The killing of Aquan Salmon shakes the Hartford community to its core, underscoring an omnipresent fear of anti-Black violence perpetrated by the Hartford Police Department. The media coverage of the incident often follows a familiar pattern, the senseless death obscured by the narrative of Salmon’s perceived criminality as justification. The collaboration between community leaders initiated in 1999 proves fruitful, and the group—led by Carmen Rodriguez, Reverend James Walker, and Wadell Muhammad—pursues accountability measures through the judicial system via Cintron, committed to creating new conditions of law enforcement which would prevent another such death. The city agrees to create a new nine-member Firearms Discharge Board of Inquiry (FDBI) with three civilian members, as well as a new police rule regarding the use of weapons; both of these policies, referred to as 1-21 and 1-22, are updated versions of stipulations included in Cintron’s initial 1973 agreement. (Source) State prosecutor Kevin Kane exonerates Officer Allan in February, and the HPD begins their own internal investigation shortly after. (Source) As city officials ask for a thorough internal inquiry into the shooting, the HPD proves resistant to increasing demands for reform and oversight. The HPD review panel assigned to the shooting is suspended mid-meeting after residents raise concerns that it violates the new policy. (Source) The panel was composed of officers alone, rather than the civilian-police FDBI body recently agreed to under Cintron negotiations. 

On March 1st, after pushback from the City Council, both parties to the renewed Cintron litigation agree that the court will appoint an independent monitor of compliance, or “Special Master.” Judge Burns names attorney Richard A. Bieder to the position. The Special Master “shall have the power to make decisions on disputes between the parties regarding the enforcement of the Consent Decree . . . shall have the duty to conduct hearings to determine whether or not the Consent Decree has been violated . . . [and] shall have the responsibility and duty to oversee all aspects of the Consent Decree.” (Source) Shortly after Bieder is named to the role, he rules that Allan’s use of force was within his authority as a police officer since he believed his life had been in danger. Bieder regards Salmon’s death as tragic but justified. 

In May, Deputy Chief Robert Casati faces disciplinary proceedings for the discriminatory language alleged in 1997. Casati’s behavior is justified by City Council Arbitrator Albert G. Murphey, who considers it a consequence of the grueling work of a police officer. In his decision reinstating Casati as deputy chief, Murphey writes that an officer’s language might reflect the challenging and violent world that he experiences each day, and therefore Casati’s racial epithets should not be taken too seriously. Murphey’s decision stands in tension with the way language is taken up in Cintron. On one hand, the inclusion of “Trigger Words” (see 1997) in the consent decree acknowledges the role language plays in police-community relations, a response to the Plaintiffs’ claim that racial slurs are part of the regime of humiliation the HPD exercises against the city’s Black and Brown citizens. However, that text also denies the effects of language used in private; essentially, it presupposes that slurs are harmful only when overheard by citizens. This siloing of everyday experience assumes that the internal culture of a police force has no impact on the way officers interact with the public, a shockingly facile, and perhaps deliberately evasive, notion. In his condoning of “blue humor,” Murphey is actually aligned with Cintron’s implicit assumptions about racial slurs in the consent decree’s original form, which is still operational at this time.

            Acting Police Chief Deborah Barrows is ousted in July, amid claims of her inability to justly investigate the Salmon shooting. Council members and activists find that Barrows’ actions during Allan’s hearing proved a disregard for city council rule, specifically the new FDBI procedure recently signed that updated the review protocol included in Cintron. Barrows’ actions are regarded immediately as a disrespect of direct orders and indicative of her insubordination, quickly shattering her professional identity. (Source)

            Particularly significant about Barrow’s position are the diverging expectations set forth for her as a Black woman from Hartford’s North End leading a police department. Barrows was expected to appease everyone at all times, both the community that looked to her for representation as well as the police force she led (Source). The needs of these communities often diverged. Cindy Austin at the Hartford Courant reports on the immediate aftermath of Barrows’ demotion, describing the complicated and conflicting feelings that Hartford’s Black community held regarding Barrows’ tenure as chief. Austin writes that “Barrows’ high-profile status comforted the city’s minority population and assured them that the department would do its best to get down to the bare bones of the Salmon investigation. They were depending on her to make it happen. To them, she was more than a figurehead. She had become the promise of a new beginning for a city that was seemingly being rent away from them.” (Source) Barrows had a close relationship with the community. Aquan Salmon’s grandmother Norma Watts described Barrows as “blessed. She’s different from the rest. I appreciate her for that. She shouldn’t have to do the department’s dirty work. When this happened she wasn’t in charge. It’s an unfair burden.” Watts’ assessment, along with Austin’s observation in the Courant, speaks to the difficulty Barrows faced being placed at the head of an already damaged department. Barrows first joined the force in 1973 and was welcomed with the signing of Cintron, a clear acknowledgment of dysfunction within the department. When she was appointed acting chief in 1999, the HPD had seen over twenty officers arrested for crimes conducted on duty in recent years; the department’s internal functions were in disarray; and morale was low. The Buracker report, which exposed these and other deep-seated structural problems within the HPD over 400 pages, was released just a few months into Barrows’ tenure. She possessed little control over the department’s direction, but was deemed publically responsible for it.

           These expectations placed on Barrows failed to account for the contradictory obligations of a Black police officer, discussed thirty years prior in the Hartford Star article “Black Community and the Police.” This article acknowledges that “in many instances, the patrolmen want to better communicate with the ghetto, but find it difficult defining what they believe to be the conflicting demands of being a concerned black citizen and a police officer.” As analyzed by James Foreman in his book Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, these “conflicting demands” will always result in upholding the systems granting those officers authority in the first place. Foreman’s book critically analyzes the position of Black police officers, judges, and politicians whose work actively maintains the system that continues to place a disproportionate number of Black people in prison. Foreman argues that the individuals in these positions should not be expected to do anything more than the role they have taken on for themselves. Foreman quotes James Baldwin’s claim that “the function of an urban police force was to keep the black man corralled,” deducing that Black officers, and those in similar positions of power, must not be presumed to alter the nature of policing from its original function. The conflicting emotions held by both Black Hartford residents and activists fighting against racial violence speaks to two simultaneous truths—Black officers like Barrows will continue to uphold racist police systems despite their sensitivity to the community, though they will also be scapegoated, disrespected and discarded when convenient for those in power.

NOTES on Deborah Barrows