We normally read of racial profiling and drivers. Here we have
allegations of profiling by community policing. Video capability
with small devices is starting to heavily impact citizen/police
interaction.
March 13, 2009
Priest’s Video Contradicts Police Report on Arrest
EAST HAVEN, Conn. — Latino merchants in this New Haven suburb have been complaining for months that they get a disproportionately large share of attention from the local police. Officers, they say, have harassed them and their customers by lingering outside shops, stopping cars and demanding to see driver’s licenses.
But their complaints were largely confined to grumbling among themselves and at a local church until Feb. 19, when a white American priest was arrested.
The priest, the Rev. James Manship, who was videotaping a police visit to an Ecuadorean-owned grocery store on Main Street when he was led off in handcuffs, has become an unlikely symbol of racial profiling, charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with the police.
On Thursday, more than a dozen East Haven residents joined the priest at a news conference in New Haven to release the brieftape he made of the encounter.
Father Manship, who had been advising the merchants, was in My Country Store taping two police officers as they confiscated the owner’s collection of license plates. In the arrest report, Officer David Cari said he grew concerned when the priest approached the officers and failed to identify an object cupped in his hands. Officer Cari wrote in the report that he felt “unsafe.”
But in the 14-second video, which can be seen on the Web site newhavenindependent.org, the officer can be heard asking the priest: “Sir what are you doing? Is there a reason that you have a camera on me?” Father Manship replies, “I’m taking a video of what’s going on here.”
Officer Cari approaches him, saying, “Well I’ll tell you what — what I’m going to do with that camera.” Then the taping stops.
Father Manship, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in New Haven, was documenting police action on behalf of several members of his parish, including the store’s owner, Wilfred Matutet, and his wife, Marcia Chacon, who owns the beauty salon next door.
The number of customers at the salon, said Janet Ortiz, a stylist, has dropped drastically in recent months, as police officers lingered in cruisers across the street.
Over the past 20 years, the Hispanic population of this working-class town has nearly quadrupled to about 1,900, or about 6 percent of the population, according to census estimates. Businesses, many of them owned by Ecuadoreans, have expanded.
In January, Pedro and Adriene Gutierrez moved here from Long Island to open Gut’z Bakery. Within a week, Mr. Gutierrez said, he noticed the police checking the licenses and car registrations of his customers. His daughter, Marley Gutierrez, said she had called the Police Department, telling a police supervisor, “This is a problem — did we do something wrong?”
“He said, ‘Well, this is how we do things in East Haven,’ ” she recalled.
No record of the complaint seems to have been registered, said Hugh Keefe, the lawyer for the Police Department. “If somebody legit calls the mayor with a specific complaint formally or informally with a date, time location, I assure you it will be investigated,” he said.
Mayor April Capone Almon said on Thursday that she had dined twice at Gut’z Bakery, but that no one had told her about problems with the police. “We investigate and look into all concerns, but no formal complaints have been filed,” the mayor said. “How can I do anything if I don’t know?”
Father Manship said he and the merchants had been assembling a case to document their stories, and videotaping police action. His arrest suddenly made the effort public.
Town officials said Father Manship might be getting in the way of a resolution. “I know he is trying to get his name in the paper,” Mr. Keefe said. “I know he wanted to get arrested.”
He added: “I don’t want to hear him talk about discrimination without backing it up with places, dates, times and arrest records.”
Toward that end, merchants, religious leaders and young lawyers from Yale Law School’s law clinic have been gathering at St. Rose Church. “We’re continuing working with the community to collect stories. Many people now, instead of keeping this hidden, people are now talking about it,” Father Manship said.
The mayor said she feared further division. “One always has to be careful about who they are choosing as their messenger,” she said. “The front page of the paper, press conferences — they alienate us from one another.”
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