East Haven's corruption goes right to the top
By Chris Powell, Managing Editor,
Journal Inquirer, December 21, 2011
East Haven Mayor Joseph
Maturo Jr. affects indignation about a lack of specifics in the report issued
the other day by the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division accusing
his police department of harassing Latinos. The mayor's indignation is
nonsense.
Yes, the Justice Department's report doesn't include the names of officers. But
it provides enough details to identify officers with.
Particularly the report cites at length the disgraceful case from March 2009
that exploded the bigotry and corruption of the East Haven police -- the
knowingly false arrest of a Catholic priest who videotaped two officers
harassing the operator of a Latino grocery store. The officers submitted an
arrest report claiming that they thought the priest had been pointing a weapon
at them. But the audio of his video recorded the officers acknowledging that
they knew it was only a camera.
While the charges against the priest were dismissed quickly in court, to this
day the East Haven Police Department has never undertaken to discipline the
officers who lied in their report -- perjury that was reported and broadcast
throughout the state.
East Haven's recently reinstated police chief, Leonard
Gallo, was chief when the false arrest of the priest happened, and Mayor
Maturo, who was returned to office in the November election after having been
out of office for a couple of terms, could not have been ignorant of the
details. But what should have been the mortification of the department and the
town in front of the whole state seems not to have bothered the chief and the
mayor in the slightest. This discrediting of the East Haven police came 2 1/2
years before the Justice Department report was issued, and it has been the
giveaway that bigotry and corruption go right to the top in East Haven and thus
have been protected all the way down.
Maybe names of officers will be forthcoming from the Justice Department through
criminal indictments brought by the federal grand jury now investigating the East Haven police. But if Mayor Maturo and Chief Gallo
don't want to wait to start upholding their oaths, they can ask the Justice
Department for any identifications they can't figure
out.
For starters, the mayor and the chief shouldn't have much trouble deducing
which officers are responsible for the disproportionate traffic stops of
Latinos, stops that, the Justice Department says, come close to 40 percent of
stops made by some officers where Latino drivers constitute only about 15
percent of total traffic.
Yes, being adjacent to the "sanctuary city" of New
Haven, East Haven has an illegal
alien problem too. Yet the Justice Department report notes that the East Haven police have never applied to federal
authorities for delegation of immigration enforcement powers. Instead, the
Justice Department report says, the police department "has allowed its
officers to engage in haphazard and uncoordinated immigration enforcement efforts
to target Latino drivers for traffic stops." That is, rather than help to
enforce immigration law, it's a lot more fun to bully
people who, as recent legal or illegal immigrants, are easily terrorized.
This sort of corruption is sicker than stealing money. It's
sadism -- and nothing is more dangerous than sadism in people who carry the
badges and guns of the law.
People are entitled to be angry over the nullification program being undertaken
in New Haven to overthrow federal immigration law and destroy U.S. citizenship
and national sovereignty, nullification undertaken by supposed liberals that is
far more profound than the supposed conservative nullification of the moment,
mere lawsuits against "Obamacare." But such anger is no excuse for
police to try to nullify the law.
Police most of all should know that the national charter and the federal and
state constitutions guarantee the basic rights of due process and equal
protection of the law not just to citizens but to all persons. That
is, even illegal aliens have rights, and no one is to be
harassed by police just because he might be thought to look or sound like a stranger. Otherwise everyone would
be at risk of harassment.
There are legal, proper, and decent ways of enforcing immigration law. Maybe
someday the East Haven Police Department will be entitled to carry them out.
But right now the department can't be trusted to enforce any law at all. For
the department is a corrupt and rogue organization resisting accountability
with the approval of the mayor, and Connecticut
must hope that the Justice Department won't let go of it for a long time.
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Chris Powell is managing editor of
the Journal Inquirer.