After Emma Jones’ son Malik was murdered by police in 1997, she spent the next 23 years working to create a Civilian Review Board for police accountability. But now that one exists, she thinks it’s time for New Haven to go back to the drawing board.
***
“Guys, this isn’t just, ‘If you don’t want to do something, don’t do it.’”
Richard Crouse’s plea to participate to the other 13 members of the New Haven Civilian Review Board (CRB) faded into the silence familiar to their Zoom meetings. As the board’s November 2021 meeting trudged toward the two-hour mark, Crouse’s eyes took to darting from notes to screen, notes to screen, and he would subtly but sharply bite his bottom lip whenever a member asked a question he’d answered minutes prior. He left this meeting as he often did: unsure what the board had accomplished.
Crouse, the board’s secretary, typically bore the brunt of the tedious organizational work that had become the staple of the CRB, a group made up of everyday New Haven residents meant to generate accountability for police misconduct. He remembered innumerable volunteer hours spent combing over 70-page PDFs, compiling mountains of police data into spreadsheet categories like “Race,” “Officer Name” and “Discipline Breakdown.”
To the casual meeting observer, Crouse’s face would be easily the most memorable, and he would appear to have the best handle on CRB operations.
“If you asked me what the process is for what happens on the Civilian Review Board, I truly couldn’t tell you exactly,” Crouse said.
At the same November meeting, silently taking notes with her camera off, was another face. A face that had virtually willed the CRB into existence. A face managing a tired smile, all but forgotten behind a black screen.
Forgotten, as if it wasn’t because of Emma Jones such a meeting was happening at all. As if, in 1997, her legs hadn’t given out after picking up the phone to hear “Oh, Ms. Jones, something really bad happened! Something really, really bad! There’s a police officer and I believe he shot Malik!” As if she hadn’t sat at the site of her son’s murder every Monday since. As if she hasn’t been fighting every moment to scrape together an institution like the CRB that would prevent these policing injustices, the kind that leaves family members buried in the dirt, from going unpunished.
But now, she said she’s become marginalized in the course of establishing the enterprise that has become her life’s work.
“I just do the observing,” Jones said with pained modesty. “But they don’t, you know, they don’t typically see me. And from where I’m sitting now, from my lens, it’s very grim.”
Over the course of 25 years, Emma Jones, who now serves as an official consultant to the CRB, has worked to channel the violent loss of her son into creating a board that would fundamentally change the operations of the New Haven Police Department (NHPD), which has a long history of misconduct. But since January of 2019, when the New Haven Board of Alders voted to create the CRB, she has watched her vision slowly slip from her grasp. And as the supposed efficacy of the board remains undermined by inaction, its independence from NHPD becoming increasingly constrained, some community leaders, including Jones, have begun to wonder whether the city will ever allow the CRB to do what Jones once hoped it could.
***
Jones first heard the idea for a civilian review board in 1995. The year prior, John Destefano had been elected mayor of New Haven and immediately promoted a campaign of heightened police activity common to American cities throughout the ‘90s. New Haven is home to a 34% Black population and a 57% white population which includes many short-term residents. As the use of policies like stop-and-frisk skyrocketed in this primarily Black and brown community, so did complaints of racial profiling and abuse. Eventually, public outcry escalated until Ward 3 Alder Anthony Dawson submitted a proposal for a CRB to the Board of Alders.
Dawson’s proposal failed to pass. Little did Jones know, she would soon become its champion.
On the night of April 14, 1997, Malik Jones got in his car with his friend Samuel Cruz after a game of basketball in East Haven. As 21-year-old Malik drove home, Officer Robert Flodquist began following him. Noticing Flodquist in pursuit, Malik pulled into an empty lot on Grand Avenue and soon was boxed in by police cars. Before Malik had stopped the car, Flodquist exited his vehicle and began approaching the driver’s side door from the rear. What happened next will never be known with total certainty: Flodquist claimed Malik reversed the car towards him in an attempt to flee, though Cruz said he was simply trying to avoid hitting the police car that had appeared before him.
Flodquist then ran up to Malik’s window, smashed the glass and shot him at least four times above the heart. Flodquist later testified he kept shooting until Malik slumped over.
When she first got the call, Jones thought it was a really bad joke. Then an NHPD officer arrived at her door, and immediately she was paralyzed. She didn’t yet know that officers at the scene of the shooting took the time to handcuff her son despite his bullet holes. She didn’t yet know that her son vomited on himself as officers dragged him into a van. All she knew was that Malik was gone.
She said everyone who’d ever met her son fell in love with him.
“I had to pray to God so that I didn’t lose my mind,” Jones said. “I prayed for God to take the knife that was in my heart and pull it out and throw it in the river, in a fire someplace. And I begged God to give me a sign to let me know what to do.”
She couldn’t bring herself to do anything for three months, let alone bring herself to sleep. She felt helpless. Eventually, Jones started spending time each day dreaming of things she could do so other people would not have to suffer like this. Once a successful law associate herself, she soon got to work, bringing together groups of all kinds, from the NAACP to the Nation of Islam. They discussed new legislation, racial profiling education initiatives, public rallies, anything they could imagine, while Jones scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad.
“The police commit some of the most egregious atrocities against human beings in this country,” Jones said. “Officer Flodquist violated every single policy and procedure of the police department. But there’s no accountability, right? So the Civilian Review Board was one of the first things we decided we wanted.”
Propelled by thoughts of Malik, she began traveling the country. From New Jersey to California, she searched for years for the perfect model on which to base her vision of a CRB. She discovered that no such model existed. Almost all CRBs either vanished into obscurity or were wholly ineffective. She returned to New Haven disheartened but armed with a comprehensive knowledge of what makes CRBs fail.
For Jones, the New Haven CRB needed several key elements in order to be worthwhile. It needed complete independence from police, so it could receive complaints and conduct full investigations without relying on police records. It needed “subpoena power,” or the ability to summon witnesses and documents during investigations. It needed the authority to discipline officers, though she knew support for this would be hard to come by. And it would need an appropriate budget. Anything less, she believed, would ensure that New Haven’s proposed CRB met the same perilous fate as the others.
But translating those components into actual city law turned out to be, unsurprisingly for Jones, a slow, laborious process. Establishing a new board like the CRB requires making changes to the New Haven City Charter, which may only be amended every 10 years. By the time Jones had drafted an ordinance in 2004, she learned that the charter had just been reviewed the year prior. She’d have to wait another decade. During that time, she began working more vigorously to build grassroots support for the idea.
When the window finally opened again in 2013, and Jones and the NAACP helped propose a referendum to amend the charter to mandate that the city establish the CRB, it passed with overwhelming public support.
For a moment, she felt ecstatic. But in a city with over 500 police officers for just 144,000 people, it would be another six long years, thanks to dominant opposition from the police union, before referendum became reality.
On that day in January 2019, the day the Board of Alders created the CRB, Jones felt like she’d really done it. After 22 years, galvanized by the memory of Malik, she felt that her city would finally start doing the right thing.
For a moment, she felt relief.
“I was naive enough to think that it could happen how I wanted,” Jones said, voice breaking.
***
Three years after the official birth of the CRB, Crouse, who works full-time as a Program Administrator in Yale’s Office of New Haven Affairs, sat in the shade of a red brick pavilion, one bright blue pant leg crossed over the other. He was trying to sum up what it’s like to sit on the CRB, and he spent most of the interview leaning back in his chair with slightly slumped shoulders.
He described begging people to remember it exists at all.
“People have said we’ve done really great work with what we’ve been given,” Crouse said. “Sure. But really, we were given a dumpster fire, and we have managed to not catch the house on fire next to us. That’s it.”
When Crouse first reached out to the Board of Alders about the open CRB position, he didn’t at all realize what he signed up for. Unlike Jones, he has never had any consequential encounters with police. He grew up in Florida, not New Haven, and his background is a Ph.D. in neuroscience, not policing. He said he was just happy to try to help out the neighborhood he’d fallen in love with around Dwight Street.
The Board of Alders approved Crouse to the CRB in July of 2019. He waited for months for them to accept other members. He kept waiting. Nothing happened. Eventually, without even having their email addresses, Crouse decided to reach out to the other members via Facebook, and the ones that responded were in the same boat: not a clue what was going on.
One such member was Rev. Samuel Ross-Lee, the CRB’s member-at-large. He’d already been on the job for two months before Ward-29 Alder Brian Windgate, the CRB’s representative to the Board of Alders, told him he held this title. As he came to terms with that revelation, Ross-Lee said he had to lead the CRB through the six months of training sessions mandated by the city, but said that before those trainings concluded, the Board of Alders suddenly announced that the CRB was ready to see cases.
“I think the CRB was put before the public far too soon,” Ross-Lee said. “We got backed up significantly as a result.”
Now that the CRB, nearly two years after the passing of the ordinance which brought it to life, was holding meetings, Crouse said it felt like they might finally escape their state of limbo. But as each month ticked by, it seemed to Crouse that still nothing happened. The worst of it, he said, was the cameras.
At any given moment, no more than three or four members would have their cameras on at all. Many wouldn’t unmute even when prompted. At the board’s October 2021 meeting, Ross-Lee spent nearly a minute attempting to call on a member who had raised their hand and was met with silence, only for them to furiously unmute nearly 15 minutes later, not realizing they’d ever been called on.
“Why weren’t we slapped on the wrist for some of this stuff?” Crouse said, hand lodged in his black curls.
Windgate, often with his camera off himself, was unbothered by the participation conundrum. People should focus on the fact that the CRB exists at all, he said. That’s the accomplishment, he said. When these once-a-month meetings happen around meal times in people’s busy schedules, there are going to be cameras off, he said. Even where police abuse is concerned.
“Cameras on, cameras off, you know, [the meetings are at] dinner time,” Windgate said. “But those issues are about to go away because we’re about to start meeting in person.”
As of March, Crouse said there were still cameras off at the Civilian Review Board.
***
Considering the current CRB members don’t receive a single cent for their efforts, Jones said she could salute their very hard work.
But she also bemoaned the fact that many of the members, including Crouse, have no educational background in law or policing. There were 105 complaints to NHPD in 2021, a number that has increased steadily since 2015. These included 16 accusations of excessive force, nine accusations of criminal conduct and nine accusations of illegal stops, on top of uncountable unreported incidents. She said given the dedicated investigative eye each of these complaints requires, the lack of substantive training amongst current board members is not sustainable.
“The CRB needs a lot of help,” Jones said. “I believe it takes time for an organization like this to evolve into its true capabilities. But I don’t want you to give people the impression that we have a real, competent Civilian Review Board this year because that would not be true.”
However, the city appears wholly disinterested in reassessing the current membership of the board for the foreseeable future.
On the city of New Haven’s website, the CRB’s homepage lists term expiration dates for all 14 members. Four of them, including Crouse’s, expired in July of 2021. According to the CRB’s ordinance, term limits are two years, or alternatively, “until a successor is appointed and duly qualified.” Alder Windgate said that in light of how difficult the training process proved to be with so few meetings, how it took over a year for work to begin and the current lack of search for replacements, he believes it’s best if everyone stays put for now.
“I think it would be a disservice to do a whole switcheroo,” Windgate said. “The people invested have done their due diligence of hailing this whole new process. It’s the Richard Crouses of the world.”
Crouse feels completely in over his head.
He reached a breaking point around the time his term was originally intended to end. At 11:21 p.m. on July 19, 2021, after meeting upon meeting spent running into the same barriers, Crouse fired up a Google Doc, resolving to create a document that could serve as a summary of the CRB’s expectations, duties and procedures.
As Crouse created his six-page grasp at deeper understanding, he tried to outline the four main duties of the CRB as he saw them: to independently review complaints of police misconduct, to monitor the methods by which complaints are processed at NHPD by essentially following their paper trails, to make recommendations to the police commissioners and to report annually on their work. The only sound in his room was the fraught clacking of keys.
When complaints are filed to the police department, they have five days to turn them over to the CRB. If the complaint has substance, the CRB designates a four-person Review Committee to the complaint to go over all the relevant files and footage. The Review Committee then presents their findings to the full CRB, which, after discussion, holds a vote on whether or not to approve the committee’s proposed course of action, amend it or reject it. If the vote passes, a written report, which includes the CRB’s disciplinary recommendations, must be drawn up and sent to the Board of Police Commissioners, which either approves or rejects their recommendations. And if they are rejected, there are no consequences. Finally, well past midnight, eyes straining, Crouse closed his laptop.
This is the extent of the CRB’s power. Needless to say, this isn’t what Jones had planned.
***
Every CRB meeting starts the same: with a presentation led by police.
Every meeting, Jones sits behind her black screen and watches Lt. Manmeet Colon and Captain David Zannelli, who leads the NHPD Professional Standards and Training Division. The officers give a rundown of the complaints NHPD has investigated in the last month, the vast majority of which – 70% in 2020 – NHPD deems unfounded. Every meeting, she said she must hold her tongue as the police, who she fought to keep out of her life’s work, dictate its course of action.
“This was supposed to be the first time in my life that there was a CRB that really stood firmly for that accountability,” Jones said.
In her original plans for the board, Jones stressed the essentiality of a mechanism for citizens to file official complaints directly to the CRB. But today, the only way to get a complaint to them is through the police’s Internal Affairs Division (IA).
Crouse said that he often finds the difference between police and CRB’s investigative ability immensely frustrating. Last September, he found out about a certain type of IA log sheet with pages of racial demographic information of citizens filing complaints he was never told he had access to, and had to repeatedly beg to see again. Virtually all involved members, from Crouse to Ross-Lee to Windgate to Jones, were in agreement: IA’s dominance over the CRB needs to end in order for it to truly fulfill its purpose of generating impartial accountability.
“If civilians don’t feel comfortable going to the police, I do think it’s important that they can follow up with us directly,” Crouse said.
Captain Zannelli explained that even though all complaints are investigated first within the police department, IA gives the CRB access to all arrest and incident reports, body camera footage and their own reports of the investigations. He even said sometimes police policies are improved based on CRB feedback. When pressed for an example, Zannelli recounted a time when CRB members were pressuring NHPD to promote violence de-escalation tactics to officers. He said because he believes NHPD should be at the forefront of de-escalation practice, the department took an unspecified “portion” of CRB concerns into account. Yet Connecticut law had already mandated these reforms, so they would have had to be implemented regardless of CRB input.
Zannelli believes the CRB and police have fostered a good working relationship. Even when they disagree, considering NHPD has complete authority whether or not to accept CRB recommendations, they do so respectfully. In fact, out of everyone I spoke to, he was the most complimentary of the CRB.
“I would like the CRB to go back to the community and say the IA division is doing thorough investigations,” Zannelli said. “There’s not a boogeyman in the closet.”
***
On Oct. 7 of last year, Crouse remembers walking down Howard Street in New Haven, side-by-side with Captain Zannelli. He’d reluctantly agreed to assist the captain with an NHPD recruitment drive, going door to door with flyers, selling the idea of joining the force. He didn’t think much of it. It was right by his lab. Armed with a large backpack, he shrugged off anxieties he was being too chummy with the department, and the pair took off through the Hill.
When the two reached the corner of Howard and Putnam, Zannelli spotted a group of young people and peeled off to begin his jovial pitch, paying no mind to the aging Black man sitting in front of Kav’s Package Store. With Zannelli preoccupied, Crouse approached the man and extended a flier. The man turned to look up at him. He shook his head.
“You a cop?” he demanded, voice low, a shadow of worry overtaking his face.
“No, I’m not a cop.” Crouse, in his backpack, was mildly offended.
The man began muttering something Crouse couldn’t make out, so he knelt down beside him. Not wanting to completely ignore Zannelli, however, Crouse kept one side of his face turned away from the man, hoping to continue hearing both speakers. He listened with one ear as the man’s muttering continued.
“F*** these guys,” he said. “You gotta watch out. They’re putting on a smile now, but they’re gonna shoot us.”
In the ensuing silence, Crouse wished he could think of something reassuring to say. Wished he could give him clear instructions. Wished he could describe clear processes the CRB still didn’t have, something to sum up his months of toil in a seconds-long exchange with one of the strangers the CRB was designed to advocate for.
All he was able to give this man was a hollow summary of the New Haven Civilian Review Board, and his phone number.
Crouse never heard back.
Zanelli would later report that NHPD received 523 applications thanks to the drive, their highest in four years. He thanked the CRB for what had been, for him at least, a team effort.
Yet at almost every stage of this “team effort” since the CRB’s creation in 2019, NHPD and its accompanying police union have campaigned to undermine not only the CRB’s independence, but its ability to function at all. The campaign started when the union backed West Haven officer Bob Proto’s nomination to the CRB. The CRB’s ordinance explicitly states no officers may serve on the board, but because Proto was recently retired, he was able to get around it. It was only due to widespread outcry that the Board of Alders ultimately shot down Proto’s nomination.
In January 2022, the police union, led by president Florencio Cotto, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint against the CRB. They claimed that the CRB violated its ordinance by failing to notify an officer being investigated for misconduct of a meeting where the board discussed their disciplinary recommendations for that officer. They hoped to stop public discussion of potential abuse while the Freedom of Information Commission conducted its investigation.
The campaign continues with NHPD’s standoff-ish approach to the CRB’s written recommendations. Crouse stressed that in the city ordinance, the CRB must always hear from the Board of Police Commissioners before any disciplinary rulings are given out on a complaint they investigated. The CRB is supposed to receive a response to their written reports and recommendations. As of March 2022, Crouse said they never have.
Justin Farmer, who sits on Hamden City Council, speaks with the knowledge of someone who has been attuned to police misconduct for many years. He remembers standing on the steps of NHPD, protesting in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and getting pepper-sprayed by police despite being an acting elected official. He said it’s absurd that the police have the sole authority over themselves, and his N95 ballooned at the force of his words.
“The police should not be investigating themselves,” Farmer said of the NHPD’s Internal Affairs Department. “If the city gets audited, we can’t just have our own finance director say these numbers are good. When it comes to police, we always throw conventional wisdom out the window.”
Jones, with her avalanche of notes, minute-by-minute meeting details on how her dream of police reform has fallen apart, still isn’t really sure what happened. It was as though she blinked and her years putting together the ideal recipe for a CRB vanished. She said you couldn’t imagine how frustrating it feels.
But Jones said she wants people to know her criticisms don’t come from a malicious place. She wishes more than anything she could trust NHPD with this work themselves. Alder Windgate certainly does, as he rejected the systemic nature of these issues within police, saying there are people that should be held accountable in every profession, from custodians to “Wall Street guys.”
But the stories of Jones’ son and countless others have made it impossible for her to feel comfortable granting police full responsibility for their own conduct.
“I don’t want to be unfair to anyone because I know deep in my soul what that feels like,” Jones said. “In the ideal world, I would like to see the police and the community working together to do the right thing. But it’s not an ideal world.”
Back under the red brick pavilion on Yale’s campus, I asked Crouse if, while under the thumb of police, there was an accomplishment of the CRB he could point to that makes him proud to be a member. He dropped eye contact with me and took a breath.
“The most sinister answer would be that I could point to nothing,” Crouse said.
***
For 25 years, Emma Jones has toiled over the CRB. Now, she believes that perhaps the city is better off without it.
“I’d rather not have a CRB that’s not legitimate than give people false hope,” Jones said. “This Civilian Review Board is not legitimate.”
For Councilman Farmer, the CRB has amounted to a mere political football. A football meant for voters to chase, to appease them, and a football to be perpetually intercepted by infinitely more powerful entities like the police union. So while he’s sympathetic to those working to better the CRB, ultimately, he just doesn’t believe the city will ever take it seriously. If they did, he said, there would be conversations about how to turn the resources used on every officer disciplined or terminated into resources to go back into the community. But that’s not the conversation the city is having.
“The Civilian Review Board has been a response to institutional racism, but it has been a shield to police,” Farmer said, hand suddenly striking his knee. “Everyone loves reformist ideas like the CRB, but I cannot take it seriously until the city wants to say it will reinvest in the community.”
The evidence of this lack of serious attitude toward efforts like the CRB, Farmer said, is in the city’s spending patterns. It’s the recent measure to fund a bunker with over 500 surveillance cameras rather than funding programs to keep kids off the streets. It’s New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker promising money from the American Rescue Plan first and foremost to police.
Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, the CEO of the Yale-based Center for Policing Equity (CPE), has observed many CRBs in many places. The Center boasts the world’s largest collection of behavioral police data, providing Goff an outlet to holistically analyze CRB performance. And he echoed Farmer, saying the emphasis most cities place on police is typically a response to the choice not to provide other services. When places divest from housing, health care, child care and substance abuse, which all disproportionately impact Black people, police funding goes up in order to handle the repercussions.
Farmer and Goff are tired of the conversations around public safety beginning and ending with police.
“We must talk about policing within the context of generational racism and within the context of neighborhood divestment,” Goff said.
Crouse, who spends most of his time in a Yale lab, not thinking about policing, said he’s desperate to hear feedback from these neighborhoods. Both himself and Jones are trying to plan community engagement events in the near future, trying to make people aware of how badly the CRB needs help.
Because for Jones, watching people pontificate about these ideas isn’t going to cut it anymore.
And for Crouse, he wants to, needs to, feel like all this work can really mean something for someone.
“I want the community to know that we need you to yell at us,” Crouse said. “Hold us accountable, too. In some ways, it’s not fair to put that on the shoulders of the people who are most affected by this. But I just want to be able to defend what the CRB is doing.”
***
Malik Jones was a remarkable athlete. He’d always excelled on the basketball court and even earned a black belt in karate. Malik’s mother said he was the glue holding the family together, and in an instant, the police took that away from her. But that wasn’t enough. Jones recounted how, in the aftermath of Malik’s murder, she watched as the police tried to take the bright memory she had of Malik away from her too.
She watched Flodquist claim he received a tip that a red Subaru was speeding in the area, and that this tip led him to begin tailing Malik. Malik was driving a gray Oldsmobile Cutlass.
She watched the police pull the accusation that Malik’s car was speeding at all seemingly out of thin air. Later investigations of the event revealed his car was incapable of going more than 40 miles per hour.
She watched as a Black NHPD officer approached her days after Malik’s death, saying he arrived at the scene as officers were searching the car. He told her he stopped them from planting a gun in the trunk.
She watched Robert Flodquist never face a single consequence for Malik’s murder. He was promoted shortly after the killing and continues to receive a sizable pension to this day.
In a way, Jones said the police have also taken away the New Haven CRB, the project that arose from the pain of their taking of her son. She watched it enter their sphere of influence and inevitably become separated from its original purpose. And now, Jones said she feels weary. Weary in the face of being denied justice for a long time.
But despite everything, Jones still can’t help but see the potential in this idea. She said the board’s goal is to begin cycling in new membership in December. She refuses to give up hope that there’s some way to fix this mess.
Because if her fight has taught her anything, it’s that she must keep standing up, no matter the cost.
“I think something like a miracle would have to happen to get the kind of results I have in mind for the CRB,” Jones said. “It’s time to go back to the drawing board. But I haven’t given up on it yet, because in this fight there is no giving up.”