A month after the city council committee on police use of firearms submitted their recommendations, requesting no change in guidelines governing deadly force, the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities—led by Arthur L. Green—released their report on police-community relations in nine Connecticut cities. The report offers a straightforward structural assessment as explained by two respondents, out of a pool sourced from various sections of Hartford society. 

Two interviewees attributed the problem to current political situations: The population to which a city agency, such as the police department, has traditionally been accountable has moved and been replaced by a vocal non-white population. This non-white population is demanding service from the police, while the police department is continuing to hold itself accountable to other segments of the population. Meanwhile, the non-white ghetto residents have not yet developed the political power to hold City Hall accountable to themselves. Thus, tension and conflict have been produced.

This quote gets to the center of Hartford politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Notably, the report writers are unable to refer directly to white society, defining it only by negation via the “non-white population.” This veil, implicitly upholding white supremacy by naturalizing and erasing its particularity, underscores the profound shift seen during this era in US politics as marginalized voices grew in strength and number. The white establishment (encapsulated here by the HPD administration and city government) struggles to account for itself amid a changing landscape. According to the report’s interviewees, this moment of fissure—marked doubly by a lack of language—was viewed at the time as a turning point in which the scales of power were wavering, to uncertain end. 

Around 1970, the city government and Connecticut judicial system failed repeatedly, from the perspective of Hartford’s Black and Puerto Rican organizers, to enact justice or show respect for the lives of those living in the North End. Viewed from the perspective of this moment of shifting scales, the story is not simply one of defeat and could be re-narrativized as one of waver. Local leaders did not falter in their demands after the city council decision; amid the many lost civil suits in which no damages were awarded to the families of brutality victims; alongside the HPD officers still roaming Hartford with bloodied hands. They continued to pour effort into this fight, a story taken up again in 1973 with a significant victory: the class action lawsuit Cintron v. Vaughan, settled via consent decree, effectively institutionalizing the voice of civilian critique of the HPD for fifty years.