It’s the mayors and the police chiefs that are routinely going before cameras to answer questions from their community members about why violence continues to be a problem, and what they’re going to do about it.
Middletown was one of those places recently. A police officer was attacked by a man with a hammer and in this case, the chief said Detective Karli Travis had to shoot the suspect to save her own life and protect her community.
During the last legislative session, mayors and police chiefs from across the state put together proposals to amend sentencing guidelines with the goal of making streets safer and keeping people in prison longer when they’re repeat offenders.
NBC Connecticut’s Mike Hydeck spoke with Middletown Mayor Ben Florsheim (D) to find out what progress the state has made on this issue.
Mike Hydeck: First up, that video was harrowing. How is your detective?
Ben Florsheim: She is, I think, as well as as one can be under the circumstances. We are relieved that she’s making a recovery from her injuries. Obviously, this is a traumatizing experience for really the whole neighborhood, the whole department. But I think that the psychic wound is probably going to be more serious than the physical ones. Which means that thankfully, she’s at home and resting and recovering, but also that we’re going to need to work to make sure that we’re there for her and for the department.
Mike Hydeck: And you could hear it in the chief’s voice, you can hear the tone in his voice during that interview. He was a little bit, you know, taken aback by it.
Ben Florsheim: First officer-involved shooting in Middletown in as long as anybody can remember.
Mike Hydeck: So in recent years, you know, this, and we’ve talked about here on the news, several times, sentencing guidelines in both prisons and mental health facilities have changed to try to let people out sooner, get recommitted to society. But when that happens, how does that have an impact on places like Middletown?
Ben Florsheim: Well, you know, I think that Middletown has had a history with this question, unlike any other community in the state in many respects. I’m thinking of the Jessica Short tragedy in 1990, that involved an inmate at Connecticut Valley Hospital, who left under sort of supervised leave, and then committed this atrocious crime.
Mike Hydeck: To remind people, she was in a convenience store, I guess, at the time.
Ben Florsheim: She was on Main Street, a young girl with, you know, hundreds of people, hundreds of witnesses. It was in many ways the event that was the death knell for Main Street, and that required the city and the chamber and the police department to all work together really consciously to say, ‘what are we going to do to change this and to turn this around?’ And a huge part of it is, you know, I said this at our press conference at the police department the other day, we have made really important progress in Connecticut, in the country when it comes to reforming and we’re correcting a lot of the injustices and non-functional elements of our criminal justice system that were not serving the community well.
Mike Hydeck: When you speak to that, that’s minor offenses that people use to get long prison time for. Those things have been changed.
Ben Florsheim: Non-violent drug offenses.
Mike Hydeck: These are different though.
Ben Florsheim: Well, yes. And I think that there’s also been a lot of inroads made on research and in types of programs that can help rehabilitate offenders who have more serious criminal backgrounds, but the the funding and the support and those programs need to actually be brought to scale. They cannot, they have to be implemented if they’re going to be successful. So I think that there’s an impulse sometimes to put this conversation in terms of reform vs. anti-reform. I think we’re always needing to be reformed. Ideally, we’re always reforming, we’re never going to be perfect, we just want to improve, and the circumstances are always changing. So we’ve made a lot of really good progress, but the investment needs to be there for those community supports. And again, this was true for mental health deinstitutionalization many years ago. There were amazing organizations like Gilead Community Services, like Community Health Center in Middletown, that were founded in the community by residents in the years after the state started to deinstitutionalize and close hospitals down. And those were intended to be community support programs. They have done amazing work. But they constantly are overwhelmed by the amount of the need that is out there.
Mike Hydeck: They need more funding, they need more staff, they need more ability to do what they need to do. Do you expect any of these reforms, it seems like there’s somewhat of a disconnect. We’re seeing mayors, your police chief in Middletown, we’ve seen it in Hartford, we’ve seen it in Waterbury, saying the same thing. It seems as if it’s not quite getting through to lawmakers in the statehouse. Do you believe that? Do you think it’s gonna get more traction this time around?
Ben Florsheim: I think that there will, I hope so. And I think that again, there is a tendency for the pendulum to swing back and forth on issues like this. I think that there is acknowledgement that we can make at the municipal level of the good intentions behind some of the changes in the programs that the state is advocating, but we need to, and certainly we have not been quiet about this through CCM, through our advocacy at the state legislative level, but we will need to be more pointed. And I think we’re going to have to get our communities involved in a new way and saying, ‘Hey, not let’s undo all these things and go back and not let’s not swing the pendulum back in the other direction and recreate the problem that we had just as we were starting to make really positive progress according to some metrics.’ Let’s take these ideas and implement them at scale. We need funding for our juvenile review boards, we need funding for community-based mental health programming and rehabilitation that gets people into employment. And, frankly, you know, we need to have adequate staffing for our court system, for our correctional system. We’re facing a crisis in many respects in employment in the public sector and you know, not to connect one issue to every other issue, but the fact that we’re struggling to fill positions at the local level and at the state level in law enforcement and the judicial branch, it’s putting a lot of burden on the systems that need to be redesigned in the first place.
Mike Hydeck: And a lot of these proposals were in Mayor Bronin’s framework that Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury, even you were ready to try to adopt and it’s going to be interesting to see if it’ll make some headway in the next session.
