 

Community Health Care Van director Altice said he thinks it’s “only a matter of time” until Connecticut establishes overdose prevention sites. For him, the real question is whether they will have sufficient and sustainable funding in the long term.

Conflicting laws and roles for law enforcement

Harm reduction operates in an often-hostile legal environment. For example, in addition to criminalizing the possession of drugs, Connecticut criminalizes the possession of drug paraphernalia. Serio, of DESK, explained that this puts people who carry harm reduction supplies like safer-use crack pipes at risk of arrest and incarceration. He called for the law to “not criminalize individuals for what essentially breaks down to a medical intervention.” 

At the federal level, the “crack house statute” in the Controlled Substances Act criminalizes anyone who knowingly manages a site where controlled substances are used. This places overdose prevention centers on uncertain legal territory. But according to David Oliveros SPH ’23, who has collaborated with harm reduction initiatives through the Global Health Justice Practicum, this has not prevented other overdose prevention centers from operating in recent years.

Harm reductionists unite in their opposition to these overlapping forms of criminalization. Drug use, they say, is not a problem we can arrest our way out of. Incarceration is itself one of the many harms that harm reduction seeks to prevent. 

But advocates remain divided on the proper role of law enforcement in harm reduction work. 

Jenkins, of the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance, expressed skepticism of actors who claim to practice harm reduction while relying on law enforcement to conduct outreach.

“When you have organizations that are using law enforcement to engage people right now in harm reduction, and they’re still a harm-producing entity, it’s a contradiction,” Jenkins said. “When you have a small percentage of that group that may have buy-in, but by and large, the larger group is still causing harm, I don’t agree with it.”

At the same time, Jenkins and others acknowledged that the situation is unique in New Haven, where the police have been more supportive of harm reduction initiatives. Jenkins and Lucibello, both of SWAN, referenced the work of Lieutenant Michael Fumiatti, Fair Haven District Manager for the NHPD. 

Fumiatti helped convene the Fair Haven team which is working on the engagement center, and he has collaborated with SWAN on efforts to create dialogue between street-based sex workers — many of whom have experienced drug-related arrests — and police officers. 

Over the course of his career, Fumiatti told the News, he came to see how “pointless” it was to arrest people over and over again for the same low-level drug-related crimes.

“What’s the point of me arresting someone seven times, ten times on low-level drug offenses, specifically paraphernalia?” Fumiatti said. “Trying to get people into services and get them help and get them to make their own decisions to hopefully go into a rehab or engage in safer practices, that’s a public safety thing just as much as arresting people — I would say even more so, because what we’re looking at is root problems, rather than band-aids.” 

Fumiatti explained that officers have broad discretion over how they respond to offenses, and are not obligated to make arrests except in cases of domestic violence. Rather than arresting people on paraphernalia or possession charges, he now tries to direct them to available services.

He mentioned a local business owner who regularly calls the police because of a man who stands outside his store, harassing customers. The traditional law enforcement response would be to write the man a ticket for trespassing and move on. Fumiatti’s new strategy would be to buy the man something to eat, have a conversation with him and encourage him to change his behavior. 

The goal, he said, is for police officers to “mediate an issue [rather] than to just be a robot.” He tries to make arrests only when someone is at risk of causing harm to themselves or others, and he encourages other officers to take a similar approach. He added that by focusing less on low-level drug offenses, officers have more time to focus on major crimes. 

Groups like COMPASS carry ROVERs filled with harm reduction supplies. (Courtesy of Andressa Granado)

The establishment of COMPASS, New Haven’s nonviolent first responder team, might further reduce punitive responses to drug use. 

COMPASS’s teams include a social worker and a “peer recovery specialist,” or someone who has lived experience with homelessness, addiction or mental illness. The teams can provide crisis counseling, harm reduction supplies and help with accessing social services. In addition to conducting their own outreach, COMPASS teams can respond to 911 emergency dispatches, and Fumiatti said that NHPD officers regularly call on COMPASS’s crisis teams to respond to incidents related to substance abuse.

Lucibello said that NHPD is unique in its approach to drug use, but that “traditional policing is at odds with harm reduction.” She said that police officers in Waterbury had told her that “we know we’re not going to arrest away the drug problem, we know that the War on Drugs is bullshit, but we still have to enforce the laws.”

She added that harm reduction efforts ought to be led by people who have personal experience with drug use.

“It’s just like anything else,” Lucibello said. “The people that are closest to the problem, are closest to the solution… The people that have been there and understand and truly can show empathy are those that are most effective in building connections and helping people.” 

Nationwide, federal policy might also be shifting away from incarceration and towards a strategy of harm reduction, according to John Hamilton, president and CEO of Liberation Programs, a Connecticut drug treatment and prevention organization that incorporates harm reduction practices. He pointed to a recent grant announced by the Bureau of Justice Assistance that provides funding for “comprehensive programs in response to the overdose crisis.” 

A more trustworthy medical system 

Even more than law enforcement, people who use drugs express distrust of one institution in particular: the medical system.

Jess said she hadn’t had much involvement with the police. But when it came to hospitals, her response was instant.

“Their bedside manner is terrible,” Jess said. “Everyone that I know that has been to the hospital all last year has had something to say, like how they’ve been rude and treated badly if they had addiction in the past or if they’re an active addict.” 

Heimer said that most people with opioid use disorder consume opioids not to get high, but for “maintenance” — that is, to avoid withdrawal, the symptoms of which include potentially life-threatening vomiting, diarrhea, nausea and muscle pain. Costello, of Cornell Scott, explained that many emergency rooms refuse to treat withdrawal symptoms, which patients start to experience while waiting for treatment. 

Imagine, Costello said, that you go to the doctor’s office for a problem. While you’re there, you develop terrible tooth pain. The doctor refuses to treat your tooth pain, and keeps focusing on your original concern.

“You’re gonna get aggravated, you’re gonna get mad. You’re probably going to leave to try to get to a dentist to fix the tooth pain, right?” Costello said. “Well, it’s the same thing with the dopesickness, the withdrawal symptoms.” 

Costello added that this problem has been especially acute since the prescription opiate crisis. He said that the medical community has started “under-treating” withdrawal symptoms, out of a fear that patients are trying to get opioids for illicit resale. The reality, he said, is that substances like fentanyl are so cheaply available that there’s no black market anymore for prescription painkillers. 

According to Costello, when treating patients with opioid use disorder, medical providers should give patients opioids, putting them into “a window of cognitive sobriety” where they can stop worrying about withdrawal and focus on whatever problem brought them to the doctor in the first place.

As it is, people who use drugs often avoid going to the hospital and leave against medical advice once they’re there, Costello said. To fill this gap in accessible and respectful care, multiple providers run mobile clinics designed to meet drug users’ needs. 

Cornell Scott’s Street Medicine program conducts outreach to New Haven residents experiencing homelessness, many of whom also have opioid use disorder. In addition to following their own outreach routes, they often partner with groups like SWAN and offer services in soup kitchens and homeless shelters. The program’s three teams try to cover the whole city, including Hamden, Milford and West Haven.

The Community Health Care Van offers mobile health care services including HIV testing, primary care and syringe access. (Courtesy of Angel Ojeda)

Similarly, the Community Health Care Van offers healthcare services out of its 40-foot mobile clinic in the Hill, Fair Haven, Newhallville and other neighborhoods. Altice said the CHCV was the nation’s first mobile healthcare van when it was created 30 years ago, during the AIDS epidemic. 

“The trust issue is really important,” Altice said. He noted that offering mobile services is central to the harm reduction approach — the van is quite literally meeting patients where they are. 

Trust, Costello added, comes from consistency: showing up in the same areas every week, reaching out to people directly and following through on commitments.

Costello said that healthcare outreach programs also need to think from the perspective of people living on the street. For example, because homeless people’s belongings are regularly stolen or confiscated, Costello might distribute a smaller number of pills with more refills. 

Many brick-and-mortar health clinics and addiction treatment programs, although more limited in their capacities, are also attempting to incorporate harm reduction frameworks into their care.

Oldfield explained that as a federally-qualified health center — a comprehensive healthcare provider that serves an underserved population and qualifies for enhanced federal funding — the Fair Haven Community Health Center operates in a fee-for-service model. It receives reimbursements for traditional clinic and telemedicine visits, but not necessarily for patient outreach or harm reduction efforts. 

“Harm reduction and patient engagement does not fit neatly into that rubric,” Oldfield said. “We need to be out on the streets, working in partnership with these agencies, talking to neighbors, discussing options for care and harm reduction. That doesn’t always get remunerated in a way that we need to to maintain our bottom line.”

Federal law also constrains federally-qualified health centers’ ability to operate syringe service programs and overdose prevention centers. 

Oldfield said FHCHC collaborates with community partners who face fewer legal and financial limitations. In addition to their main clinic on Grand Avenue, in the heart of Fair Haven, they provide services at an outpatient addiction treatment program and hope to offer telemedicine at the forthcoming engagement center. 

At the APT Foundation, a substance use treatment provider, physical accessibility is linked to temporal accessibility. CEO Lynn Madden said that APT offers walk-in evaluations and same-day treatment, recognizing that many of its patients would struggle to keep appointments. 

Oldfield also noted that FHCHC’s clinicians regularly prescribe or recommend Narcan. Furthermore, when treating people with substance use disorders, they understand that “for a lot of people who use substances, their goal may not be abstinence.”

In addition to clean syringes, SWAN distributes safer injection kits. (Courtesy of Emme Magliato)

Hamilton said that Liberation Programs’ outreach had evolved from “recovery coaches” to “overdose response specialists.” When engaging with people after an overdose, the coaches used to ask, “What does your recovery look like to you?” and “How can I help you in your recovery?” Now, they ask, “How can we help you today?”

“It could be a clean needle, it could be a fentanyl strip… It could be a meal, it could be gloves, it could be a sleeping bag,” Hamilton said. “We really don’t want to come in with an agenda. And I think that’s the major shift.”

Liz Evans, the senior director of harm reduction at Liberation Programs and a longtime harm reduction advocate who helped establish OnPoint NYC, explained that harm reduction strategies are not meant as a replacement for more intensive treatments for substance use disorders, but rather as a complement. Harm reduction recognizes that many people currently do not want or cannot receive treatment, and it aims to provide acceptable and accessible care without judgment.

In doing so, it actually increases the likelihood that people will enroll in further treatment. 

“The underlying key is just to create relationships with folks that often are mistrustful of services and don’t feel like people have their back if they ‘fail.’ So for us, there is no failure,” Evans said. “The objective really is to build trust and to build relationships so that there’s always an open door, if somebody wants that, and in the meantime, to work really hard to try and keep people alive… Most of the research outcomes show that harm reduction is, in fact, a pathway into those supports and services, as well as its own pathway, legitimately on its own.”

Responding to community concerns

Practitioners emphasized that harm reduction is an evidence-based set of practices that reduces overdose deaths and the spread of disease while improving health outcomes — as well as a more humane response to a devastating epidemic.

“People who have a drug use disorder, they are considered less than,” Madden said. “It becomes an identity. You become your illness… People aren’t illnesses, they’re people.” 

Yet harm reduction initiatives often run into community backlash. 

In 2020, NHPD started to distribute harm reduction kits to people upon release from police custody, recognizing that people are more vulnerable to overdose immediately after incarceration. The department received “a lot of negative pushback,” according to Fumiatti.

“People who aren’t as educated about harm reduction… are more likely to have a negative view of the police, as in, ‘Well, you guys just don’t want to do your jobs,’” Fumiatti said. 

Fumiatti said that any harm reduction initiatives should be combined with public education campaigns to explain the benefits of harm reduction and encourage community participation.

Evans highlighted the importance of reframing conversations around stigma and drug use. 

“I think one of the greatest challenges for folks… is the misdirected fear that by acknowledging somebody who is still active in their drug use, and trying to help them to stay less at risk of overdose and less at risk of other kinds of harms, that is also somehow making the situation worse, or ‘enabling’ is the language that gets used a lot in the US,” Evans said. “I like to redefine enabling and say, ‘What we’re actually trying to do is enable people to have hope for a future so that they can stay alive and so that they can have some quality in their life.’” 

Senator Anwar said he is hopeful that community members will be open to harm reduction solutions once they see the data. The opioid epidemic is so widespread, he added, that “opioids have touched every family in our state.” 

“People recognize that there’s a problem, and they’re willing to listen,” Anwar said. “In a neighborhood, if you see people in dark alleys using drugs and substances, as opposed to going to a facility which has protections and a well-lit, safe environment… you are likely to select the latter.” 

Without sufficient community engagement, though, the backlash can be overwhelming. This was evident in the recent resistance to a proposed methadone clinic in Newhallville.

The APT Foundation runs four methadone clinics in the greater New Haven area. One of those clinics, on Congress Avenue, has been subject to repeated complaints about violence, littered syringes and public drug dealing and use. Howard Boyd, chair of the Hill North Community Management Team, said that local schools have had to construct fences and better lighting because of problems in the area. 

Madden blamed the issues with the Congress Avenue site on its location. Unlike APT’s other clinics, she said, the Congress site is in a busy neighborhood, where people tend to loiter just outside the property. APT plans to move its Congress Avenue operations to a new facility on Long Wharf Drive. 

Boyd agreed that the Congress clinic is in a busy, central part of the neighborhood. But he said that APT has failed to sufficiently engage with the community.

“If this is on our property, we’re gonna take care of it, but… once it’s crossed the street off of their property, it’s whatever,” Boyd said. “That’s the kind of attitude I was getting from them.” 

In early 2022, APT purchased a building on Dixwell Avenue in Newhallville, intending to open a new clinic in the neighborhood. Community members gathered in opposition, citing not only the problems at the Congress clinic, but also APT’s failure to engage with community members before purchasing the site. 

Hamden council member Justin Farmer, whose district abutted the proposed Dixwell location, said he was not contacted at all before APT made its purchase.  

“If you haven’t talked to the community, you shouldn’t be doing this,” Farmer said. “If there isn’t community buy-in, you’re going to have tension, and in the case of the methadone clinic, that’s the last thing people need.” 

Newhallville residents protest the proposed APT clinic on Dixwell Avenue. (Sylvan Lebrun, Contributing Photographer)

Farmer connected the lack of communication to broader tensions with race and class. He explained that the proposed clinic exacerbated community concerns about gentrification, underinvestment and overpolicing. There was a widespread perception that people would come from other neighborhoods to access APT’s services — while local residents continued to suffer from economic disinvestment.  

“If it was East Rock or any other affluent neighborhood, you wouldn’t be able to put in something like this without engaging in dialogue,” he said. “You cannot add something like a methadone clinic to Newhall without providing wraparound supports.”

Farmer said he felt the proposal “pigeonhole[d]” the community: either they supported the clinic, or they didn’t care about people with addiction. In reality, he said, the lack of available treatment is a problem — but so is the disproportionate siting of treatment centers in low-income Black and Brown communities.

Although APT has since ceased development of the Dixwell site, Farmer added that the lack of communication had set back the entire conversation about harm reduction, saying, “I can’t go to my community now to convince them we need a safe user site because now they’re pissed off about a methadone clinic.” 

Madden, however, attributed the choice of the Dixwell location to systemic factors outside APT’s control. The foundation needed a facility that was at least 40,000 square feet, zoned for outpatient medical use and within their price range — “there are not a lot of those kinds of properties that exist,” Madden said. She added that APT had worked with three city administrations to locate a suitable property.

The problem is exacerbated by the strict regulations around methadone, for both patients and providers. Methadone cannot be dispensed at standard pharmacies or doctor’s offices because it must be stored in a safe, behind a locked door with two alarms, according to Madden. This means that the number of places where patients can obtain methadone is extremely limited, although recent federal regulations allow for the creation of mobile methadone clinics. 

New Haven’s methadone clinics are mostly located in majority-minority or industrial neighborhoods on the southeast side of the city. The Newhallville clinic would have expanded access, but residents were concerned about problems with APT’s management and community engagement. (Courtesy of Sadie Bograd)

Patients also must go to a licensed methadone clinic every day to receive their dose, increasing congestion at clinics. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the federal government started allowing take-home methadone treatment. This exemption improved patient satisfaction and engagement, and may soon be made permanent. 

Boyd, of the Hill North Community Management Team, emphasized that community opposition is not inevitable. He expressed that, with better management, methadone clinics and other harm reduction services could be deeply beneficial. 

“We’re not against the treatment at all. We know people need treatment,” he said. “It was just really a communication problem. Talk to us. Be part of the community.”

For connections to local harm reduction resources, visit the New Haven Harm Reduction Taskforce, Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance or ConneCT Without Stigma.

UP CLOSE:
Transforming interpretation at Yale New Haven Hospital

As the pandemic rages on, the hospital's language services department is continuing along a path away from in-person interpretation.

Story by Emiliano Tahui Gómez

Cover Photo by Marisa Peryer

Published on September 14, 2020

The changes to Yale New Haven Hospital’s interpretation services, used by thousands of local residents each year, came suddenly in October of 2019.

That month, the hospital system’s Department of Patient Experiences and Operations implemented a series of critical changes to internal policy on interpretation services. The hospital reduced the types of patient-provider interactions that qualified for in-person interpretation services. Remote interpretation services such as video and phone interpretation grew in use. 

The policy switch and the fast timeline of its implementation sparked concern and confusion among many and started conversations between providers and administrators within the hospital. Some providers and employees questioned the sensitive types of patient-provider interactions where remote interpretation was being used. 

Yet the conversation over the changes halted almost as abruptly as they started. In the waning days of March, as the daily temperatures began to jump above freezing, the coronavirus pandemic arrived in New Haven with a feverish pitch, forcing all other issues to take a backseat.  

The public health crisis immediately demanded the absolute focus of Yale New Haven Hospital System, the city’s largest medical institution. All energies shifted quickly and completely to responding to the rates of infections that grew through April and May. The hospital transitioned numerous of its wings to serve the steady stream of COVID-19-positive patients and eliminated the many elective surgeries and traditional appointments that would usually fill up the hospital with in-person visits. 

“With the pandemic, resources were allocated elsewhere,” said Dr. Stephanie Massaro, an attending physician for hematology and oncology at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital and also assistant professor of clinical pediatrics. “This issue had to be tabled because [the] administration needed to respond to other faculties to assure the provider and patient safety, and I understand that.” 

Yet as attention shifted focus, changes to the department of language services, which provides interpretation and translation services, have continued to show their effect. Access to in-person interpreters has become increasingly difficult, as the number of staff within the language services department has dropped. At the same time, the virtualization of health care through telehealth has normalized the expanded presence of remote interpretation services with some providers. Within the language services department, pushback to changes from numerous long-term employees has led to an exodus of staff. Inside the halls of many departments, a new normal — wherein remote services predominate over their traditional counterpart — has emerged.  

OCTOBER RESTRUCTURING

The October policy changes included new triage guidelines that reduced the number of types of appointment or patient-provider interactions that qualify for the use of in-person interpretation services. YNHH Chief Experience Officer Joan Kelly told the News in February that the decision to enact changes to the system formed part of an institutional effort to streamline and expand services.

The decision in December came after legal pressure to reconsider a part of its services for deaf and hard of hearing patients. In 2018, a federal judge ruled that a number of Connecticut hospitals, including Lawrence + Memorial Hospital of the YNHH system, were not in compliance with standards for providing interpretation services for deaf and hard of hearing customers.

But the changes left Limited English Proficiency (LEP) patients more dependent on remote forms of interpretation services. It predominantly increased the use of video interpretation, carried out on iPoles — portable carts with screens as heads used to display video interpreting services. The demand for iPoles led to their scarcity and raised questions about access to remote interpretation services, according to Massaro. Besides the problem of scarcity, providers also criticized the disruptive nature of the new video services, which they said dropped calls, due to issues in broadband connectivity.

YNHH spokesman Mark D’Antonio did not directly respond to questions about the hospital’s record of video-call connectivity or broadband access. Still, he praised the new policy in an email and said that administrators implemented the new program to allow “employees more autonomy in setting their schedules by identifying needs in advance.”  

But several current and former language services employees told the News that the lack of flexibility within the new operating system led to days where they sat idly — under-scheduled and underutilized. According to these employees, the new scheduling system regularly assigns interpreters only a limited amount of appointments each day. They added that it did not allow interpreters to reorganize their schedules or request different work when scheduled appointments cancelled. These employees also told the News that the changes have deflated morale and led to a split between management and numerous employees.

“What is the future for the department? Interpreters only by phone and video? Because I can’t see it any other way.”

“What is the future for the department? Interpreters only by phone and video? Because I can’t see it any other way,” a current employee of language services told the News. The employee asked their name be kept private for fear of retaliation from their employer.

YNHH did not respond directly to questions on the effect of the operating system changes to the work experience of employees. 

Patients too immediately noticed the change. In February, News interviews with New Haven residents that required use of language services revealed that the use of remote interpretation services occasionally led to suboptimal experiences for patients. 

One patient, Deli Velazquez, who originally hails from Mexico, told the News in February that she had trouble communicating through phone interpretation over multiple days when she went to the hospital to care for her ailing son in January. During that meeting, Velazquez struggled to communicate on behalf of her son, who was occasionally in too much pain to speak for himself. 

Velzaquez said she found the interpretation phone service unintelligible and asked instead for an in-person interpreter, but was told that none were available.

For the next three days, Velazquez relied on the phone interpretation services despite no improvements in quality. She continued to voice her concerns over the service and was later assigned an in-person interpreter, but only at certain hours. She told the News that the concerns over interpretation contributed to her overall confusion over treatment options. That confusion and distress over her son’s health led her to eventually discharge her son from the hospital and opt to take care of him at home.

Several patients who spoke to the News in February, including Velazquez, characterized their interactions with remote interpretation services to be a drop in quality from their past experiences with in-person interpretation services. They struggled to hear the interpreter and the remote interpreter failed to fully convey their concerns to the doctors, those patients explained.

Still, in February, Kelly told the News that negative experiences with early patient experiences with the remote services did not indicate a change in quality. Instead, these complaints were symptoms of adjusting to a change, she argued. 

The pandemic has brought an even larger amount of LEP patients in contact with virtual interpretation services. Since the onset of the pandemic, the hospital has only used remote interpretation services, often in the form of video, to communicate with COVID-19-positive patients. 

One such patient, Wanda Roman, a New Haven resident originally from Puerto Rico, was admitted to YNHH as COVID-19-positive in April. During her week stay at the hospital, Roman interacted with providers exclusively using video interpretation services. While Roman felt that she understood everything her providers shared with her, she told the News she felt less confident asking for information on the status of her health and treatment beyond what she was told. When the screen on the iPole went off, Roman felt that her time to ask questions was over. In the past, Roman said she asked passing interpreters for help.

The city’s ever-growing Latino community, with a high percentage of foreign-born Latin American immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, among others, have settled in large numbers throughout the Greater New Haven area and account for about a third of the total population today. 

Spanish has remained the most prevalent language of request at YNHH accounting for 80 percent of the annual requests for language services in 2016. 

STRIKING A BALANCE

Experts continue to disagree over the extent to which newer remote interpretation services should be used in the medical interpreting industry.

The shift towards an increased use in remote services is not unique to the Yale New Haven Hospital. As the demand for interpretation services increased throughout the United States, health care providers had to find methods to fulfill the ever growing and linguistically diverse requests for interpretation services. 

Joumana de Santiago, manager of Interpretation Services for Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania, told the News that while a shift towards remote services has often appealed to hospitals looking to modernize, it has sometimes caused difficulties. 

According to de Santiago, for smaller hospitals with limited resources, using remote interpretation services can often be the most economically feasible manner to provide interpretation. Still, the lack of interpersonal interaction has convinced many providers and industry professionals that there are aspects of in-person interpretation that cannot be replaced by remote interpreter services, she added.

Jacqueline Ortiz, director of Diversity and Inclusion for ChristianaCare, a Delaware-based health care provider, said that while the foundational role of a medical interpreter is as a “conduit” of language, interpreters also have ethical and professional obligations to serve as clarifiers, mediators and advocates.

Ortiz added that in-person interpretation services provide the most conducive environment for an interpreter to manage all these roles successfully. She explained that in-person interpreters can be more effective readers of body language, silence and other forms of non-verbal communication. This makes them more likely to spot situations where lapses in communication are not verbally communicated by patients. She added that this is particularly important in overcoming differences in cultural norms or the intimidating nature of a hospital environment.

“The interpreter is the only person in the room that knows when a service is not being provided when it should,” Ortiz said. “It’s not that patients always know what to do. Sometimes they’re just stuck.” 

“The interpreter is the only person in the room that knows when a service is not being provided when it should. It’s not that patients always know what to do. Sometimes they’re just stuck.”

—Jacqueline Ortiz, director of Diversity and Inclusion for ChristianaCare

INTERNAL DISSENT

Despite the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospital’s language services department has continued its transformation. 

Since October, the number of employees within the department has shrunk by nearly half; former staff interpreters and translators have left, reducing the number of employees from 34 in October of 2019 to around 20, former and current employees of the department confirmed to the News. 

Many of those that left did so because of the change, according to employees sourced by the News. Some resigned, others took early retirements. A few refused to return to work and were dismissed.

News interviews with nine former and current employees revealed that many of those exits were caused by a work environment cited as hostile and inconsiderate. Many of those who left the department had worked in it for nearly a decade. 

“Someone has left the department during each month this year,” said a current language services employee on the exodus of colleagues during which the department has seen many months with multiple employee resignations. 

The employee requested anonymity to discuss the happenings candidly with the News. 

Several of the former employees told the News they left the department because they felt the department had undergone a transformation with little to no input from department employees or providers. Many felt that the department no longer valued them as a vital part of the healthcare team. 

“I don’t think [Patient Experience and Operations management] took into consideration the experience [and] the quality of the service I was providing,” said Aura Marina James, a former YNHH interpreter of 15 years. “Because there was never a discussion [regarding the changes].” 

James made the decision to retire early in March, citing hostile and inconsiderate responses from management on employee concerns over the changes. 

YNHH did not respond to questions on the quick turnover of department employees nor on the number of in-person interpreters and translators it planned to keep on staff. 

A CHANGE IN FOCUS

The pandemic switched many of the hospital’s subspecialties and clinics towards a telehealth-based form of services. By the end of April, the hospital had conducted 51,000 outpatient visits by telehealth. 

In part, the switch to telehealth-based care has normalized the use of telehealth and video interpretation, even among providers who originally voiced their concern over the increased reliance on remote interpreting. Provider response to remote interpretation services softened during pandemic as many have, at least temporarily, come to accept the remote interpretation as inherent to the culture of ‘social distancing’ necessary during the pandemic. 

At the same time, the switch to telehealth and the restrictions placed on most non-emergency, in-person care left the hospital below prior capacity, or the number of patients the hospital normally serves. Since the onset of the pandemic, this shift freed services that at normal capacity were harder to access. The postponement of elective surgeries and non-essential interments reduced the number of total patients at the hospital. The lack of competition for interpretation services improved the rate at which department’s needs were met. 

As the hospital has returned to capacity, Massaro said she has begun to notice the same issues with the interpretation services that she noticed when the hospital was at full capacity before the pandemic.  

iPoles too have remained in short supply in certain parts of the hospital. In the YNHH’s Trumbull clinic, the 20-room wing for clinical pediatrics has only one iPole for all providers to share, Massaro said.

“Now that we’re nearing the end of the pandemic, I think we’re returning to ‘you’re gonna need to wait one to two hours’ for an interpreter or ‘you may have to wait 10 or 20 minutes for your partner to finish using an iPole down the hall,’” she said. 

(Yale Daily News)

From outside the hospital’s efforts to care for patients with the coronavirus, Massaro has continued to observe the effects of the policy changes in interpretation services on a normal basis. As an attending physician at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, part of her daily routine includes rounding — the daily communications between physicians, patients and family that occur for in-patients. 

Massaro’s patients are often children with cancer, thus her interactions are often with the patients and the family members by their sides. She estimates that about 50 percent of her interactions with patients and families require interpretation services. 

In New Haven, the demands for interpretation services are not likely to go away. Over the past two decades, the number of LEP patients using the hospital has continuously risen. 

Thanks to Yale New Haven Hospital’s reputation, the hospital attracts LEP patients from different parts of the world. Still, like Velazquez, the majority of LEP patients that rely on the interpretation services at Yale New Haven Hospital come from one of the city’s migrant communities. Today, 14 percent of New Haven residents are foreign-born, according to data from DataHaven’s 2020 Neighborhood Profiles series. The current number of foreign-born New Haveners is twice what it was in 1990. As of 2017, 11 percent of New Haven residents reported a low level of English proficiency, according to the hospital’s Community Health Needs Assessment. 

Several YNHH physicians told the News they prefer an in-person interpreter during occasions when delivering news that could lead to emotional conversations with patients and their families. According to Massaro, in-person interpreters better assist her to convey a “sentiment of concern and respect,” and ensure that families in delicate conversations are adequately cared for. Yet these physicians also emphasized that with in-patient services where patient conditions are more likely to remain stable, video-remote interpreting can work well. 

Current employees of the language services department told the News that staff interpreter participation in in-patient services like rounding has fallen significantly since the department implemented the new triage guidelines late last year. The new guidelines instruct providers to use video interpretation services as the default form of communication for many in-patient interactions.

The current triage guidelines do prioritize the use of in-person interpretation services during “family discussions” and other types of interactions that involve sensitive conversations of life and death. But this is only guaranteed when the sensitivity of the issue is known in advance and when the provider files the request with anticipation.

Massaro said she believes the conversation over the state of interpretation services at the hospital will reignite at a future point, when hospital operations return to a more normal state. 

“I think as we start to move back to our regular functionality we may see [the effect of] that change,” she said. “I can’t tell you if all the issues we had have been properly addressed because all our attention was with the pandemic.” 

Correction, Sept. 15: This article has been updated with Joan Kelly’s correct job title. It has also been updated to better reflect the sentiment of James’ comments.

(Eric Wang)

UP CLOSE
Yale and the City: A pandemic and a plan

Story by Jose Davila IV

Cover Photo Courtesy of Yale News

Graphic by Megan Graham

Published on September 8, 2020

Looking out onto Chapel Street from behind the closed Vanderbilt gates, a quarantined Yalie might spot off-campus students enjoying ice cream from Arethusa Farm Dairy, buying a gift to send home from Ten Thousand Villages, or emerging from Sushi on Chapel with takeout rolls ready for dinner.

To many Yale, city and state officials, this would be evidence that the University’s reopening plan is working the way it is supposed to — limiting viral spread in New Haven while benefiting the city economically.

Still, one thing remains invisible to the naked eye: the coronavirus that necessitated the closure of Old Campus in the first place.

In interviews with the News, Yale administrators and public officials remained cautiously optimistic about the University’s reopening plan and students’ return to campus and the Elm City at large. Many pointed out the economic benefits of the students’ return to New Haven, including increased support for local businesses in Downtown New Haven and the resumption of regular employment for many Yale staff members.

The reopening itself, albeit partial, was the result of much coordination and planning between the state of Connecticut, the city of New Haven, and universities — public and private — throughout the Nutmeg State. All parties to those negotiations said that communication and consistent reopening criteria have been critical to the reopening going ahead mostly as planned since early July.

Some concerns remain, however, mostly regarding the testing of staff members and the decision-making process behind the plan.

“I think there’s definitely some concern among other folks in the community about people bringing the virus back to New Haven, especially because we’ve seen such a solid decline in cases over the last few months,” Ward 1 Alder Eli Sabin ’22 told the News in an interview. “A lot of folks are also excited to have a lot of the young folks who bring so much energy and life to New Haven back. From a dollars-and-cents perspective as well, there are a lot of folks in our city who are employed by Yale and various other colleges.”

“I think there’s definitely some concern among other folks in the community about people bringing the virus back to New Haven, especially because we’ve seen such a solid decline in cases over the last few months. A lot of folks are also excited to have a lot of the young folks who bring so much energy and life to New Haven back.”

—Eli Sabin '22, Ward 1 Alder

INITIAL PLANS EMERGE

Planning for a fall reopening of Connecticut colleges and universities began at the state level in the spring, according to Josh Geballe ’97 SOM ’02, chief operating officer of the governor’s office. On April 23, Gov. Ned Lamont announced the foundation of the Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group, co-chaired by former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi SOM ’80 and Yale School of Public Health department chair of epidemiology Albert Ko. 

The Education Committee of the advisory group, co-chaired by former Yale President Rick Levin and former Yale Vice President for Global and Strategic Initiatives Linda Lorimer, was tasked with building criteria for higher education institutions to reopen safely. Geballe emphasized the role of Yale alumni, experts and administrators in the success of Connecticut’s pandemic response.

“Governor Lamont, throughout this whole pandemic, has understood that public health considerations have to come first. Our view is there’s no way to truly reopen the economy if you’re in a situation where the virus is running rampant,” Geballe said in an interview. “Our priority was to establish criteria for our colleges and universities to reopen safely and ensure that each of them, including Yale, were putting the necessary steps in place to reopen safely.”

Connecticut was the first state to produce such guidelines when Levin and Lorimer published a report on the necessary steps for university reopenings in early May. Presented to Lamont, the report recommended schools have robust plans to contain the coronavirus if an outbreak occurred on campus and plans to shut down again if necessary.

Levin said that Lamont thanked the committee for the report. Levin has not been involved in subsequent decision-making about reopening plans for Yale or other Connecticut colleges, he said. He declined to comment any further for this story.

Yale President Peter Salovey has been in regular contact with Lamont and Mayor Justin Elicker about the University’s plans for the fall semester, Salovey told the News in an email.

“Both the governor and mayor have been thinking a lot about higher education during the pandemic,” Salovey wrote. “They support going back to teaching and learning to the greatest extent possible while safeguarding the well-being of everyone on college campuses and in the surrounding communities.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, Salovey convened a public health advisory group as well. After initially advising about the shutdown of campus in the spring, that group turned its attention towards the University’s reopening plans starting in June, according to Yale Health Director Paul Genecin, who serves on the advisory team. The team worked with a host of other Yale bodies to make sure the reopening plan was logistically sound, including Facilities, Yale College, and all of the professional schools.

“We cannot escape the fact that we will have some COVID cases at Yale. Our goal is to prevent uncontrolled spread in this community,” Genecin told the News in an email. “Yale has created a unique system for its students and we will try to contain the spread of any infection through a series of behavioral expectations, changes to the environment, biweekly testing for students, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine.”

Genecin added that all of the elements of the plan need to function properly and in unison in order for it to be successful.

Representatives from Yale New Haven Health have also been at every meeting of the advisory group, Genecin said. Representatives from YNHH were unavailable for comment on this story.

ELM CITY COLLABORATION

“My overall feeling is that the university and the city coordinated quite well together. In general, we have been cautiously optimistic about Yale coming back in-person.”

—Mayor Justin Elicker

After Salovey announced Yale’s fall reopening plans to the University community on July 1, the University, along with other local colleges and universities, explained its plan in webinars and meetings with city officials. On July 15, Yale and other colleges presented their fall reopening plans to alders on the Human Services Committee. 

“My overall feeling is that the university and the city coordinated quite well together,” Elicker told the News in an interview. “In general, we have been cautiously optimistic about Yale coming back in-person.”

However, Yale and City Hall have not been on completely amicable terms since the pandemic started. Back in March, Yale initially declined Elicker’s request to use dorm rooms to house New Haven public safety officers if they were to be exposed to the coronavirus. After the University declined, Elicker called University of New Haven President Steve Kaplan, who agreed immediately to house first responders there. At a press conference the next week, Elicker criticized Yale for declining the request — a day after the University set up an emergency fund to aid the city’s response.

A day later, the University reversed its decision and pledged to open up 300 rooms for use, more than double the original request.

The next week, during a Board of Alders budget hearing, multiple residents called on Yale to contribute more to the city’s coffers. 

For the reopening plan, though, Elicker told the News that, when it comes to “the nuts and bolts of what we need to get done,” Yale and City Hall “work together.” He added that he still thinks that Yale needs to play a much more significant financial role in the future of New Haven, including by helping to reduce systemic income inequality by investing more in the city.

On Aug. 12, Yale representatives participated in a webinar hosted by the Economic Development Administration about local institutions’ return plans and how to ensure students and New Haveners stay safe. Representatives from Albertus Magnus College and Southern Connecticut State University also attended the briefing.

Leadership from each of Greater New Haven’s six higher education institutions — Yale, Albertus, Southern, Quinnipiac University, the University of New Haven and Gateway Community College — also participated in a conference hosted by the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce last week in which they discussed their schools’ plans and implementation thus far.

THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT

Local businesses, especially those immediately surrounding Yale and in Downtown, have suffered immensely from a lack of students and Downtown commuting workers since the pandemic began to affect the Elm City in March.

Recent closures include Clark’s Family Restaurant and Freskos on Whitney Avenue and The Beer Collective and Duc’s Place elsewhere in Downtown.

“Yale University Properties has worked in close partnership with its retail and restaurant tenants throughout the pandemic to support them through these difficult times,” Associate Vice President for New Haven Affairs and University Properties Lauren Zucker told the News in an email. “We know that the New Haven business community greatly appreciates the support of the Yale community and that appreciation is mutual.”

City officials and business owners hope the arrival of students will help to boost local businesses and the wider Greater New Haven economy. In addition to 1,821 undergraduate students living on campus — or about 36 percent of the University’s normal capacity — there are about 1,530 enrolled students living in off-campus housing in New Haven, according to Yale officials.

“I think it’s great to have the students back, enlivening the town, once they complete their quarantine,” Yale College Dean Marvin Chun told the News in an email. “Everyone’s priority is the safety and well-being of our students, staff, faculty, and the New Haven community.”

“Having students back is only going to be a positive for the economy locally. It’s going to take some time still. It’s not going to be like, ‘Hey, we’ve got students back, everything is normal,’ but it’s a good first step.”

—Garrett Sheehan, President of Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce

However, Connecticut rules in effect to curb the spread of the coronavirus — including the mandatory 14-day quarantine for students and travelers arriving from hot spot states and continued restrictions on indoor dining and live events — mean that any economic benefits offered by the return of students will remain muted for the foreseeable future.

“It’s a positive first step, but, with the way restrictions are, it’s obviously not going to be the same,” said Garrett Sheehan, the president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce. “I feel confident that they’re putting in the best process possible and hopefully that works… Having students back is only going to be a positive for the economy locally. It’s going to take some time still. It’s not going to be like, ‘Hey, we’ve got students back, everything is normal,’ but it’s a good first step.”

Outside of effects on local businesses, 24 percent of the job base in the region is related to academic services, said city Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli. Having students back and paying tuition at all six colleges and universities ensures that many New Haveners will still be employed by the schools themselves.

In March, the University continued to operate critical campus functions with the support of 2,000 staff members. Now, thanks to the gradual reopening of research functions and other operations, there are about 9,000 faculty and staff with authorization to be on campus, Yale spokeswoman Karen Peart told the news in an email.

Other parts of the New Haven economy will take a little longer to bounce back, though, including tourism. The Omni Hotel remains closed, Yale is not running campus tours and Ivy League football will not happen this fall.

“Right now and through the pandemic, in addition to school coming back into session, it’s really important to start to rebuild hospitality, tourism and reopen the museums,” Piscitelli said. “Yale is an essential part of the Downtown restaurant and retail base. The students, the faculty, the vibrancy the university brings to our downtown are very important pieces to the puzzle… The meaningful nature of the work the students are doing is equally important.”

The return of students to New Haven has additional benefits for the Elm City. Piscitelli mentioned that many undergraduate and graduate students are contributing to ongoing research in the development of therapeutics and vaccines for the coronavirus. Throughout the pandemic, Yale students have contributed to the city of New Haven’s response through Yale Emergency Support-New Haven, and individuals worked for local nonprofits over the summer through programs like the President’s Public Service Fellowship. 

(Megan Graham)

PERSISTING CONCERNS

Still, some have concerns about the return of students, the decision-making process behind the plan, and the message it sends to New Haven community members.

“I definitely think the conversations were framed around how we can get students back safely and minimize the risk to New Haven, not necessarily maximizing the safety of New Haveners and questioning if it would benefit the city for students to come back at all,” Yale College Council President Kahlil Greene ’21 told the News in an email. “Conversations were, in my opinion, very Yale-focused.”

Greene served on the University’s Academic Continuity Committee, where he helped to hammer out details in the return plan. Other YCC members also served on college-level task forces concerned with the delivery methods for teaching. Greene warned there could be “severe consequences” for the Elm City if students do not “follow the rules and comply with testing” requirements and quarantine procedures.

Every Yale official who spoke with the News emphasized the responsibility the student body has to prevent an outbreak on campus and in the city and the importance of following the University’s rules on gatherings, masking and social distancing.

The lack of a coherent and mandatory testing system for graduate students, faculty and staff remains a concern for other members of the community.

Ben Oldfield, chief medical officer of Fair Haven Community Health Care, said his experience with the Yale plan comes through speaking with Yale staff members that are patients at the clinic.

“Recently, we have seen a lot of patients who have concerns,” Oldfield said. “The nature of the concerns are reasonable, but sort of general. What I’ve heard is, ‘Well, gosh, there’s going to be a lot more people at my place of work.’ … I do feel like it’s a well-thought-out plan and so I have had conversations with patients in the clinic where I’ve tried to explain the fact that I think this is a well-thought-out plan.”

Oldfield said that the Yale reopening plan was subject to health disparities between students living in New Haven and staff working alongside them on campus. The Yale student body skews healthier and younger than the staff who work in Yale Dining or Yale Facilities, for example. As such, staff — many of whom come from communities of color like Fair Haven and the Hill that have been hit disproportionately hard by the coronavirus pandemic in the city and nationwide — are more likely to have higher incidence of comorbidities like diabetes or asthma. These health realities, when paired with less stringent testing for staff, contribute to a “milieu where outcomes can be worse” if a staff member were to contract the virus, Oldfield said.

Yale officials made it clear that the University was not infringing on city health resources with its testing program. Yale is also undertaking its own contact-tracing program to relieve stress on the city’s contact-tracing workforce, Genecin told the News.

Oldfield likened the plan to a luxury car — since Yale is focusing so many resources on regular testing and contact tracing, the program is more likely to prevent an outbreak than something less robust, just like a more expensive car is likely to perform better than a cheaper one.

“The Yale testing strategy is a bit of a Cadillac strategy that will be very effective. I wish we had systems like that for other folks,” Oldfield said. “I would love to see Yale take a more of a leadership role in really expanding testing into vulnerable communities.”

There remains an obvious disparity between the availability of testing for Yale community members and New Haveners unaffiliated with the University. At Fair Haven Community Health, patients can get a test within one to two days and receive a result between 48 and 72 hours after that for free, Oldfield said. He added that earlier in the summer, when states in the South and West were experiencing spikes in cases, it took labs longer to turn around results for his patients. Throughout the country, limited lab capacity remains an issue for processing tests.

“I definitely think the conversations were framed around how we can get students back safely and minimize the risk to New Haven, not necessarily maximizing the safety of New Haveners and questioning if it would benefit the city for students to come back at all.”

—Kahlil Greene '21, Yale College Council President

BEYOND YALE

Each Greater New Haven college has a slightly different plan due to differences in the number of students that live on campus and the availability of teaching materials to students at home. For example, art and culinary classes are being held in person at Gateway because many students do not have access to the equipment they need to learn. All five colleges with residential options have some students returning to campus, and all five will move to entirely online classes after Thanksgiving break.

Yale is doing the most testing of any college in the area, however. Students at Albertus and Southern were tested upon arrival, and a random sample of 5 to 10 percent of their student bodies will be tested weekly throughout the semester.

Still, each college’s overall goals are the same, and the city is working with each school to make sure its plan works for its particular culture and demographics, according to Jennifer Vazquez, director of public health nursing for the New Haven Health Department. Yale has the greatest percentage of enrolled students from outside of Connecticut of the six Greater New Haven colleges. During normal times, Yale also hosts the highest percentage of undergraduates in on-campus housing. 

“We do believe there are good plans in place. We continue to do education and track data very closely,” Vazquez said. “We want to provide support where we can, so we are very optimistic we will be able to continue to work well together.”

As of Monday night, Albertus, Gateway and Quinnipiac had not reported new coronavirus cases since classes began. As of Aug. 30, the University of New Haven had two cases among commuter students and, as of Sept. 5, Southern had reported two cases among on-campus students and staff and four self-reported cases among commuter students. As of last Wednesday, Yale has reported 11 cases since the start of August among students and staff.

Elsewhere in the state, UConn’s Storrs campus has seen 100 positive cases among residential students since testing started on campus on Aug. 14, according to data updated on Monday. 

Despite rises in cases on college campuses across Connecticut, state Rep. Pat Dillon SPH ’98 — whose district includes the New Haven neighborhoods of Dwight, West River, Edgewood and Westville — said that colleges should not blame students when things go wrong and make sure that students have the tools they need to prevent the spread of the virus.

“I don’t think it’s a threat to the city at all that people are coming back, and I don’t think it’s a threat to the students,” Dillon said in an interview with the News. “It just takes a lot of thinking.”

Dillon is also the deputy majority leader in the Connecticut House of Representatives, and her husband, John Hughes, is the assistant director of the Yale School of Medicine’s biomedical ethics program.

Dillon also said she was proud of how much progress the city and the state had made on containing the coronavirus since the worst days of April, but added that the progress “does not mean much” to her because cases could rise again if “we do not build safeguards.”

Still, Ward 22 Alder Jeanette Morrison wants students to feel welcome in New Haven provided they follow the rules.

“As long as [the students] are safe, they quarantine as expected and they do all of the testing that Yale has put in place. This is their home, too,” Morrison said. “I don’t ever want students to feel like they’re just visitors. They’re here longer than they are wherever they live, so I welcome them home.”

(Courtesy of Yale News)

UP CLOSE:
Prisons hit by a pandemic

In Connecticut, the COVID-19 crisis has brought the prison healthcare system under even further scrutiny.

Story by Meera Shoaib

Graph by Crystal Cheung

Cover Illustration by David Zheng

Published on April 22, 2020

In January 2017, Patrick Camera complained to the medical staff of Osborn Correctional Institution about ongoing sinus and nasal pain.

During the months that followed, Camera repeatedly visited the medical unit, sometimes multiple times a day, to get Tylenol or Motrin for his bleeding nose. But after a June chest x-ray that did not reveal abnormalities, the staff began turning Camera away. By August, his nosebleeds had twice required a team of people in hazardous material suits to clean up after him.

Only when Camera was taken to a hospital in an ambulance in November 2017, did the doctors discover that Camera had a tumor in his nasopharynx that had grown to the size of a baseball and invaded his eye socket and brain.

In September 2018, almost two years after Camera first notified the medical staff about his health conditions, he filed a lawsuit against his doctors and then-commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Corrections Scott Semple. In the lawsuit, Camera alleged that his doctors suspected he was not telling the truth about his symptoms but was attempting to gain access to pills instead. 

In 2019, less than a year after the lawsuit was filed, Camera died of advanced-stage cancer. 

Camera’s case is one of many harrowing accusations of medical malfeasance across correctional facilities that have been levelled against the Connecticut Department of Corrections in recent years. 

Until 2018, prison healthcare was managed by Correctional Managed Health Care, a division of the University of Connecticut that was charged with providing care to about 13,400 inmates across Connecticut’s 14 correctional facilities. However, after numerous lawsuits, the CDOC flagged 25 inmate medical cases that had ended tragically — including Camera’s. This resulted in the CDOC terminating its annual $100 million contract with CMHC and taking over its own prison healthcare in 2018.

Still, the CDOC has continued to face claims of inadequate healthcare in the two years since its takeover. Last year, a pregnant 19-year-old at York Correctional Institute filed a lawsuit after her request to see a doctor was denied and she gave birth in the toilet of her cell. In January of this year, an inmate died at Osborn Correctional Institution after hitting his head, and two correctional nurses are on leave pending the result of an internal investigation into his death. The CDOC did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.

This year, correctional facilities have been hit by the biggest health crisis in living memory: the COVID-19 pandemic. As of April 21, the CDOC reported that they had seen 303 cases of inmate infection in the state and 222 cases in correctional staff. Earlier this month, the state saw the first inmate death from COVID-19 infection — a man in his 60s with underlying conditions, who died after being hospitalized at the University of Connecticut Health Center. And it is not only inmates who are shouldering the impact of the pandemic — healthcare workers and correctional staff are also struggling due to short staffing and a lack of protective equipment, several such workers said in interviews with the News.  

According to Alicia Schmidt Camacho, chair of Ethnicity, Race & Migration, it is not the pandemic that lies at the heart of concerns about health and safety inside prisons. Instead, the pandemic is laying bare the preexisting problems of mass incarceration that both inmates and correctional workers have been facing for years.

A BREEDING GROUND FOR THE VIRUS

The very nature of correctional facilities makes it almost impossible to follow the mantra of the COVID-19 pandemic: social distancing. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention splashes in bold print on its website that the best way to prevent illness is to avoid exposure to the virus. But in a system that relies on shuttering people within close quarters, evading contact with the virus seems unlikely. 

“Prisons and jails are the single most dangerous place to be during a pandemic,” Brett Davidson, founder and co-director of the Connecticut Bail Fund, told the News. “The spaces are filthy, there is no possibility for social distancing, virtually no access to healthcare and widespread dehumanization and abuse. None of these problems are new, but they are all intensified in a moment like this.” 

According to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, the close proximity of prisoners create the ideal circumstances for a virus to fester. Common areas such as dayrooms, bathrooms and showers are breeding grounds for COVID-19. Even if a facility goes on lockdown, contact is inevitable — between prisoners and staff, or between prisoners themselves, as a simple cell change or trip to the shower provides opportunities for transmission. 

According to Sean Howard, a correctional officer at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, inmates were still leaving their cells and congregating with each other — playing sports such as basketball and handball outside or playing cards with each other indoors. In addition, Howard said inter-facility transfers were still occurring — last week, an inmate transferred into Cheshire with a fever of 102 degrees.

“Prisons and jails are the single most dangerous place to be during a pandemic.”

—Brett Davidson, founder and co-director of the Connecticut Bail Fund

Prisons across the United States also suffer from overcrowding, as the U.S. has more incarcerated people than any other country in the world, both in absolute numbers and per capita. According to data collected by the American Civil Liberties union, while the country has less than five percent of the world’s population, its prisoners account for a quarter for the global prison population. These numbers indicate that it is difficult, if not impossible, for prisoners to keep six feet of distance from one another — especially where facilities like the Willard-Cybulski Correctional Institution house up to 100 individuals in one dormitory-style room. 

Steve Wales, a correctional officer at Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center in Montville, said that while the CDOC had restricted activity, inmates were still “mingling all day” as they lived together in one dorm. Corrigan-Radgowski spread out their inmates from 105 to a room to 60 after the COVID-19 outbreak and implemented guidelines for social distancing, but Wales said that the prison had turned into a hotspot for the disease regardless. 

Another key advisory by the CDC is to continuously wash one’s hands — another great challenge in correctional facilities, according to Matt Post ’22, president of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project. In order to gain access to soap and other personal hygiene supplies, inmates must purchase them from the prison commissary unless they have less than $5.00 in their account, according to the Friends and Family Handbook for Offenders and Inmates released by the CDOC. A memo sent to the prison population about the commissary on April 6 stated that all soaps were sold at cost. 

“By design, these prisons were not set up to promote public health,” Post told the News. “When you put people in cages, in close quarters next to each other, the end result is people dying unjustly.” 

Hand sanitizer is usually considered contraband in prisons, as its alcohol base can be removed from the gel. Yet even if alcohol-free sanitizers were made readily available, the CDC recommends an alcohol content of at least 60 percent to effectively combat COVID-19. According to the ACLU-CT’s lawsuit, cleaning equipment is also often frequently in short supply or diluted, and the strong cleaning agents — such as bleach — needed for high-touch surfaces like doorknobs and light switches are often unavailable. 

OVERWORKED AND UNDERSTAFFED 

Unions across the state who represent healthcare workers and other correctional staff have been warning the CDOC about understaffing for years. According to a document provided by the CDOC to the legislature’s nonpartisan office of fiscal analysis last March, the department had 309 nurses on staff for 12,320 inmates, and one medical provider — a doctor or physician’s assistant — for every 579 inmates. 

“We’ve been alerting the state for a couple years now that the healthcare staff in prisons is too short,” Pedro Zayas, spokesperson for Connecticut healthcare workers’ union SEIU Healthcare 1199NE, told the News. “You can see that if you look at the overtime numbers even before the crisis began. There’s just not enough frontline staff for each shift.” 

One nurse at Northern Correctional Institution, which currently houses all Connecticut inmates who have tested positive for COVID-19, painted a bleak picture of work conditions. Ellen Durko, who is part of SEIU Healthcare 1199NE, told the News that there were only two nurses on staff every shift to care for the COVID-19 positive inmates at Northern. Northern Correctional Institution could not be reached for comment.

As Northern is part of a cluster of four correctional facilities in the area, Durko said that staff were stretched so thinly that two of the facilities were left “high and dry” without a nurse on night shifts when healthcare personnel were diverted to COVID-19 patients. If there were an emergency in one of those facilities in the middle of the night, Durko explained, there would be nobody on-site to provide immediate care. All nurses are required to work double shifts, she said — 16 hours without relief for meals or breaks. 

“I’m utterly exhausted,” Durko said in an interview with the News. “I was mandated 16 hours twice within the span of four days. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to pass out when we’re doing the assessments.” 

Durko said that she typically engages in an assessment of 60 to 70 inmates on one shift with one other nurse. Her equipment consists of one vital signs machine and one pressure cuff. She wears a disposable gown intended for single use throughout the week, and the strap on her mask is already broken from overuse.

In response to the pandemic, press releases by the CDOC and its commissioner Rollin Cook state that the department has discontinued all social visitation, suspended inmate community work crews and increased cleaning efforts and availability of soaps at facilities. Lawyers are encouraged to make legal calls in place of visits, and nonessential inter-facility transfers have been limited. Staff have also waived the $3 co-pay usually required for medical attention.

“I’m utterly exhausted. I was mandated 16 hours twice within the span of four days. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to pass out when we’re doing the assessments.”

—Ellen Durko, nurse at Northern Correctional Institution

Yet, according to Durko, correctional staff had been left with their “mouths wide open” as the pandemic unfolded and the CDOC remained inert. She said that as the state closed down schools, bars and restaurants in March, prison functions — such as non-essential transfers and work assignments — continued. As the CDOC lacked a “concrete plan,” Durko said, and nobody from the Central Office at the DOC had updated nurses, staff at Northern were told to construct the COVID-19 unit just hours before sick individuals were set to arrive.

In interviews with the News, correctional officers told the same story of a system unprepared for a crisis. Wales, who is the corresponding secretary for the union AFSCME Local 1565 as well as a correctional officer, said that staff at Corrigan had only received N-95 masks last week. According to Wales, this was despite warnings from union members as early as December that the department lacked PPE equipment.

Howard, who is also president of the union AFSCME Local 387, told the News that correctional officers desperately needed personal protective equipment as they came into close contact with inmates daily to perform pat-downs and searches. 

“I worry every day, because not only do I worry for myself, I worry for my fellow co-workers and our families that we’re going home to after we do this job for 8–16 hours,” Howard said. “It’s a dangerous time, and it’s even more dangerous during this COVID time when [the CDOC] isn’t giving us the proper equipment to do our job.” 

Howard said that, like healthcare staff, correctional officers are mandated overtime and becoming increasingly short-staffed as they continue to come down with the virus. 

“TORTURE IS NOT A PUBLIC HEALTH SOLUTION” 

The CDOC announced that all inmates who have tested positive for COVID-19 after April 8 will be transferred to an isolation unit at the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut. Upon testing negative for the virus, the individual would be returned to their original facility. 

Northern is Connecticut’s “supermax” Level 5 security prison. The facility has a capacity of 500 — generally isolation units — and is designed to hold male convicts serving long-term sentences for highly violent crimes. It also housed inmates on death row before Connecticut abolished capital punishment in the state in 2012. 

As of April 17, the CDOC said that 170 COVID-19 positive inmates had been transferred to Northern. If an individual’s situation worsens, the CDOC said, they would be transferred to a hospital.

“Solitary confinement is bad enough on its own, but when you start to have massive numbers of people without adequate planning at a facility that is known for inhumane treatment — you’re going to see incredibly devastating conditions,” Joseph Gaylin, a steering member for the social justice organization Stop Solitary CT, told the News in an interview. “The other problem is that, since they know they’re going to face something akin to solitary confinement, transferring COVID-positive inmates to Northern CI disincentivizes people from self-reporting their symptoms.”

Stop Solitary CT has long been advocating for the closure of Northern and the abolition of solitary confinement. In an open letter to Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, the group claimed that “torture is not a public health solution,” and in fact, solitary confinement constituted a public health crisis of its own because of its psychological toll. Studies of prisoners placed in isolation have reported depression, intrusive thoughts or symptoms of psychopathology such as hallucinations and perceptual distortions. 

The Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School penned a letter last year to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, urging the rapporteur to declare that the DOC’s use of prolonged isolation, especially at Northern, constitutes torture under international law.  

In their report, the Lowenstein Clinic collated multiple testimonies of individuals incarcerated at Northern.  The clinic found that the isolation cells at Northern were unsanitary beyond what could be expected in a lower security prison, documenting the use of in-cell restraints and negligence that have led to individuals trapped in cells covered in their own bodily fluids. According to Durko, the CDOC is not letting the COVID-19 positive inmates in Northern shower for the duration of their quarantine. 

“The way that Northern is built is designed to break you down … to make you feel worthless, unwanted and scattered in that building like unwanted remains,” wrote Kezlyn Mendez, an inmate at Northern, in his testimony to the clinic.  “It’s a dump for humans — you can do whatever you want with them. That’s where they dispose what they consider to be trash for the state.” 

However, Durko told the News that she believed the staff at Northern were generally compassionate and cared about the health of their inmates. Durko cited a CERT team — a correctional emergency response team — of officers who had volunteered to work on the frontlines of the crisis, who she said “bent over backwards to do everything they could to make the inmates comfortable.” Durko explained that these officers checked on sick inmates throughout the day and fulfilled requests for materials such as paper and books. She said that this was part of efforts to show inmates that they were supported in overcoming COVID-19. 

“FREE THEM ALL” 

According to Camacho, the nature of a punitive facility means that, in some cases, healthcare staff can have a conflict of interest when providing patient care — especially when doctors are reporting to the prison itself. In addition, she said, for-profit prisons have a motive to restrict and reduce costs. 

“Things like dispensation of medication, access to quality care, checkups, exercise, education, mental health services — all of that gets reduced,” Camacho said. “And as this is a population that’s captive and largely invisible to the larger society, there’s very little accountability around that. So decisions are made, like keeping calorie counts very, very low and restricting access to medicines.” 

A lack of sufficient prison healthcare, combined with the aging prison population in Connecticut, means that many prisoners are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19. The virus is known to most heavily affect older individuals and those who are immunocompromised. 

A coalition of organizations — including the Lowenstein Clinic, Stop Solitary CT and the Connecticut Bail Fund — penned an open letter on March 16 calling on Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont to release at-risk prisoners throughout the state. 

The letter specified suggestions for pretrial release and post-conviction release. The former concerns individuals who cannot post bail and are imprisoned before they are sentenced; the latter is directed towards individuals who are serving a sentence but are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 due to their age or health status. 

“There are certain buckets of people where we believe the governor can pretty quickly get people out,” Gaylin said. “There are over 2000 people that have less than a year left on their sentence, and 1600 people in prison for technical violations. There’s over 5000 people who are parole-eligible, and 3000 people that are unsentenced.” 

One group has been lobbying politicians across Connecticut with the broadest call: to free all incarcerated individuals in the state. The Connecticut Bail Fund is demanding full decarceration and a moratorium on the incarceration of any new individuals. 

“In a rapid response manner, we established a prison support hotline, we dramatically grew our commissary fund, and, for the first time in four years, we depleted our bail fund, getting as many people out as possible,” Davidson, co-director and founder of the Bail Fund, told the News. “We are trying to put resources in the hands of families so they can better advocate for their loved ones — both in the courts and on the streets — while also protecting the integrity of our message, which is the total illegitimacy of the system and the need to free all incarcerated people globally.”

The Bail Fund has also spearheaded several protests outside correctional facilities across the state and outside Lamont’s mansion. In order to adhere to social distancing guidelines, organizers have turned out in their cars in “honkathons” in place of traditional protests. In the past two weeks, the Bail Fund has posted videos on Facebook of organizers chanting and leaving their cars outside correctional institutions to wave flags emblazoned with the words “Free Them All.” 

A SLOW RESPONSE 

The ACLU-CT has claimed that over 100 government agencies have mechanisms they can use to legally release prisoners.  Police officers, at their discretion, can choose to serve individuals accused of misdemeanors with written complaints or summons instead of arresting them on the spot. The 13 state’s attorneys and the chief state’s attorney have the power to alter pretrial detention recommendations, modify existing sentences or adjust their own sentencing recommendations. The Board of Pardons and Paroles has independent authority to grant paroles and commutations to people who are incarcerated. For specific offences, such as individuals convicted of certain motor vehicle and drug offences, the DOC could recommend release from facility to homes under electronic monitoring.

Most activists have focused on the CDOC and Gov. Ned Lamont, as the two could use emergency powers to immediately release large swathes of people. 

Following protests outside Lamont’s mansion on April 6 by the activists and families who had members incarcerated, the governor eventually agreed to a meeting to discuss releases. Lamont offered a meeting for April 9, which he rescheduled for days later and eventually cancelled, according to a press release from the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. Lamont did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

In a press briefing on April 7 with Lamont and CDOC Commissioner Cook, Cook said that the prison population count had dropped by 727 people since March 1 — the largest one-month reduction in Connecticut history. 

Lamont said the releases were largely focused on “low-violence, lowest-risk” individuals while making certain that they had safe places to return to upon release. Cook said he would not release anyone from a correctional facility who did not have a home to return to, but that the CDOC was collaborating with the judicial branch to analyze the pretrial population to determine their eligibility for compassionate and medical parole. 

Both Cook and Lamont have said that they consider criminal justice reform to be a key priority of their tenures. Lamont supported a bill allowing the erasure of criminal records for misdemeanor offenses and has signed laws increasing transparency around police use-of-force instances and data collected on the criminal justice system. 

“Prior to any staff or offender COVID-19 cases, my direction was clear: review all eligible and suitable low-risk offenders for release without circumventing routine protocols that support public safety as swiftly as possible, and add a layer of review that will prioritize offenders considered high-risk per the CDC guidelines,” Cook said at the press briefing. 

However, an analysis by Hearst Connecticut Media indicates that the drop in prison population since March 1 is overwhelmingly the result of fewer new intakes into jails, not large-scale releases of existing prisoners. 

Prisons across the country have planned to release thousands of inmates in accordance with a memo from Attorney General William Barr to increase the use of home confinement and expedite releases of inmates deemed to be at high risk for COVID-19 infection. California announced that it was releasing 3,500 inmates. New Jersey has moved to release up to 1,000 people from county jails. Internationally, Iran has set free over 80,000 inmates and in Poland, up to 12,000.

Yet, it seems that Connecticut has not quite followed suit. 

“I think politically, there’s always a concern that some of those released recommit a crime — a very narrow, self-interested concern that it will hurt [politicians’] political standing and reputation,” Ethnicity, Race, & Migration professor Daniel HoSang told the News in an interview. “But there’s no direct correlation between prison construction and incarcerations rates and episodes of violent harm or offense. You can see that because there are states that have lower incarceration rates with similar demographics and they don’t necessarily have higher rates of crime.” 

However, some staff at correctional facilities told the News that mass releases were not the solution. Howard told the News that he “strongly disagreed” with decarceration, as he believed it would put a strain on public safety. 

Durkos echoed Howard’s sentiment, saying that some of the inmates she saw at Northern would be unable to integrate back into the general population due to mental illness or lack of impulse control. Others, she said, have substance abuse addictions that prison rehabilitation programs might be able to help keep at bay. 

“Our parole officers in the field are already overworked; their caseload is already very heavy,” Wales said. “If we add [mass releases] to them, and then these guys aren’t properly monitored, I think that’s a bad thing for public safety.” 

COMMUNITY AND REFORM

“It’s growing inequality within our society, and New Haven is one of the most economically polarized cities with a large concentration of people who lack basic social and economic support.”

—Alicia Schmidt Camacho, chair of Ethnicity, Race & Migration

In recent weeks, Lamont and Cook have also emphasized the importance of ensuring that anyone who is released from a correctional facility has a solid plan for reentering into society. Releasing inmates during a pandemic is complex: individuals are facing the typical difficulties of integration compounded by a world facing economic instability and mass unemployment. However, activists explained that their demands encapsulate robust reentry support for released individuals.

“We demand and will fight for a world in which all people have access to healthcare, housing, education, income, restorative justice systems and all the basic necessities of life,” Davidson said. “The current lack of housing for people [outside of] prisons and jails is not a reason not to decarcerate. It’s a reason to couple decarceration with massive investment in public resources.” 

According to HoSang, prison has become somewhat of a “catch-all” for social problems over the years: poverty, joblessness, drug abuse and violence. Instead of directly addressing those problems through meaningful social investment — for example, through education, housing or mental health services — society has generally turned towards the punitive route of incarceration. 

“It’s growing inequality within our society, and New Haven is one of the most economically polarized cities with a large concentration of people who lack basic social and economic support,” Camacho said. 

The problems of overworked staff, inadequate healthcare and unsanitary facilities have been voiced by unions, inmates and prison advocacy organizations for decades. While COVID-19 has certainly exacerbated the issues that predated the disease, the pandemic has critically shown that the boundary between correctional facilities and their communities is easily permeated — according to correctional doctor Josiah Rich’s sworn affidavit in the ACLU-CT’s lawsuit against Cook and Lamont. 

Visitors, healthcare staff, correctional officers, contractors and vendors are constantly moving between correctional facilities and the rest of society, Rich said. As public health resources run dry, sick inmates become a concern for everyone as increased COVID-19 infections pose a greater threat of exposure for the general public. According to Rich, as ICU beds and ventilators are already running short, a surge of critically ill inmates transferred to hospitals could overwhelm public health resources. 

Calls for alleviating the immediate pressure on the prison system have included advocating for mass releases or increasing support within correctional facilities, so staff are better equipped to handle outbreaks and prevent community spread. Others have used this as an opportunity to speculate on ways to fundamentally reshape the justice system — for example, by decriminalizing certain activities and investing the money used for mass incarceration into public resources. Looking forward, however, it still remains to be seen whether the COVID-19 pandemic will spark long-term prison reform, or eventually fade from social and legislative agendas once the crisis has passed. 

“I do think there is an opening here to get people to imagine a world where you can be safe and free of harm, which doesn’t rely on just warehousing people,” HoSang said.

(Wikimedia Commons)

UP CLOSE:
COVID-19, homelessness and New Haven’s response

Story by Mackenzie Hawkins

Cover Photo by David Zheng

Published on April 21, 2020

“What am I supposed to do?” asked a man at a March 19 COVID-19 press conference on the steps of City Hall. He was one of a half-dozen homeless individuals who interrupted Mayor Justin Elicker’s daily briefing. “Am I supposed to sleep on the Green and if I get sick, infect everybody that I get in contact with? You guys have homes to go to … but we have nowhere to go. We’re [at the] bottom of the barrel right now.”

A day prior, Elicker had announced New Haven’s plans for the city’s homeless population. Those plans — which include a self-isolation site at Hill Regional Career High School for those who test positive for COVID-19 and hotel rooms for those who are asymptomatic or awaiting test results — came to fruition over the next three weeks. But the measures were in the early stages on March 19 and did not solve homeless individuals’ immediate problem: finding a bed for that night. 

While Elicker focused his March 19 remarks on community criticism of his plans for Career, Bryant Tatum, who is experiencing homelessness, pressed the mayor on his plans for homeless individuals who had not tested positive for COVID-19. Elicker acknowledged a shelter capacity issue and pointed to 24 hotel rooms the city had rented. But Tatum was told those rooms were for the elderly, he responded.

When another individual asked where he was supposed to sleep that night, Elicker asked that he attempt to contact a shelter. But that man had tried the shelters, he said. They were full. Elicker promised to talk to him after the briefing.

Homeless individuals — an at-risk population in New Haven even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the city — are especially vulnerable to a public health crisis for which the main recommendation is “stay at home.” 

Beds are far from the only issue. During the day, those who typically spend time in libraries or coffee shops — in a city where winter temperatures often dip below freezing — are now confined to the street if not placed in a state-contracted hotel room. Elicker closed the Elm City’s public libraries on March 13. Three days later, Gov. Ned Lamont ordered all restaurants, bars, gyms and theaters in the state to shut their doors. 

In addition to finding a shelter, hand-washing — the CDC’s main public health recommendation — becomes near impossible for the homeless population when soup kitchen bathrooms are unavailable as food providers switch to take-away meals. When food providers shared that problem with city officials during a weekly COVID-19 conference call, the city installed port-a-potties on the Green. 

New Haven’s pandemic policies — from port-a-potties to emptying the city’s shelters — have been the result of collaboration at the local and state levels. While some service providers have praised New Haven for a robust and relatively quick response, others have called on the city to do more. 

When the immediate storm passes, the challenges will be far from over. New Haven has more shelter beds than any other city in the region, but still falls short of the city’s need. Those who can find a bed night-to-night struggle to transition to long-term affordable housing — although the pandemic application process has been expedited in some cases. 

And the economic picture is grim. At the beginning of the month, Connecticut processed more unemployment applications in a week than it usually does in a year. Homeless individuals who were poised to have stable income sources — which are essential to finding permanent shelter — have lost those opportunities. Those without job opportunities prior to the pandemic are unlikely to find them as the local economy struggles to rebound. 

Looking ahead at the coming months and even years, service providers, local officials and state leaders will have to address what some predict will be an unprecedented strain on homeless services in the Elm City. 

“You guys have homes to go to … but we have nowhere to go. We’re [at the] bottom of the barrel right now.”

Social services in a time of social distancing 

Sunrise Cafe went grab-and-go. Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen shifted part of its operations to delivery. Several smaller pantries shuttered their doors. In a matter of days, New Haven’s entire homeless service apparatus had transformed. 

The process began in mid-March, when Lamont declared a public health emergency in Connecticut on March 10, and Elicker followed suit in the Elm City five days later. These proclamations sparked the beginning of a weeks-long effort to curb the spread of the virus in New Haven’s homeless community. 

Sunrise Cafe, which offers restaurant-style breakfast services, set up a tent on March 12 and plans to continue grab-and-go services for the duration of the pandemic, administrator Art Hunt told the News. Community Soup Kitchen began offering take-out through its dining room backdoor on March 10.

Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen piloted a similar method for the first three weeks of the crisis, Executive Director Steve Werlin said in an interview. DESK has a split operation: hot meals for the homeless and a pantry service for those who have shelter but struggle to put food on the table. Werlin said that DESK hopes to end the service for the homeless by working diligently with city officials to connect those individuals with hotel rooms. He hopes to shift the pantry to delivery to minimize outdoor trips for clients, many of whom are at high-risk for serious cases of COVID-19. 

Most homeless shelters in New Haven have congregate housing, where residents sleep, eat and live in communal spaces. The Elm City’s largest shelter, Columbus House — which houses 101 residents at its main site and 75 at a warming center across the street — immediately changed protocol in an effort to implement social distancing, Chief Development Officer John Brooks told the News.

Initial measures included staggered dinner meals and CDC-recommended screenings upon entry. Water fountains became hand-washing stations; hand-washing became a requirement in the lobby and dining room.

Amid fears that volunteers could bring the virus within shelter doors, volunteer activity ground to a quick halt and frontline staff members — the “unsung heroes” of the entire operation, in Brooks’ words — began serving evening meals. Visitors were banned. 

While residents are normally free to leave during the day and come back at night, the shelter required them to stay indoors, spare scheduled outdoor time in small groups. By late March, fresh air was no longer an option. While residents complied with ever-stricter regulations, Brooks described the situation as “tough.” 

“We’re really on a lockdown,” Columbus House resident Kimberly Kinell told the New Haven Register. Other women lamented their inability to see their children given restrictions on daytime movement. 

And while the virus did not spread throughout the shelter — there were no positive cases as of April 3, when the last residents left for area hotels — fear did. 

“We’re all so close together,” Jennifer Palladino told the Register. Shelter residents share sleeping quarters and communal spaces, making compliance with CDC social distancing guidelines — which stipulate six feet between beds and in general — a tremendous challenge.

To hotels, from shelters and streets 

On March 16, one day after declaring a state of emergency, Elicker put homeless shelter decompression at the top of his stated priority list. New Haven’s shelters are still up and running, but the city needed alternatives given the inherent difficulties of social distancing, Elicker said at the time.

Two days later, the city presented several solutions. March 18 marked the beginning of the three-week transition from shelters to hotel rooms — one that proved more challenging than anticipated, Elicker said on April 20. 

In what Brooks described as the “first wave” of the process, the city finalized a contract with a local hotel for 24 double-occupancy rooms. Soon after the city contract, the United Way of Greater New Haven secured an additional 20 rooms in coordination with state officials. The first wave focused on the most high-risk shelter residents: those over the age of 60 and those with underlying health conditions. Around 20 Columbus House residents fit this profile. Residents of Martha’s Place, a women’s shelter, filled the remainder of the hotel rooms. 

The state ramped up its involvement on March 28 after FEMA approved Lamont’s presidential major disaster declaration request, unlocking federal funding that will reimburse up to 75 percent of Connecticut’s COVID-19-related expenditures. 

The process began with an executive order: Homeless shelters across the state had to close. Over the next week, the state footed the bill for around another 100 homeless individuals in New Haven to move into hotels and folded the original 24 city-rented rooms into its contracts. 

That process was not without its challenges: The day before a scheduled move to Best Western of West Haven, West Haven Police Chief Joseph S. Perno delivered a letter to the hotel requiring nearly $5,000 per day in police services. While this temporarily put the deal in jeopardy, the state resurrected its contract two days later and rented 100 rooms with no provisions for extra-duty police officers. New Haven Community Services Administrator Dr. Mehul Dalal confirmed in an April 18 email that this effort completed the relocation process for New Haven’s individual adult shelters.

The city’s youth and family shelters are not slated to move residents to hotels. Christian Community Action’s Hillside Family Shelter — which houses about 10 families in single-entry, single-exit apartment units — is fully operative with some remote services, Executive Director Bonita Grubbs told the News on April 8. Dalal told the News in an April 20 email that Life Haven, a family shelter, “has separate rooms already” and that Youth Continuum Shelter “reduced occupancy to the point where clients have their separate spaces.” 

Once in hotels, homeless individuals receive three meals per day via a city-operated delivery service, Dalal said. While the city is fronting the costs as of now, Elicker said on April 7 that he anticipates 75 percent reimbursement from the federal government — a figure made possible by his earlier emergency declaration. Case workers and residential staff are present in hotels, but they conduct most of their work remotely, Brooks told the News in an interview. 

Still, the three-week hotel room relocation process did not house the Elm City’s entire homeless population. For those without a shelter bed prior to the transition period, the process of finding accommodation is similar to its pre-pandemic counterpart: calling 2-1-1, a housing hotline operated by United Way. 

Teresa Lyck, who attended Elicker’s March 19 briefing, said at the time that she was put on hold with 2-1-1 for hours, and to no avail. According to the 2-1-1 website, nine percent of housing calls in the past month have gone unmet. 

“The city is currently working with our partners on a multidisciplinary plan to serve the remaining unsheltered,” Dalal wrote in an April 18 email. “This plan includes outreach and engagement, from medical and behavioral health teams as well as a plan for triage into hotels or housing as available.”

Brooks told the News that Columbus House’s frontline workers will conduct routine street outreach for the duration of the crisis. Based on an early April headcount of clients, Werlin knows of at least 42 people still on the street and estimates that the figure is closer to 100 when adding estimates from other organizations. DESK, he said, continues to serve as an entry point for those seeking accommodation. 

Self-isolation without a home

As hospital systems across the country are overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, those who test positive but do not require intensive care are asked to self-isolate at home. But for those without one, this is an impossible task. Recognizing this challenge, the city on March 18 announced plans to erect a self-isolation site for the homeless at Hill Regional Career High School. 

Noting its proximity to Yale New Haven Hospital, a well-suited gymnasium and central location along major roads, the federal government designated Career as a regional emergency shelter site following Hurricane Irene in 2011. As such, the city can expect federal reimbursement for its use — a factor that played heavily in Elicker’s decision to choose it over two other locally identified shelter sites: Hillhouse High School and Wilbur Cross High School. 

But the mayor’s choice quickly drew criticism. The morning after Elicker’s announcement, nine leaders from the Hill neighborhood — which houses the school-turned-self-isolation-site — gathered outside of Career to condemn the mayor’s location decision on the grounds that the Hill is already oversaturated with social services. With 24 providers, the neighborhood shoulders a greater burden than any other.

In a press conference the following afternoon, Elicker acknowledged the validity of these concerns but emphasized the need to act quickly. 

“We don’t have time right now to wait,” he said. “We need to look at the examples of other communities that are 11 days ahead of us in this experience where emergency health providers can’t cope with the number of people who are sick.” 

At the time, New Haven had seven confirmed cases. That number had grown to 361 by the time the Career site was ready to open on April 7.

In addition to systemic issues of oversaturation, former Ward 3 Alder Latrice James expressed her concern that COVID-19 patients would be able to walk in and out of the Career site, endangering Hill residents. At a Board of Education meeting the following Monday, several parents worried about health complications for their children upon returning to a school that had had COVID-19 within its walls.

Elicker and Emergency Operations Director Rick Fontana ensured the public that the city would implement stringent security measures and rigorous cleaning methods: round-the-clock police presence and video surveillance while the site houses the homeless, and a deep clean with hospital-grade disinfectant before students return to campus.

“This was a bit of a break for them from being homeless. Their concerns are really: ‘Where are they gonna go after?’ They may not be infectious anymore, but they’re still homeless.”

—Chaney Kalinich ’19 SPH ’20, Medical Reserve Corps volunteer

Elicker found support for his plan from the majority of the city’s Board of Education, which voted in favor of the Career self-isolation site on March 23. Still, BOE member Darnell Goldson — joined by two of his colleagues — asked the mayor to reconsider, citing concerns similar to those of Hill leaders. Larry Conaway, who voted against Goldson’s resolution, sent an email to his colleagues the following Friday expressing regret for not standing against the Career site. 

While the debate over the Career site ensued in meetings and at press conferences, the city faced difficulties in getting the facility up and running. On March 20 — two days after Elicker initially laid out the city’s plans — Fontana said that Career was “fully, from a logistical standpoint, ready to go.” After putting 40 beds in place in the first 24 hours, the city increased capacity to 50, which proved a “more manageable” number than the planned 75, Elicker said on April 7.

But staffing was another story. The city would need nurses, support staff, police and on-call doctors to stand up the site.

On March 26, Elicker issued a call for help, asking New Haveners with medical experience to sign up for the Medical Reserve Corps, a group of volunteers that support mass care settings and other public health activities. By March 27, Connecticut had 235 sign-ups statewide.

About one week later, New Haven trained its first 19 volunteers on April 2. The group — mostly nurses — was tasked with “checking temperatures [and] screening people,” a role New Haven Health Director Maritza Bond described as “basic medical follow up and triage.” The city also arranged for an on-call doctor and behavioral practitioner, she said. The next day, Bond and Fontana certified an additional six trainees. 

By April 7, the Career site was on standby, awaiting its first patients. The first two patients entered the facility on April 9. 

Chaney Kalinich ’19 SPH ’20, a certified EMT, is working at Career as an MRC volunteer. She told the News that the Career patients have expressed concerns about where they will turn once their stay at the self-isolation site is over. One patient who was discharged this weekend is currently living out of his car, she said. Another is scheduled to leave soon and his caseworkers have been unable to find accommodation — hotel rooms, she said, are not available. 

“This was a bit of a break for them from being homeless,” Kalinich told the News. “Their concerns are really: ‘Where are they gonna go after?’ They may not be infectious anymore, but they’re still homeless.”

Elicker noted on April 20 that patients discharged from Career no longer carry transmission risks but emphasized the need for more hotel rooms. While the state has secured agreements with two area hotels, the contract process has stalled due to hotels’ “willingness … to open up,” Elicker said. City officials are working diligently to expand hotel availability, he continued.

Fontana said that no one has been discharged from Career without a place to go. The city found a hotel room for one individual discharged on April 20, where he will stay for several days before moving to another accommodation, Fontana said. 

Past the pandemic 

As of April 20, eight homeless individuals in New Haven who have tested positive for COVID-19 are housed at or recently discharged from Career. Just under 200 are housed in hotels, and many remain on the street as the city works to find accommodation.

New Haven plans to keep these measures in place for the duration of the public health crisis. But when the fog has lifted, some are questioning whether the Elm City can — or should — return to normal.

New Haven resident Michael Cutler, who has been in and out of homelessness and currently lives with a friend, told the New Haven Register that hotel rooms and high school gymnasiums are temporary fixes to a plight that predates the pandemic.

“It’s got to be a long-term solution,” he said. “Humanity is not just something part-time. You don’t help another person just because you’re in a crisis.”

New Haven offers more homeless services than any of its neighbors by a wide margin, but service providers and city officials agree that shelters fall short of meeting the homeless population’s needs. Those who can get into shelters live in crowded spaces, and despite the Elm City boasting more affordable housing than surrounding cities — 32 percent as compared to 10 percent or less — expensive accommodation options make leaving homeless shelters and city streets a challenge.

New Haven, Sunrise Cafe’s Hunt said, is not unique in “not providing particularly robust services for the homeless.” He does not anticipate the situation changing for the better or worse in the long term. Still, Hunt credited the Elm City with a COVID-19 response that has “really ramped up to be a pretty robust [one].”

“It’s got to be a long-term solution. Humanity is not just something part-time. You don’t help another person just because you’re in a crisis.”

—Michael Cutler, New Haven resident

Despite its limitations, New Haven’s existing service coordination laid the groundwork for rapid mobilization amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Coordinated Access Network — formed a decade ago at the behest of government officials, shelter representatives, health centers and funders — continues to use 2-1-1 to connect homeless individuals with available housing options as those options shift from shelter beds to hotel rooms. Nine percent of the 1,349 New Haven housing calls the CAN has received since March 21 have gone unmet, compared to 14 percent of a similar figure in the same period last year. The city has worked with the Greater New Haven CAN since the beginning of the shelter relocation process, Dalal told the News.

About 10 months ago, food servicers created an analogous Coordinated Food Assistance Network that has proven invaluable in recent weeks, Hunt said. Throughout the pandemic, CFAN has hosted twice-weekly calls to ensure that food banks and soup kitchens are working in lockstep. Food providers are also on twice-weekly calls with city officials.

“[Food and housing] efforts have been extremely well-coordinated through partnerships and coordinated networks that had already existed prior to this,” Werlin said. “The fruits of the last 10 years of collaborative work [among shelters] have really paid off in a crisis … All of the collaborative work [at CFAN has made the pandemic response] a lot smoother than it could have been.” 

For the most part, providers and officials agree that it is too early to anticipate specific effects that COVID-19 will have on homeless services. The city’s homelessness budget has flatlined in recent years and Elicker’s proposed allocation mirrors that of his predecessor’s last two budgets. How the COVID-19 pandemic may affect those numbers depends on the trajectory and longevity of the pandemic as well as the level of federal support the Elm City receives, Dalal said. 

Right now, New Haven is focused on connecting homeless individuals to state and federal financial assistance programs. When asked if the pandemic will change how his department approaches homeless services, Dalal said, “I suspect yes, but it’s too early to tell exactly how.” 

One thing that will not change is the city’s stance on homeless encampments, Elicker said on April 20. The Elm City has historically cracked down on encampments, including a May 2014 attempt by Amistad Catholic Worker House to establish a tent city in a vacant city-owned lot. Amistad Founder Mark Colville argued that New Haven’s opposition to encampments exacerbated the current crisis, but Elicker said that the pandemic has not changed the city’s position. 

Perhaps the pandemic has expedited the housing application process in a way that could outlive the current crisis, Brooks offered. Columbus House has placed 44 people into permanent housing since March 20, according to a press release. Brooks told the News in an April 3 interview that the process was quicker than usual for those who were already eligible for permanent housing.

But whether prospective applicants enter the housing process in the first place directly depends on their economic circumstances — and across the board, predictions for New Haven’s economy, and its impact on the city’s homeless, are grim. 

Those impacts are already visible. DESK has seen increased demand for its services, largely as a result of new people entering the system, Werlin said. Grubbs told the News that two families at Hillside were slated to move into permanent housing soon, but their heads of household have been laid off after a week working a new job and had a new opportunity cancelled, respectively. 

Elicker worried in an April 7 press conference that the state’s efforts to decompress its prison system would result in an influx of people requiring homeless services. And for those who were barely above water prior to the outbreak, the next few months will prove vital to lasting economic stability. 

According to Dalal, it is “undoubtedly the case” that there will be a greater demand for basic needs services.

“It is my hope we see this as a lesson that we cannot ignore segments of our community,” he said. “The pandemic makes clear that our long-term health and economic well-being depend on us seeing this as a collective problem.”

(Courtesy of Columbus House)

Looking back:
Justice for Stephanie and Paul, one year later

Story by Mackenzie Hawkins

Graphics by Christie Yu

Published on April 16, 2020

I n the early hours of the morning on April 16, 2019, Hamden police officer Devon Eaton and Yale Police officer Terrance Pollock fired 13 and three shots, respectively, at Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon, an unarmed black couple in their car.

The day of the shooting, life on Yale’s campus continued as normal, spare a morning email from YPD Chief Ronnell Higgins and an evening one from Vice President for Human Resources and Administration Janet Lindner. The admissions office and student groups were busy running Bulldog Days, which was scheduled from April 15 to 17. But beyond campus borders, a movement was growing. Activist groups, including People Against Police Brutality and Black Lives Matter New Haven, organized an evening rally outside the Hamden Police Department, drawing a crowd of about 200. Later that night, organizers protested at the site of the shooting on Dixwell Avenue and Argyle Street.

“I think we all built, during this time, the foundation for a relationship rooted in solidarity,” People Against Police Brutality organizer Kerry Ellington told the News in an April 14 interview. “I think all the different communities that were involved wanted to — and still want to — see an end goal where both officers are held accountable for their reckless actions on April 16 of last year.”

The following day, New Haven and Hamden mayors and police chiefs hosted a briefing that was absent of University officials and clear-cut answers. In addition to city activists, about a dozen student leaders from the Afro-American Cultural Center and Af-Am House Dean Rise Nelson attended. In a debrief behind City Hall, Yale students discussed next steps: New Haven and Hamden community activists would be protesting at University President Peter Salovey’s house within the hour, and several Yalies decided to join.

The demonstration started on Hillhouse Avenue and ended at YPD headquarters — and the path between the two, rather than initially suggested city streets, took demonstrators through the heart of campus and into the courtyard of Pauli Murray College.

“There was going to purposely be an effort to not allow anyone at Yale to ignore what was going on,” Black Men’s Union Solidarity Chair Isaac Yearwood ’22 said in an April 10 interview. “If you are on this campus and you have the capacity to be a part of this and you choose not to, you’re complicit.”

Several students expressed disappointment and frustration with the lack of student turnout that evening. Yearwood acknowledged the pressures on Yale students at the time — from Bulldog Days to looming final exams — but underscored that he views showing up for community activists, whether in person or on social media, as an obligation. Over the past year, student and community activists have collaborated to organize around last April’s shooting and a broader set of issues — building relationships that have transcended the incident that spurred them.

“There have always been iterations of students who have come through to this city who have really understood the significance of connecting with the community,” Ellington told the News. “So I don’t want to disregard students that I’ve worked with and organized with in the past … But [the shooting was] definitely, I would say, a significant moment for both black and brown Yale students on campus and black and brown residents in New Haven — a moment that was clear to come together, clear to make a united call.”

THE FOUNDERS’ ROOM

Student leaders from a slew of Af-Am House organizations and other spaces had been in constant conversation since that Wednesday night. Community organizers were planning a rally outside Woodbridge Hall for Thursday afternoon.

Having exchanged contact information following the demonstration at Salovey’s house and tapped into existing networks, University and city activists convened in the Founders’ Room of the Af-Am House on Thursday afternoon, hours before the rally was slated to start.

“To see a group of young black Yale students sit down and learn from [local activists] was amazing,” Elm City Vineyard Lead Pastor Joshua Williams ’08 DIV ’11 said in an April 13 interview. He was involved in race-related student activism during his time at Yale and said that New Haven’s black community had played a pivotal role in movements like the one to change the name of Calhoun College.

Yale students showing up for New Haven in the wake of the shooting, he said, was a “twin moment” paired with dining hall worker Corey Menafee smashing a window in protest of Grace Hopper College’s former namesake. New Haven residents have consistently fought for Yale students of color, he said, and students followed and reciprocated in the Founders’ Room that Thursday.

“In terms of an urgent response, it was the first time I had seen black students have this incredible deference to black New Haven — [asking] black New Haven to lead [so that Yale students] could follow,” Williams told the News. “That meeting set the backbone [for what was] clearly, by far, the most powerful protest I had been a part of in terms of New Haven activism [and] Yale activism.”

Yearwood said that the Founders’ Room meeting was marked by an instant sense of trust and solidarity. Everyone in the room was “there for the person that sat next to them,” he said, despite some having met only the night — or never — before.

Yale Black Women’s Coalition President Imani Richardson ’21 and Black Men’s Union Vice President Ben Dormus ’21 both said that the meeting reinforced that the Tuesday shooting was not an isolated instance, but rather part of a larger pattern of violence.

Within three hours, organizers were outside Woodbridge Hall, leading a rally that marked the beginning of a 500-person, seven-hour protest that shut down several major thoroughfare streets in the Elm City.

“JUSTICE FOR STEPHANIE, JUSTICE FOR PAUL”

Yearwood and Ellington at the Thursday protest. Courtesy of Sydney Holmes '20.

The Thursday demonstration highlighted several of many demands that activists would issue over the coming weeks. Among those demands: The University must immediately terminate Pollock.

Salovey said in a University-wide email on April 17 that the YPD officer had been placed on paid administrative leave and that the University could conduct its own investigation only once state officials had completed theirs. Eight months later — a timeframe not lost on those who had called for Pollock’s immediate firing — the University announced that Pollock, who had not been charged by the state, would be reassigned to a position that does not require a gun or a uniform.

While organizers had long advocated for Pollock’s termination, Laurie Sweet of Hamden Action Now — an organization formed in the wake of the shooting — told the News that Pollock’s shift to desk duty was a “small victory.”

But April’s shooting, in the eyes of many front-line activists, was a tragic symptom of a deeper systemic problem of violence against minority communities — a problem that Pollock’s eventual reassignment did not solve, they said.

“There is a larger context of state-sanctioned violence that we are in,” Ellington said outside Woodbridge Hall the Thursday following the shooting. “[Washington and Witherspoon] did absolutely nothing wrong. And even if they did do something wrong, it still wouldn’t be cause for deprivation of their rights. Why is it okay?”

Local activists called for a fair and thorough investigation from the state and the immediate release of all relevant camera footage.

Connecticut State Police made that footage — which included Hamden police body camera footage and all relevant dispatch audio — public about a week later. Pollock’s footage was unavailable, as he failed to turn on his camera at the time of the incident.

John Rovella, the commissioner of the State Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, said at the time that it was “unheard of” that the state police were “putting [the footage] out so quickly.” This marked a departure from normal operating procedures, he said, as footage is usually released only after termination of an investigation, which was to be conducted by State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin.

Months later, in July — following a legislative debate about police accountability reinvigorated by April’s shooting and another incident in Wethersfield — then-Gov. Dannel Malloy signed a bill requiring footage release within 96 hours of a public request.

The State’s Attorney concluded and published the results of his investigation in the fall. Griffin announced on Oct. 21 that, per the recommendation of his report, Connecticut had filed felony and misdemeanor charges against Eaton. Griffin declined to recommend charges for Pollock, who fired three shots after his own patrol car had been hit by a stray bullet from Eaton.

The existence of that investigation, Sweet said, was a win in itself. Connecticut law requires the state to investigate only fatal police shootings, she explained. This, she continued, means that the pressure she and others put on Hamden and the state forced the system to provide some measure of accountability, albeit slowly.

But in the aftermath of the investigation, activists continued to push for more decisive action from the state and the University. Yale Black Women’s Coalition Publicist Zoe Hopson ’22 recalled meeting Ellington and others at a local office building with Black Men’s Union Community Outreach Chair Jaelen King ’22 and Yearwood to plan next steps. About one week after the report was released, protesters from a coalition of community and student groups occupied the Broadway island at The Shops at Yale to call for both officers’ termination.

One town over, the Hamden Police Department responded to the state’s report by switching Eaton’s administrative leave from paid to unpaid, which remains his current status. Eaton pleaded not guilty to all criminal charges in a court appearance on Nov. 5.

With the state’s report complete, the Hamden Police Commission stated that it would wait for then-Acting Hamden Police Chief John Cappiello to conduct an internal investigation into Eaton’s actions and make a recommendation. Frustrated by continued delays and outraged that Eaton’s status had not made the Hamden Police Commission’s Nov. 13 meeting agenda — the first since the state’s report — around 100 student and community activists delivered heated speeches in the meeting’s public comment section.

“I feel enraged that it’s taken this long for the commission to be minimally receptive,” Ellington said in an interview at the time. “We shouldn’t be pleading to the police commission to put a near-attempted murder by their police officers on their agenda. We’ve seen the state turn a blind eye to these killings.”

At the end of the meeting, the commission confirmed that Cappiello would make an employment recommendation by Nov. 20.

Come Nov. 20, Cappiello recommended firing Eaton for committing multiple violations of the Hamden Police Rules and Regulations. According to several activists, this recommendation — which arrived seven months after the shooting — was the direct result of applied pressure.

Following the recommendation, the commission would have up to 30 days to commence with hearings. But before those 30 days were up, a court order prohibited further action.

On Dec. 6, New Haven Superior Court Judge John Blue granted an injunction — requested by the Hamden Police Union — that prevents the police commission from acting on Eaton’s employment status until his criminal case is resolved. Five months later, the case is ongoing.

Across the board, organizers agree that there is still much more work to do, beyond the immediate goal of holding Eaton criminally liable for his actions. Across the state, there were three fatal police shootings in the first 23 days of this year. One of the victims, Mubarak Soulemane, was a New Haven resident.

This constituted a “state of emergency” of police violence in New Haven, Hopson said. Others interviewed by the News agreed — the fight is far from over.

“WE DEMAND”

On both Yale and New Haven fronts, activists’ earliest demands focused on the involved officers and the timeliness and fairness of state and University investigations. But community organizers also repeated long-standing calls for greater accountability in the criminal justice system. Within days, Black Students for Disarmament at Yale, or BSDY — which formed in the wake of the shooting — had drawn up a broader list of demands.

In the hours after the Thursday protest and leading up to a massive Friday demonstration in Hamden, Yale organizers arranged rideshares and formed teams for social media, research, events, outreach and strategy. The goal, Yearwood explained, was to tailor broader community calls for justice — about armed police forces and broad boundary lines, for example — to actionable, Yale-specific items.

Throughout the deliberation process, student organizers were in constant communication with their New Haven and Hamden counterparts, texting and calling to run ideas by those who were leading the effort. King remembers community leaders being “so responsive and so receptive,” welcoming students into a decades-old fold of local organizing.

“People felt like something was different about that moment,” King told the News in an interview. “It wasn’t just another protest … The moment itself allowed for so much interplay and connection … People were just really open and receptive to building relationships [and] coming together for something that was bigger than us.”

A brainstorming session in the Af-Am House E-Room, early Friday, April 19, 2019. (Courtesy of Richard Mbouombouo '21.)

Yale seniors — who had been first years when massive protests about racial tensions swept the campus in 2015 — took the lead in the conversation, which started Thursday night and continued into the early hours of Friday morning in the Af-Am House’s E-Room.

Nia Berrian ’19 told the News in an April 14 email that she was focused on providing an outlet for student organizers to express the emotions that come along with a draining demonstration.

“Our intentions were not ultimately to form demands or do anything besides assist New Haven organizers whenever they needed,” she wrote. “However, it became increasingly clear that many of the underclassmen … wanted to do more but did not exactly know where to start.”

Seniors, she said, drew on connections with New Haveners and Yale alumni, as well as prior experiences of reading and writing demands, to convey to their peers that they could “really harness student power to demand drastic measures to protect the Black community on Yale’s campus and the [New Haven] and Hamden community.”

On April 20, BSDY delivered a letter to Salovey reiterating earlier calls for Pollock’s firing and body camera footage while adding two new calls for justice: the disarmament of the Yale Police Department and the restriction of the YPD’s patrol area to a reasonable definition of “campus.”

The YPD’s boundary lines quickly emerged as a focal point for Yale and community activists alike. The April 16 shooting occurred on the New Haven side of the New Haven-Hamden border, far from the edge of campus and outside of Hamden’s jurisdiction. While it is common for municipal police officers to venture across boundary lines, Cappiello, in recommending Eaton’s termination, rebuked the officer for “failure to notify a supervisor that he was entering another jurisdiction.”

Farmer noted that Hamden and New Haven officials had proposed a memorandum of understanding about when officers could cross into the neighboring city — but one year later, an MOU has not been drawn up. Elicker told the News that he intends to pursue an MOU but that the current pandemic has delayed those efforts.

As for Yale, the University police department’s legal reach matches that of New Haven’s municipal officers, Griffin noted in his report. According to scores of community activists, this makes the YPD one prong of a dangerous trifecta of law enforcement in the Elm City.

“We have a situation where we have a police department for the city of New Haven and we also have two additional police departments [Yale’s and Hamden’s] that can come in and police New Haven,” Ellington told the News in an interview last fall. “We call that a triple occupation.”

Since this time last year, the YPD’s jurisdiction has not changed. Higgins told the News that the YPD polices Yale’s campus, not the entire city of New Haven. YPD officers have never patrolled in Hamden, he added. Higgins noted that the YPD is not considering disarming, as officers need to be “fully prepared” to respond to campus emergencies.

For its part, Yale hired 21CP Solutions, an organization that partners with police departments to “tackle the challenges of policing in the 21st century” according to its website. 21CP would advise the University on how it can “improve police services,” Lindner wrote in a community email on Oct. 28. Jeannia Fu, an organizer with Justice for Jayson, dismissed this at the time as a University attempt to “create its own facts.”

In the wake of last April’s shooting, the YPD — which has an official police partnership with NHPD — also scaled up its community outreach in an attempt to improve its relationships with local residents.

Six days after issuing its initial letter, BSDY and a slew of other student organizations marched to YPD headquarters to hand-deliver over 1,000 civilian complaint campaigns, ranging from racial profiling incidents with other officers to direct demands about Pollock’s involvement in the shooting.

Over the course of that week, protests took an increasingly holistic approach to reform — calling for justice not only in the immediate case, but for minority Yale students, underserved New Haven residents and the Elm City more broadly.

Zoe Hopson '22 prepares for BSDY's deliverance march. (Courtesy of Seyade Tadele '21.)

“We’re standing here at the ivory tower,” the Rev. Scott Marks of New Haven Rising said on April 26, gesturing to Woodbridge Hall. “And I know that there are the means for there to be change.”

In addition to demanding Pollock’s termination, speakers highlighted the University’s continued failure to deliver on promises to New Haven and to its students. They criticized a lack of faculty diversity; consistent underfunding of race, gender and ethnicity studies; and Yale’s alleged failure to meet its commitment to hire 1,000 New Haven residents from neighborhoods of need. They also chastised the University for a $12.5 million voluntary annual contribution to the Elm City that New Haveners say pales in comparison to Yale’s $30.3 billion endowment — a topic that comes up at MLK celebrations and city budget meetings alike.

University Spokesperson Karen Peart said that Yale’s financial contribution is the largest of any university to its host city and pointed to additional means of support that the University provides. Yale has recently hired 1,000 New Haven residents, she added, bringing the total to 4,000. FROM BDD TO BSDY

Amid the novel coronavirus outbreak, Yale’s annual Bulldog Days program has gone virtual — marking the second consecutive year that a crisis coincided with the admitted students event.

Last year, admitted members of the class of 2023 arrived on campus just one day before Hamden and Yale officers shot at Washington and Witherspoon. While they departed before mass demonstrations began in earnest, Dormus and Yearwood recall prospective first years sharing articles and social media posts from their respective corners of the world.

“I learned about the shooting when I was making the choice of whether or not to come to Yale,” Callie Benson-Williams ’23 told the News. “During Bulldog Days, I got to go to the [Af-Am] House and … seeing how strong and resilient the black community there was was definitely a help … This is a lesson of how important connection between community and Yale is, and having a supportive black community is.”

Black Men’s Union First Year Representative Ayanle Nur ’23 said that seeing community organizers and Yale students come together after he left Bulldog Days made him confident in his college decision. Zaporah Price ’23, a staff columnist for the News, remembers hearing about the shooting at Af-Am House events while on campus and sharing articles with her mom when she returned to Chicago. Upon arriving in New Haven, Price immediately got involved with Yale student activists — people who she said “stay in the background” and follow the lead of community organizers.

Tiya Proctor-Floyd ’23 told the News that she has always been looking to continue social justice work in college. BSDY organizers — rather than “being an activist for the sake of being an activist and being visible” — are genuinely dedicated to uplifting community voices, she said.

In September, Ellington and fellow People Against Police Brutality organizer Amelia Allen Sherwood came to an Af-Am House first-year and transfer student retreat to talk to newly　arrived Yalies about activism and engagement in New Haven.

“It’s super important [for students] to understand that any work that they would do is standing on the shoulders of people who have been doing that work long before we were ever at Yale — and is going to be continued on long after we leave,” Eden Senay ’22, who organized the retreat as the membership coordinator for the Black Student Alliance at Yale, said in an interview with the News.

Ellington told the News that she went in order to introduce herself as someone who “really wanted to intentionally build community” between students and city residents and to get to know the students themselves.

First years led campus publicity efforts for the Shops at Yale protest following the state report release, according to Dormus and Benson-Williams, and they encouraged one another to show up to the event, Proctor-Floyd told the News. Proctor-Floyd saw the protest as an opportunity to stand in solidarity with community members.

“Yes, we are black students in America, and yes, we do fear police brutality and police violence to some degree on the merit of being black students,” she said. “[But] this is not something we’re doing for us because we fear for our lives. This is more us utilizing the privilege that we have as black Yale students to support community organizers and community activists.”

At the end of that protest, Ellington issued a call to Yale students: Just as community organizers had come to the University to fight for Pollock’s termination, students needed to show up in Hamden and support New Haven and Hamden residents as they shut down a police commission meeting two weeks later. Price remembers that meeting as the worst day of her Yale experience. It was “beautifully sad,” she said — beautiful for its solidarity and sad for its necessity. It was also a sobering reminder that Yale’s ivory towers do not change what it means to be black in America, she said. She recalled a heated confrontation between Dormus and a police commissioner:

“I did not feel like a Yale student,” Price said. “Ben wasn’t a Yale student in that moment. Ben was a black man who was in a fighting match with a man who did not see him for who he was, but for the color of his skin.”

Reflecting on the same moment, Nur said that his “blood was boiling” and he was inspired to take to the microphone himself. Several first years joined him with passionate speeches of their own, he said.

Sweet told the News that she has been ”blown away” by Yale students’ involvement — particularly that of first-year students who were not enrolled at the time of the shooting but have embraced the cause as their own.

BEYOND THE SHOOTING

Last April’s activism laid the groundwork for a continued united front. Starting within weeks of the shooting and continuing into recent months, mobilization has expanded beyond the incident that initially spurred collaboration between Yale and community organizers.

That newfound network became necessary within 12 hours of Yale closing its campus to undergraduates at the end of finals period. Ellington and several others were arrested at a Bridgeport rally and memorial for 15-year-old Jayson Negron, who was fatally shot by a Bridgeport police officer two years earlier.

Having exchanged phone numbers and social media information with community activists and their organizations, a groundswell of student support advocated for Ellington and others’ immediate release. Around two dozen students flooded police lines in a virtual phone bank, while others took to social media, Dormus told the News.

In January, BSDY activists and others joined 200 city residents on the steps of New Haven City Hall to protest the fatal shooting of New Haven teenager Mubarak Soulemane at the hands of a state trooper, during a high-speed car chase after Soulemane allegedly carjacked a ride-share driver in Norwalk.

The next month, Yalies again traveled to Hamden — this time, for reasons unrelated to the shooting that had taken scores of student activists to the neighboring town as recently as November.

In an incident that made national headlines, a Hamden teacher had cast a biracial girl and a black boy as slaves in a play designed to teach fifth graders about the trans-Atlantic slave trade. That teacher was placed on administrative leave about a week later and returned the following week, while the school district issued an apology.

But in the eyes of many residents, this incident was one in a series of abuses and failures on Hamden’s part to adequately address racism. Hamden Action Now called on community members to rally outside of and then attend a Feb. 3 Hamden Legislative Council meeting.

About 20 Yale students answered that call, according to King, and a combined 100 protesters packed the cavernous hall that Monday. Sweet drove some of them herself. Their demands included firing the principal of the school in question, hiring more minority teachers and creating a centralized reporting system, among other measures.

“We’ve had issues around race in Hamden for quite some time, nowhere different from anywhere else,” Farmer told the News. “It was humbling and beautiful to see students come out and support the work that people are trying to do to change their immediate community.”

Sweet noted that a core group of activists have been doing that work for years. But the group of people willing to “shoulder that weight” has grown in recent months. Hopson told the News that BSDY, as a result of sustained contact with local organizers, has been able to encourage students to attend events of which they otherwise may have been unaware.

Richardson said that she has maintained personal connections with organizers like Ellington and has learned more about the work of local organizations as a result. But she does not think that the aftermath of last April’s shooting has changed the Yale-New Haven relationship at large. Yale students’ turnout at the seven-hour protest was unlike anything she had seen in her time at the University, Richardson said, but those who remain heavily involved today are the same people who led student efforts at the time.

Yearwood and King — both of whom have worked closely with community organizers this year — described a shift since last April. Rather than two distinct groups converging in the same place at the same time, student and community activists are working as one body, they said.

“Even when the most difficult conversations are about to be had or just finished, we chop it up, make jokes — after, before — so it feels like a very warm and loving environment,” Yearwood said. “Before, the only thing that brought people together was anger, whereas [now we are] also in a space of love.” “We have sat at a number of tables together and listened to one another,” Sweet told the News. “We’ve built relationships and we’ve built trust. I would hope that if the Yale students feel like they needed us Hamden residents, that we would be right there. I definitely feel that any time we’ve needed some Yale students to come out to a Hamden meeting, they have shown up in force.”

They must continue to do so, King said — for Washington and Witherspoon, and for justice in New Haven and Connecticut at large.

Meera Shoaib contributed reporting.

(Robbie Short)

UP CLOSE:
New Haven's push for police accountability

Written by Ashna Gupta

Photos by Neehar Gandhi

Published on April 13, 2018

Steven Winter ’11 couldn’t understand why the police were putting him in handcuffs.

“All I was trying to do was check up on my friend,” Winter told the News earlier this month.

At around 1 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010, New Haven Police Department officers raided Morse-Stiles Screw at the Elevate and Alchemy nightclub, tasing a member of the Yale football team and arresting five students, including Winter. The police, some of them in SWAT gear, cursed and yelled as they raided the club — using physical force and threatening to jail students if they didn’t “shut the f— up.” Winter, who was charged with disorderly conduct and trespassing, eventually saw his charges dropped after he promised not to sue the New Haven Police Department.

The police chief at the time, Frank Limon, assigned blame for the incident to former Assistant Chief Ariel Melendez, who led the raid. Limon retired before the release of an Internal Affairs report on the encounter, which determined the officers’ actions were justifiable and that they did not use unnecessary force.

But Yale students disagreed. Outrage ensued. Marches on New Haven police headquarters followed.

Compared to some others’ experiences, though, Winter’s was mild. Over the years, activists say, New Haven residents have seen their loved ones harassed, or even shot, by police officers with little or no consequences.

Now, Winter, the newly elected alder for Ward 21, is part of a cohort of activists pushing for New Haven to form an independent civilian review board — a body that would oversee policing in the city and investigate misconduct. Activists say that without an independent civilian review board, the police lack accountability, and situations like Winter’s — and others far more serious — will continue to beset the city.

Yet creating an effective civilian review board is easier said than done. The New Haven Police Union has expressed opposition to a board with any role in disciplining officers, citing language in the police union’s labor contract. The expenses associated with putting together the board have deterred the city during a period of fiscal restraint. And the question of whether the board would have subpoena power — the ability to demand documents and appearances by witnesses — has stalled efforts.

But now, with protests against police violence and calls for greater accountability sweeping the nation, this decadeslong effort has seen a resurgence, and activists are more adamant than ever that the city must institute an effective civilian review board.

A DECADESLONG PROCESS

For over 20 years, members of the New Haven community have pushed the city to establish a civilian review board, but the question remains: What would a truly effective civilian review board in New Haven entail?

The matter first arose in November 1995, when then-Ward 3 Alder Anthony Dawson proposed an ordinance to the Board of Alders for an all-civilian review board. At the time, though, few alders considered the proposal particularly pressing, and the ordinance never came to a full-board vote.

Two years later, an unarmed 21-year-old, Malik Jones, was shot at close range by an East Haven officer following a car chase in New Haven. A burst of activism on the issue followed. For years, Emma Jones, Malik’s mother, fought for justice for her son, arguing that the shooting was unwarranted. The case dragged on for a decade and a half, with appeals and petitions filed on both sides. Although Emma Jones never received compensation — the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear her case — a judge eventually ruled that her son’s civil rights had been violated.

Jones’ case caused civilian review board discussions to accelerate in the late 1990s and 2000s. At forums, conferences and meetings, residents called for a strong civilian review board with subpoena power — the ability to compel testimony, summon documents and demand other evidence related to an investigation. But in 2001, before the Board of Alders could propose or vote on an ordinance, then-Mayor John DeStefano issued an executive order calling for a civilian review board. The caveat? The board DeStefano outlined was not independent from the New Haven Police Department; it relied on police officers to conduct investigations on their fellow officers’ alleged misconduct. It also lacked subpoena power.

“Mayor DeStefano basically halted the whole process by passing a board of his own by executive order,” said Wally Hilke LAW ’18, who got involved in the civilian review board effort when activists recruited Yale Law School students for research.

In short, the executive order created a civilian review board that had none of the powers advocates were pushing for. Since it lacked adequate funds, the board had to rely on police staff to investigate misconduct, meaning the board could not collect information on its own. Hilke said that this board’s establishment took some of the “wind out of the sails,” because some activists thought they had succeeded in creating a New Haven civilian review board, even though the board lacked the powers it needed to be effective.

Chris Desir LAW ’18, another law student and community organizer, called DeStefano’s board a “smokescreen” that provided a layer of “apparent legitimacy.”

DeStefano acknowledged in an interview that the board he established in 2001 probably did not have enough resources or personnel to be as effective as it was intended to be.

“I don’t think what we tried to do in 2001 was necessarily conceptually inappropriate,” DeStefano said. “I just think perhaps we didn’t implement it as aggressively as we might have.”

Regardless of that board’s effectiveness, or lack thereof, all was not lost — activists had another chance to institute a board, this time with the necessary powers.

Every 10 years, the New Haven city charter — the document that lays out the rights and privileges of various Elm City institutions — goes up for review. In 2013, after much debate, a referendum was passed that mandated the creation of a more powerful review board in the city charter, dissolving DeStefano’s “smokescreen” board.

Still, five years after the referendum, with the requirement in the city charter, there is no civilian review board in New Haven, as questions about implementation continue to retard a decadeslong process.

THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS

Following the election of President Donald Trump, protests on both sides of the aisle flooded news print and television screens. In June 2017, longtime New Haven activist Barbara Fair was trying to counterprotest white nationalists on the New Haven Green. But in the process, she was arrested — unjustly, she said.

Fair said she filed a complaint for an investigation with the Internal Affairs office after the arrest. But in January 2018, she found out the case had been closed even though the office never reached out to her for additional comment following her initial statement.

Fair said the closure of her Internal Affairs case highlights one of the central shortcomings of the police department: a lack of transparency. Camille Seaberry ’08, an organizer with People Against Police Brutality, agreed, saying that transparency is a key component to an effective internal affairs office.

“You file a complaint and you don’t really know what happens,” Seaberry said. “It’s just kind of a black box.”

Fair and Seaberry believe the solution to the transparency problem is a powerful civilian review board. And many New Haveners share that view, according to Ward 7 Alder Abigail Roth ’90 LAW ’94, who said the need for a board is one of the three issues her constituents brought up most often during the campaign.

“By having the ability to actually have accountability and shine a light on those officers who are bad apples, it protects the ones who are good — who are most of them — and it helps our justice system,” Roth said.

A year ago, in a statement to the News, New Haven police chief Anthony Campbell ’95 DIV ’09, said he generally supports the implementation of a civilian review board, as it would strengthen the department’s accountability. Over the past week, Campbell did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the powers he would like to see a civilian review board possess.

Activists don’t want just any civilian review board. They want one with the power to hold the police department to account. That means having an independent investigator, unaffiliated with the police department, Winter said. And it also means giving the board subpoena power and some role in deciding appropriate disciplinary action for officers.

“In a democracy, the community should control how police departments operate, not the other way around,” said Dan Barrett, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. “Ensuring that a civilian review board is run by and for the people requires making sure that civilian review board is independent from the police department.”

Even DeStefano — whose meager civilian review board may have set the movement back in the early 2000s — agrees that while police officers generally behave well, a review board would benefit the community.

“I don’t think you need to have a problem in order to have robust review of police behaviors,” he said. “I think it serves everybody well to have that.”

THE POWER TO SUBPOENA?

Creating an independent, effective civilian review board is not as simple as putting a few New Haven residents in a room to talk about police misconduct. Without subpoena power — the ability to gather documents and compel witnesses, especially police officers, to testify — a civilian review board would have no teeth, experts and activists say.

Although many alders, both past and present, have argued that it would be illegal for the civilian review board to have subpoena power, Hilke said that is simply misinformation that has been propagated over the years.

During the latest public hearing held on the civilian review board in April 2017, then-Ward 9 Alder and Legislation Committee Chair Jessica Holmes said that granting subpoena or discipline power to the review board is illegal under state law, which stipulates that an institution cannot acquire subpoena power unless it is conferred by the state.

But Hilke has some evidence on his side. According to a memo provided to the News that New Haven’s Corporation Counsel John Rose Jr. sent to the Board of Alders in 2015, the civilian review board mandated by the charter could in fact have subpoena power. The Special Act of 1899 granted the city’s Board of Alders and their committees and commissions the power to issue subpoenas. The civilian review board would be one of those commissions.

“The Civilian Review Board, as one ‘of the several boards of commissioners’ of the Board of Alders has the power to compel the attendance and testimony of witnesses before it by the issuance of subpoenas and the administration of oaths,” the memo reads.

Hilke said the ambiguous part of the memo is a line that says that neither the Board of Alders nor the Civilian Review Board has the power or authority to enforce a subpoena that would compel the attendance or testimony of a reluctant witness.

From Hilke’s perspective, that line simply describes the way a subpoena functions. If a person does not comply with a subpoena, then the investigator must go to a judge to enforce the warrant.

“That doesn’t make the power any weaker, it just means that the subpoena power that a civilian review board would hold works in the usual way,” Hilke said.

Roth — the Ward 7 alder and a graduate of Yale Law School — seconded Wilke’s assessment, saying that she read the memo the same way Hilke did.

In fact, many cities across the country have civilian review boards with subpoena power, demonstrating that it can be legal.

Regardless of the confusion over the legality of subpoena power for the civilian review board, there has never been any doubt that the Board of Alders itself has the ability to subpoena documents and witnesses. In 2010, for example, then-Ward 8 Alder Michael Smart used that authority to call members of the city’s tax appeals board to testify about tax assessment complaints.

Setting aside those legal questions, though, why is subpoena power so central to the community review board envisioned by the activists?

The short answer is that without subpoena power, the board would have no way to obtain information. For example, Hilke said, if someone were shot by a police officer outside Walgreens, without subpoena power, a civilian review board might struggle to obtain video footage or hear directly from the officer who fired the gun.

For the most part, Seaberry said, the subpoena power would go toward “boring” things like obtaining documents and surveillance camera footage rather than calling police officers to the stand. Across the country, the civilian review boards that do have subpoena power rarely use it to compel police officers to testify, Hilke said.

The “magic” of subpoena power, he emphasized, is that once a board has it, it rarely has to use it.

When people know they could be brought in front of a judge, they tend to start complying.

CONFRONTING THE UNION

In the 2013, New Haveners voted by referendum to create a civilian review board. But five years later, no such board exists, and the alders are not in the process of creating one.

After the referendum passed, the next step was to create an ordinance calling for the civilian review board. Though the language in the city charter carries the force of law, it contains no timeline for the creation of the civilian review board. In theory, debates over technicalities could drag on indefinitely.

And after the referendum, Seaberry said, “nobody was jumping at the opportunity.” One reason for the delay has been resistance from the New Haven Police Union Elm City Local. In an April 2017 hearing on the topic held by the Board of Alders Legislative and Public Safety committees, members of the New Haven Police Union expressed concern that parts of the civilian review board — such as the idea that it could have a role in deciding disciplinary action — would violate police union contracts.

When asked about their opinion on the civilian review board and about accusations that they have stalled board creation efforts, the New Haven Police Union said “the union has not been involved with any discussions regarding a [civilian review board] or been invited to any discussions.”

“Police are supposed to serve the public,” said Barrett, the legal director of the Connecticut ACLU. “Yet in America, at every level, police have rigged the system against everyday people seeking to hold their police departments accountable to democratic checks and balances.”

Eventually, activist groups like People Against Police Brutality began drafting the ordinance with the goal of introducing it themselves. In April 2017, they introduced the Malik Jones All-Civilian Review Board ordinance — which is based on Emma Jones’ original proposal and named after Malik Jones, the 21-year-old who was shot in 1997. The groups are still in the process of reviewing the language and taking community suggestions.

Desir, the law student and community organizer, rejected the police union’s argument about its contract. Even if disciplinary power interferes with the current language of the contract, Desir said, the board could simply delay the implementation of that particular power until the expiration of the contract. At that point, the police union would have to renegotiate with the city, and the new contract would have to align with city law.

Still, Desir acknowledged that politics is a “slow process.” The Board of Alders has also played a part in holding up the process, partly because of “fears of litigation if a strong civilian review board is enacted,” said Ioann Popov ’21, a member of the Police Brutality Mapping Project for the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association.

Popov said that when he spoke with Ward 8 Alder Aaron Greenberg GRD ’18, Greenberg said the city has “dealt with [human relations]–related lawsuits in the past and does not want to face the legal action from the police union.” Greenberg referred questions about the board to the Public Safety Committee and Legislation Committee chairs Ward 12 Alder Gerald Antunes and Ward 13 Alder Rosa Santana. Antunes said that while he does not know why the civilian review board has been held up, he recognizes there is a “time coordination” issue when a joint committee is involved.

Regardless of those uncertainties and the police union’s opposition, New Haven may not actually have enough money to establish a civilian review board anytime soon.

The board that DeStefano established in 2001 lacked resources, which led to many complaints. And given the fiscal difficulties currently facing New Haven, a new board — even with subpoena power — could have the same problem. The mayor’s most recent budget proposal includes an 11 percent property tax hike, as well as cuts to various city departments. And there is little incentive for the Board of Alders to carve out room in the budget for an as-yet-nonexistent civilian review board.

Still, Desir and other advocates on the issue have called for 0.001 percent of the city’s budget — or roughly $600,000 — to be allocated for a civilian review board. Though it is “not a great climate” to be asking the city to spend more money, Desir noted, it is a relatively small amount.

“If something is a priority they find money for it,” Desir said.

Roth said the budget is a “huge question to address,” especially in this fiscal year. But she added that the city spent $9 million settling a wrongful imprisonment case stemming from police misconduct this year.

“Getting rid of bad apples ultimately is a very wise investment,” Roth said.

The civilian review board will not come to fruition before discussions of this year’s budget end, but the question remains: Where will the money ultimately come from? Will it come from the police department’s proposed budget? From some other section of the city’s budget?

That, Roth said, remains unclear.

BOARDS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Still, for all the challenges, an independent civilian review board in New Haven is not an outlandish fantasy. According to data by the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, there are approximately 144 such oversight agencies nationwide as of 2016. Desir and Hilke said that based on their research and discussions with other civilian review boards — including those in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Newark, New Jersey — subpoena power, a paid independent staff and transparency are all key ingredients for an effective board. Desir said that the activist groups modeled their proposals for the Elm City on both the successes and failures of similar boards in other cities.

In 2001, Cincinnati saw some of the largest riots and demonstrations of civil disorder in U.S. history. As a result, in 2003, the Memorandum of Agreement and the Collaborative Agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the city of Cincinnati established the Citizen Complaint Authority.

Kim Neal, the director of the Citizen Complaint Authority in Cincinnati, said independence from the police allows the civilian review board to conduct its own investigations. Though the board counsel has subpoena power, she noted that, like Hilke suggested, it has never actually had to issue a subpoena. If a police officer refuses to comply or appear for the investigation, Neal said, she usually goes straight to the chief, who then orders the person to show up. She noted that most police chiefs don’t want the “public scrutiny” that would ensue if an officer did not comply with the investigation.

But she also said that Cincinnati has received pushback from the police union because officers “want to control the whole process.”

Neal said she thinks there has been a positive shift since the creation of the Citizen Complaint Authority, but she also added that many community members may not agree and issues are not all eradicated.

The Cincinnati police union did not respond to request for comment.

The Citizen Complaint Authority has made some meaningful changes. When Everette Howard died after being tased by a University of Cincinnati police officer in 2011, the authority looked into taser policy. Following the investigation, taser policies underwent serious reform. Now, taser shots to a person’s head, neck, eyes, throat, chest or genitals are forbidden, unless the action is taken in self-defense or as an effort to protect another person.

According to Hilke, the Cincinnati civilian review board sustains one in 12 complaints on average — demonstrating it has actual power and importance.

But one thing Cincinnati does not have is the ability to conduct administrative prosecutions for the most severe allegations of misconduct.

The only civilian review board in the country with that power is New York City’s, according to city officials there. Since its founding, the board has tried over 250 officers through the administrative prosecution process.

“Unfortunately,” Hilke said, “there has been no example of a civilian review being effective without having any power.”

MALIK ORDINANCE AND NEXT STEPS

In April 2017, at the last public Board of Alders hearing regarding the creation of a civilian review board, the Board of Alders introduced an ordinance — one that lacked many of the ingredients activists were pushing for. Without subpoena power or the ability to play a role in determining appropriate discipline for officers, activists at the meeting said the board did not solve the problems of trust it had with the New Haven Police Department.

Though there have been no Board of Alders committee meetings on the topic since, activists groups such as Justice for Jayson, CT Core and People Against Police Brutality have launched outreach campaigns and held community meetings to discuss the issue.

Now, one of the main proposals up for discussion is the Malik Jones All-Civilian Review Board proposal — an ordinance drafted by the members of People Against Police Brutality, including Hilke, Desir and Seaberry. This proposal creates a “civil review” committee on the Board of Alders, and the alder who chairs that committee would serve as a nonvoting member on the civilian review board. With an alder among its members, the board would have subpoena power.

This ordinance creates a board that would consist of 13 voting members — 10 that would come from citizen groups in the Elm City’s policing districts. Members would be appointed by the mayor and approved by the Board of Alders. The board would also have a full-time director, a staffer and two investigators. The proposed ordinance makes clear that voting members cannot be elected officials; they must be members of the general community.

The Malik Jones All-Civilian Review Board proposal would serve as a three-to-five-year pilot program and would be assessed for effectiveness at the end of the pilot period, according to the ordinance.

All in all, the proposed board would cost around $600,000 — about 1.5 percent of the police department’s budget. But amid the city’s current fiscal uncertainty and looming tax hikes, that money may prove difficult to acquire.

Roth said that the next Board of Alders committee meeting on the subject will hopefully take place in May or June of this year. But because the ordinance is a joint committee topic for the Legislation Committee and the Public Safety Committee, it is harder to coordinate a date.

Despite the long odds, Hilke said he feels like he has a “responsibility” to advocate for a civilian review board given the problem of police brutality in New Haven and other cities across the United States. His collaborators feel much the same way.

“A really good indicator of the health of a community is not just the relationship between the community and the police force,” Desir said, “but the institutional structure of the police force relative to the community.”

Ashna Gupta | ashna.gupta@yale.edu