US District Judge M. Joseph Blumenfeld denies the city’s motion to dismiss Cintron v. Vaughan. Hartford is sent reeling after several more young Black and Latino men die at the hands of police. A city council committee is convened to investigate police use of force, but they end up recommending no change in guidelines.
Amid a series of fatal police shootings and public outcry, the Guardians—a fraternal organization of Black Hartford Police officers—perform a walkout to call attention to their grievances regarding a culture of discrimination within the force. This is the context in which local Black and Puerto Rican organizers file a class action lawsuit, Cintron v. Vaughan, against the HPD and city government alleging a pattern of race-based abuse.
SUMMARY: The period of the 1960s has come to be defined by powerful social uprisings against the systemic racial discrimination perpetuated by de facto segregation in educational, legal and social systems. Entirely intertwined with these spheres of violence is the use of excessive force as a weapon of control by law enforcement agencies, as a means to physically uphold these systems of racial discrimination. As December 1969 closes out the decade, members of the Black and Latinx community in Hartford, Connecticut file a class action lawsuit against the Hartford Police Department for subjecting them to unconstitutional and senseless violence. This class action lawsuit would come to be known as Cintron v. Vaughan.
This project tracks the fifty-year lifespan of Cintron v. Vaughan, a consent decree which placed the Hartford Police Department (HPD) under judicial oversight from 1973 to 2023. The case began as a class action lawsuit brought in 1969 against members of the HPD and city government by community organizations as well as Black and Latinx citizens who had experienced police abuse. Cintron may be the first and longest-running consent decree entered into by a U.S. police department, and yet it is relatively unknown in discourses surrounding police reform.