On a Tuesday evening in early September 2021, Karen Dubois-Walton ’89 got a text from her friend Sarah Miller ’03. Someone had been shot in their Fair Haven neighborhood in a parking lot just down the street from DuBois-Walton’s home. Dubois-Walton rushed to the lot, meeting Miller and another friend and resident, Kica Matos. “There were a bunch of detectives and police just kind of standing around, and none of them were proactively engaging with the community,” DuBois-Walton recalled. In an email interview, Miller said that was “the tipping point” for the three friends.
The parking lot where the shooting occurred has a long and well-documented history of illegal activity––much of the crime related to the adjacent bar, the Grand Cafe. Though the bar’s owners have denied its involvement in illegal activity, several police reports and complaints of Fair Haven community members offer evidence to the contrary. The reports detail several instances of drug dealing and armed violence associated with the Cafe, and even reveal a discreet system by which bar employees sold cocaine to patrons.
2021 was a grim year for violent crime in New Haven and across the nation. That year, murders in the top American cities rose by 44 percent of their 2019 levels, with New Haven seeing 25 homicides and 110 non-fatal shootings. Fair Haven was especially hard hit, as six people were killed in the neighborhood. But, according to the New Haven Independent, the New Haven Police Department only made arrests in three of the city’s murders. So when the September 7th shooting occurred, Matos said that DuBois-Walton, Miller, and herself “had a strong sense that the city had no plan or strategy in place to address the rising number of shootings – either in our neighborhood or the city.”
So, drawing on their deep ties to the community, the three women left the crime scene and created a group chat to discuss ways to address the harmful activity in the parking lot themselves. DuBois-Walton was Mayor John DeStefano Jr.’s chief of staff and has been president of Elm City Communities, New Haven’s public housing authority, for the past 14 years. In February, she was appointed as Chairperson of the Connecticut State Board of Education by Governor Ned Lamont. Matos worked as the deputy mayor of the city, was the president of Junta for Progressive Action, and now is a Vice President at the Vera Institute, an organization that advocates for criminal legal reform. Miller co-founded NHPS Advocates, a local education advocacy organization, and now serves Fair Haven as the Ward 14 Alder.
“We had been complaining about the lack of community policing, and it just all came to a head,” explained DuBois-Walton. They organized a Community Management Team meeting––an opportunity for Fair Haven residents to gather to address problems in the neighborhood––and proposed an unconventional plan. Residents would show up in the parking lot every day, three hours a day, for the next three weeks. According to Dubois-Walton, the goal was to “bring positivity, bring community, and just be a disruptor to what was happening out there.” And many Fair Haveners, frustrated with New Haven’s recent rise in violent crime, were on board.
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On September 21st, Bomba drums and lawn chairs in hand, the group of residents staked their claim on the parking lot, settling in for the hours ahead. Song and spoken word poetry filled the air as the sun set on the muggy mid-September day. Fair Haveners gathered, talked, laughed, and ate together. Alex Guzhnay, Ward 1 Alder and Fair Haven native, said that he saw “a lot of former neighbors and people I knew in the community, which goes to show how many locals supported the effort.”
Some days had higher attendance and more participation than others but, according to DuBois-Walton, Fair Haveners were there every evening. The organizers coordinated entertainment and food for each night of the occupation, and as it started to gain media attention, they started receiving food donations and attracting participants from outside of the neighborhood. Ice the Beef –– a local violence prevention organization –– even arranged a march that culminated at the lot. During the occupation, organizers circulated a petition, which amassed nearly 300 signatures, to revoke the Grand Cafe’s liquor license.
The results of the occupation were profound. “We built community and new optimism among neighbors that things can change,” Miller said of the collective effort. According to Fair Haven District Manager Lieutenant Michael Fumiatti, who attended the occupation in uniform, the protest “absolutely” deterred crime and reduced police presence. “There were no major incidents in that corner or in the neighborhood during that period,” claimed Miller, which DuBois-Walton and Matos corroborated.
The occupation also became a space for community building. Matos said that she herself “met new neighbors,” and that “the lot ended up being a hub for community engagement.” Fair Haven residents engaged in meaningful dialogue with one another, bar patrons, and the people who usually frequent the parking lot. DuBois-Walton said that those conversations allowed each group to find common ground and better understand each other. The occupation gave Fair Haven residents “clarity on what the community is really dealing with instead of relying on information from me,” said Lieutenant Fumiatti, agreeing with DuBois-Walton. “When they can see with their own eyes,” he added, “they can see what changes need to be made and what changes they need to advocate for to hopefully not even have to have the police there at all.”
On February 3, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection denied the Grand Cafe’s liquor license renewal request.
“We changed what it felt like on that corner, and no one left in handcuffs,” DuBois-Walton said.
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The debate over crime and policing has taken an outsized role in New Haven politics, and this is the year where the city’s politicians will have to decide what they want public safety efforts to look like. With an increased Yale investment, American Rescue Plan Funding, and State PILOT funding, New Haven leaders are now faced with a question: what crime prevention strategies will they invest in? The current Connecticut General Assembly legislative session adds a tremendous sense of urgency to that decision, as New Haven has the opportunity to advocate for state funding to address crime and violence. Are efforts like the occupation –– where community members are given the resources to mobilize to interrupt crime in their own neighborhoods –– the ones the city should be investing in?
“It is certainly people-intensive,” Dubois-Walton said of the occupation. When asked if occupations like these were a long-term solution to crime in Fair Haven, Miller said “No, of course not. It’s a short-term intervention to interrupt the negative trajectory, draw attention to the issue, and help shift things in a different direction.” That different direction, Matos says, is New Haven creating plans to reduce crime and significantly invest in Fair Haven.
DuBois-Walton argues that the strategic plans should lean on community policing and institutions that address the underlying causes of crime. She views the occupation as a model of collaboration between the community and police, saying “we can address the issues, address negative patterns, replace them with something positive, and do it in a way that offers resources to folks instead of just trying to throw them away or discard them.” Lieutenant Fumiatti’s views are similar. “If you understand what the community needs, then you can use the tools available to the police department to stick with the community’s mission on how they would like to be policed, and how they would like their neighborhoods and areas to look,” he said. “We might arrest a person, but I want my cops to understand what’s going on and find a way to plug that person into services that can get them out of the life of crime or get them out of a situation where they have to commit crimes in order to survive.”
Community violence intervention programs already exist in the nation’s top cities. Programs like Readi Chicago, Advance Peace, and Oakland Ceasefire send community members into their neighborhoods to engage with those most likely to be involved in gun violence, connecting them with mental health resources, job training, and other social services. But these programs’ short-term effects on crime are mixed, and many of them haven’t been tried on a large scale. Moreover, the investment these programs make are geared toward long-term change: they’re about building the kinds of institutions and community ties that can reshape neighborhoods over the course of a generation. That timeline is inconvenient for politicians facing the pressure of elections every few years and the communities suffering from crime right now.
It is unclear if New Haven will invest in this kind of community policing. Neither Mayor Justin Elicker nor the Interim New Haven Police Chief Renee Dominguez made an appearance at the occupation, which Matos called “shameful,” and the Elicker Administration has not publicly commented on the occupation. However, after securing $2 million in federal funding, the city seems poised to follow through on its plan to create a crisis-response team, which would deploy social services providers to address non-emergency 911 calls. On April 14th, Mayor Elicker announced a new gun violence prevention program, called PRESS, that would partner with several state and federal organizations to offer support to the formerly incarcerated and those most at risk of being involved in gun violence. But community members have expressed deep concern with the initiative’s reliance on police instead of existing community-run violence prevention programs.
Regardless of the direction the administration pursues, the occupation offers us some powerful lessons. It demonstrates that community members can make their neighborhoods safer through small collective acts. It shows the power in infusing public spaces with positivity. And it suggests a perhaps radical idea: that we can counter violence with love and care instead of punishment and force.
Reflecting on the occupation, DuBois Walton said “The real success I think has been that the community came together, demonstrated its power, demonstrated its cohesion, worked effectively on something… and I think modeled for the city when community policing was working what it looked like.”
“We can do this in more and more places, and that’s what I hope can be long-lasting about this.”