A Symbol with Substance
262 days passed before the Waterbury State’s Attorney released the surveillance videos and witness statements that testified to the end of Jayson Negron’s life. Months of protests ensued after the shooting. Activists built and rebuilt a memorial for Negron, a black teenager who was fifteen at the time of his death. A campaign called Justice for Jayson pressed authorities to sanction the white police officer, James Boulay, who had killed Negron.
Over the course of those 262 days, the public waited as Waterbury State’s Attorney Maureen Platt led an investigation into whether Negron’s shooting was justified. While citizens knew that certain pieces of evidence existed, including bystander accounts and surveillance footage from a nearby Walgreens, the public was kept in the dark about what these materials revealed.
Platt publically issued her findings on Jan. 26, 2018, exonerating Boulay. According to Platt’s report, Jayson Negron had been driving a stolen vehicle in Bridgeport on May 9, 2017. Officer Boulay fired at the car’s tire to prevent it from moving. He called for Negron to get out, but the teenager remained seated. In an apparent attempt to escape, Negron drove the car in reverse, hitting Boulay with the car door. The report found that the officer “felt that he was about to lose his footing and be dragged under the Subaru.” Boulay shot at Negron, who was unarmed, hitting him four times in the chest. Negron’s body was left on the street for six hours, as Platt’s report discusses, so as to “preserve the scene.”
By the time Platt’s report was released, many had already developed a deep mistrust in her inquiry due to the limited communication about the investigation. Nearby, in New Haven, a similar tension has been brought to the forefront by current activism calling for a civilian review board in the city. Typically, civilian review boards play a parallel role to the Police Department’s internal affairs division, examining cases of potential police misconduct from the perspective of citizens unaffiliated with the police department. These boards are meant to add a layer of accountability to investigations into police action.
Wally Hilke, LAW ’18, who has been instrumental in coordinating Yale students’ involvement in the movement for a New Haven civilian review board, believes that such a committee could counteract the often secretive quality of investigations like the one into Negron’s death. “I think that what civilian review does is open a window into how police misconduct investigations work that was closed before,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to solve every challenge that New Haven has... around police misconduct, but I think it makes a world of difference. I think something that’s so important about it is that its basic belief is that residents deserve to know what happens and [that] the standards that govern policing are an object of concern to the community at large.”
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In recent months, the 20-year effort to establish a version of a civilian review board in New Haven has been gathering momentum. The proposal for this board was drafted by Emma Jones, a lawyer whose son, Malik, was killed in an encounter with New Haven police in 1997. Emma Jones’ proposal, named the Malik Jones All-Civilian Review Board, calls for a board with subpoena power and a paid, full-time staff of investigators, both measures that activists say are crucial to maintaining the board’s independence from the police. In addition, the Malik Jones board would be able to suggest disciplinary measures. The police chief could choose whether or not to adhere to the board’s recommendations.
Jones compiled her proposal for a civilian review board shortly after her son’s death in 1997, and garnered the support of an alder at the time, Antonio Dawson. Yet in 2001, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. instituted a version of a civilian review board through an executive order; in doing so, he bypassed the Board of Alders’ legislative process, which would have permitted public hearings on proposals such as Jones’ model. DeStefano’s board could request that internal affairs look further into a complaint if it felt that the initial inquiry had not been adequately thorough. However, the board did not have the power to pursue its own investigations, instead relying on reports from internal affairs.
Over the course of the next decade, DeStefano’s civilian review board received scathing backlash. At the time of the executive order, mayoral candidate Martin Looney called it a “paper tiger,” a phrase that numerous activists and organizations have since echoed as a criticism of the board’s perceived inefficacy. Many believed that DeStefano’s board, in its reliance on investigations by internal affairs, was too connected to the police department it was supposed to be holding accountable.
Frustration with the board’s limited power accumulated throughout the next decade, and in 2013, the Board of Alders altered New Haven’s city charter so as to require a civilian review board to be established through legislation. Following this change, DeStefano’s board was suspended in 2014, and New Haven has not had an active civilian review board since.
Last year, in a statement to the Yale Daily News, New Haven Police Chief Anthony Campbell said that he supports the implementation of a civilian review board. Yet police union officials have expressed some resistance to the prospect of civilian review. Last April, at a public hearing on the matter before the Board of Alders, several ranking members of the police union emphasized the logistical challenges of instituting civilian review, such as acquiring funds for the board and working through conflicts with police contracts. A representative of the police department did not respond in time to comment for this article.
This legislative season will involve more deliberations on a structure for the civilian review board, and may even lead to a decision. Advocates for the Malik Jones All-Civilian Review Board say that their model would be more effective in ensuring police transparency than DeStefano’s version, pointing out the independent investigative power that their proposal calls for. Yet in order for their board to be an impactful source of accountability, activists in favor of the Malik Jones proposal will need to overcome political barriers that may prove difficult to surmount.
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One of the central demands of the Malik Jones proposal is that the civilian review board have the power to issue subpoenas. Yet this component of the proposal has been a sticking point for many alders, as Connecticut law prohibits the allocation of subpoena power to local committees. Advocates for the Malik Jones board say they have found a loophole around this law. They propose including a seat on the board for a high-ranking member of New Haven’s Board of Alders who already possesses subpoena power from their role in city government. This member would be able to issue subpoenas on behalf of the civilian review board as a whole.
Yet according to Ioann Popov, an undergraduate leading the Yale Democrats’ involvement with the civilian review board advocacy, the Board of Alders has been largely resistant to the establishment of a review board with subpoena power. “A lot of the reason that people opposed the proposal is because they think that you can’t legally create a review board that has subpoena power, but this is a very legal way to get around” the state law, Popov said. He mentioned that other cities, including Albany, NY, have civilian review boards that similarly issue subpoenas through local government.
Advocates of the Malik Jones proposal say that subpoena power could make the difference between a board that serves as a symbol against police brutality and a board that produces a functional change in the disciplinary system.
Popov does not believe that the alders supporting the Malik Jones proposal will compromise on this issue. Yet Jeanette Morrison, Alder of Ward 22, doubts that a civilian review board capable of issuing subpoenas will be established by the Board of Alders until Connecticut law is changed. “That’s something that legislatively, on a state perspective, people really need to put their energies into,” Morrison said. “I know people have all these different roundabout, backdoor ways to give the civilian review board subpoena power,” she added, but she suggested that subpoena power was still not a realistic option at the moment.
In Morrison’s view, subpoena power alone as a means of compelling evidence has its limitations. “If you bring in a police officer under your subpoena power,” she said, “that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to talk.” Even if the Connecticut law is changed, Morrison said, activists “will have to be looking at other pieces that are going to provide and yield what the group is actually searching [for].”
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In recent months, awareness about the Malik Jones proposal has swelled within the Yale community. Activists outside of the university had specifically asked Hilke to mobilize Yale students for the movement for a new civilian review board. Since then, the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, YULAA, and the Democrats have coordinated undergraduate support, hosting informative meetings and recently gathering over six hundred signatures on petitions for the Malik Jones proposal.
Yet Yale’s potential to impact this advocacy may be limited. According to Popov, most of the signatures that student petitioners collected are from people concentrated within two Aldermanic districts, meaning that the petitions would likely be able to influence only two alders. Popov emphasized the importance of galvanizing support amongst New Haven residents outside of Yale in order to demonstrate to the Board of Alders that community members are moved by the issue.
According to Arka Gupta, who is involved with the civilian review board advocacy through the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association (YULAA), one obstacle that activists face is a common perception that Connecticut is too “liberal” a state to have a systemic problem with police misconduct.
Despite this common assumption, Hilke, Gupta, and Popov all said that they have not encountered resistance to the civilian review board proposal within the Yale community. However, Popov hopes that the movement will not fizzle out after a while within the university, noting that the push for the Malik Jones proposal has taken over twenty years and may still require a sustained effort.
Hilke does not worry that the movement for a civilian review board will lose momentum, but he hopes that new supporters do not expect an instant victory. “I think one thing that DeStefano’s executive order showed is that if a half-baked solution gets put into place, it can be a lot harder to dislodge that than to win at the beginning,” he said, “and this is a moment where we have to win at the beginning.”
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In her report on Jayson Negron’s death, Platt acknowledged that the teenager’s body should not have been left in the open for so long, where anyone could see. She suggested that in future shootings, victims’ bodies would be covered from view by opaque “screens” so that “the integrity of the scene can be preserved while maintaining the dignity of the deceased and preserving the sensitivities of the community.”
For some, such a proposition is not enough. Local organization CT-CORE published a criticism of similar statements to Platt’s, saying that Bridgeport officials “have expressed regret over the fact that Jayson's body was not properly covered after he was killed and pledge that a body will never be left out in the open again. No such promise has been made about the killing of unarmed young people by city police.”
The recent change to New Haven’s charter has paved a legislative path for a civilian review board in the city. The hope is that such a board will provide transparency to a disciplinary process that is often kept from public knowledge. Yet the details of the board’s structure remain up for debate, and with them, the amount of power that the board will ultimately possess. At stake is the difference between a gesture towards maintaining the dignity of those who have died at the hands of the police and a source of real accountability for police action.
