CRB Stymied By Police Union “Block”

by Adele Haeg

Fair Haven Alder Frank Redente: “I think wasting taxpayer money on investigations that can’t go anywhere, just for the sake of investigating, is not wise.”

CRB Chair AnneMarie Rivera-Berrios at Monday’s meeting. She abstained from voting on whether to pause sending complaints to an outside investigator.

The Civilian Review Board (CRB) voted on Monday to pause sending new civilian complaints of police misconduct to an outside investigator after at least one city police officer refused to comply with the investigator’s requests for information, per the police union’s collective bargaining agreement.

CRB member Jean Jenkins said the police union had put up a “block” to CRB investigations by advising officers not to comply with the CRB. Pausing certain cases that could be investigated is “doing a disservice” to New Haveners, she said. 

Kia Roberts of Triangle Investigations, who was hired by the CRB in March, criticized the board’s vote at Monday’s meeting. She said she thought it was “wrongheaded to pause the whole process.”

“I don’t know what the delay does except discourage public trust in the process,” she added.

That discussion, debate, vote, and critique took place on Monday during the CRB’s latest monthly meeting, which was held online and in-person at City Hall.

The CRB is an independent police-oversight body that reviews and investigates civilian complaints against the New Haven Police Department (NHPD) and can provide recommendations to officers and the chief of police regarding police conduct.

Before Monday’s vote, CRB member and Fair Haven Alder Frank Redente argued that the CRB should wait until a “procedural hang-up” between the city and the police union was resolved before sending more cases to Triangle Investigations. Redente also suggested the board wait until a meeting between the police union and the CRB’s attorney, Catherine LaMarr, or until a contract renegotiation in 2028.

CRB members can still investigate police-misconduct complaints themselves, even after Monday’s vote. However, as CRB Chair AnneMarie Rivera-Berrios said, an investigator provides more “intensive review” than the CRB can muster. 

City police union attorney Marshall Segar did not respond to requests for comment by the publication time of this article.

CRB members Kimbro, Sam Fawcett and Ebony Bowden-Moore voted in favor of Redente’s motion to pause sending cases to Roberts. Rivera-Berrios and Jenkins abstained. 

After the vote, Roberts, who phoned into the meeting, criticized the board’s decision.

Redente said the board needed to “make sure that everything is done comprehensively, for the good of the people that are asking for investigations, for the officers involved, for the investigator, and for us.” He worried that an “overloaded” investigator — assigned more cases than she was able to review — may not be as thorough in reviewing complaints. Roberts told the board she is able to manage the caseload she has.

“Both sides are working together to develop what the process looks like,” said New Haven Police Chief David Zannelli, referring to the process of requesting information from officers. He told the Independent in a follow-up phone interview that he knew of at least one officer who had “voluntarily” complied with the CRB’s requests for information in one case, and said the police department had met with the union and the CRB to discuss subpoena procedure. “There’s a pending meeting” to resolve the issue, he said.

Without the investigator’s input on cases, the CRB can still make recommendations to the police department based on their own findings, Rivera-Berrios said. “But if you review the case review data you will see that some members don’t review cases,” Rivera-Berrios said.

According to Rivera-Berrios, from March to July, neither Redente nor Bowden-Moore had reviewed any cases, Kimbro had reviewed one, Rivera-Berrios and Fawcett had reviewed all cases, and Jenkins had reviewed all cases only during April, June and July.

The CRB is empowered by city ordinance to independently investigate civilian complaints against police officers, which no other police oversight body in New Haven can do. Alders agreed in 2019 to grant the CRB power to subpoena the police officers in the course of conducting investigations, but before this year, they have never had to use it, according to Rivera-Berrios.

When reviewing cases to make recommendations to the police chief, CRB members have access to the same materials as the investigator does — some members voted in March to hire Roberts, saying it would benefit both the CRB and the police department to have a trained investigator dedicated to civilian complaints that the CRB does not always have the resources among members to thoroughly investigate. 

According to stipulations in its collective bargaining agreement, the police union has advised officers not to comply with the CRB’s requests for information. Redente said the CRB should have discussed this before hiring an independent investigator. 

“Officers go into IA [Internal Affairs] with union representation. They’re clearly not going to go talk to a private investigator,” Redente said. He said the CRB should call on the investigator if a “secondary investigation is needed.”

The police union contract is set to expire on June 30, 2028. Redente said the disagreement over the investigator’s role between the city and the police union “should give us something to shoot for” when the next round of contract negotiations comes around in two years. “You can’t force anything to get done now. You just have to be patient and we have to be wise about how we’re doing things.”

A Hartford civilian review board has also had subpoena requests blocked by city and police union officials, CT Public reported last month. Like New Haven’s CRB in 2019, the Hartford Civilian Police Review Board was granted subpoena powers by the city in 2020. In the years since George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers, many have pushed for independent police oversight of their own departments.

“When the ordinances were written around the CRB, when we made the decision to hire an investigator, we should have made sure everything fit,” Redente said after the meeting. “Let’s make sure all of our ducks are in a row before we go and do something.”

Kimbro: “Serious Concerns” About Accuracy Of Meeting Minutes

Also during Monday’s meeting, Kimbro submitted a written request for review and correction of the CRB’s April meeting minutes. According to the minutes, approved by the board and published this month, Kimbro said he was “concerned that public funds were being used on a case where the member was not of the black community.” 

In his statement to the board on Monday night, Kimbro said he had “serious concerns” regarding the accuracy of the minutes, refuted the statement attributed to him in the minutes, and said information from a private meeting of CRB members — executive session — was wrongfully included in the document. Kimbro asked that the board “re-examine the minutes, correct all factual inaccuracies, restore the omitted context, and determine if the executive session material should be removed from the public record.”

Referring to the discussion recorded in the April minutes about one complaint, Kimbro said his “actual concern was whether this specific complaint fell within our proper purview, particularly since the complainant had reportedly been uncooperative during parts of the investigation. My subsequent reference to complaints within the Black community was simply meant to highlight that there are numerous other citizen complaints deserving of this same rigorous level of attention.”

CRB To Review Race Data For Arrests, Use Of Force

Before Monday’s meeting, Rivera-Berrios met with Lt. Chris Alvarado, the head of IA, and Capt. Brendan Borer, who just left the Detective Bureau for IA, to ask them to begin including data on race with monthly arrest and use of force reports. 

“We wanted to know if the police department tracks race data,” Rivera-Berrios said. “They said yes, so we requested it in our monthly reports.”

“It’s common practice,” Redente said after the meeting. The CRB has not reviewed data on race related to arrests and use of force before.

Starting in August, the CRB will see the race of civilians arrested and involved in use-of-force incidents, alongside other data they already review such as taser deployment, firearm display, and baton use.