Hartford Police and Community 1970

Introduction:

In November of 1970, the Connecticut Legislative Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities commissioned a report on “police-community relations” in Connecticut’s cities, hoping to gather a range of perspectives on an issue that had been animating public tensions and political conflict in recent years. The study’s interviewers realized the difficulty of the task at hand, and the complexity of the subject, when their respondents questioned the value of the term “police-community relations” itself; “the term has been used quite frequently but never clearly defined.”¹ One respondent summed up the issue with striking lucidity, explaining that “the term ‘police-community relations’ had come to be another way of indicating racial strife. The entire issue, he felt, had boiled down to a ‘black citizens vs. white establishment’ conflict.”² Such moments of honesty have rooted this study to its referent, even through a historical gaze that is blurry at best. The work ahead of us is to give shape to a certain landscape, one that could be mapped as “police-community relations” but is encountered as rockier territory. Lusher, too.

This landscape takes its place in Hartford, and it takes up time in the year 1970. The story seeps out around its edges into 1969, 1971, and neighboring cities, due to entanglements that resist enclosure. One purpose that animates this study is to bear witness to the deaths and debilitating injuries suffered by many Hartford residents, often young men of color, at the hands of the Hartford Police Department (HPD) around 1970: Dennis Jones, Charles Jones, Gary “Mike” Hansley, William Casey, Abraham Rodriguez, Efrain Gonzalez, and James McMillan. These acts of violence reverberated with force into the lives of Hartford’s residents, especially those living in the North End, a working-class and predominantly Black and Puerto Rican section of the city. They were met with incredible efforts of resistance and political organizing which served as some of the only checks on police power within a regime which was, as is typical, highly deferential to those “brothers in blue.” This text relies primarily on research conducted in newspaper archives, mostly the Hartford Courant, the city’s largest and most active daily, and also the Hartford Star, the city’s foremost Black paper which went out of print in 1974. This methodology is replete with limitations, and the space that the Courant takes up means that the coverage of events is biased toward the largely white, middle-class perspective of that publication. That perspective is particularly salient when aimed at policing and crime, as most of this research is; if police-community relations boils down to “black citizens vs. white establishment,” as one Hartford resident put it in the CCHRO report, the Courant often sympathizes with the latter. Wherever possible, efforts have been made to peel back layers of this white morality—with its racism, classism, and particular valuation of human lives—that is built into the “ground” of the research. One shining outlier within the Courant is the work of reporter Theodore Driscoll, who covered Hartford politics at this time with nuance, distrust of the police and city administration, and respect for the city’s Black and Puerto Rican activists. Some highlights from his writing are featured in the section below titled “City Council Committee on Police Use of Firearms.” Other conceits must be made to engage with a limited archive; one that has remained frustrating is the uncritical use of the term “community,” which appears constantly in this writing and in the reporting that it references, as something of an empty signifier. What is a community? Why is the word often used to refer to the marginalized, in an almost utopian sense that simultaneously acknowledges a group’s distance from power? This work offers no clear answer but invites you to engage with the unspoken narratives behind language, which often obscures its true meanings in the politesse of policing PR. 

Certain cases of police brutality have received major media attention in recent years, raising public awareness of a leading cause of death among young Black men, a distinctly American epidemic. However, these prominent stories risk presenting deadly force as less commonplace than it is by dramatizing specific cases; they lead to performative reform measures that do little to change the structures of power which enable, or in fact require, that police continue to oppress vulnerable populations in the register of the mundane and everyday. The stories included here are an index of a particular law enforcement agency’s valuation of human life, which is of course continuous with good American values. By looking closely at a record of living and dying during a particular time and place—Hartford, 1970—this project hopes to serve a function of archival triage. It is a testament to the heartbreak which can never be made invisible despite the logic of protection, of salvation, through which police departments justify and reward the most brutal among them.

The story told in the following text is continuous with that of the next piece of this larger project, our study of the HPD’s consent decree, Cintron v. Vaughan. What happened in 1970 provides context and fuel for the class action lawsuit filed against the HPD in 1969 by representatives of Hartford’s Black and Puerto Rican communities. Cintron became a federal consent decree in 1973, enabling judicial oversight of the HPD which did not end until 2023. The abuses and battles recorded here are necessary prologue to the longest-running police consent decree in US history. Although the following pages are filled with tragic events, negatively spurring change, there is also a thread of imaginative policing that invites change positively. Consider the Oakland Civic Patrol, in which volunteers provided effective local public safety in the early 70s; the Guardians, an organization of Black HPD officers who protested police brutality and internal discrimination; or the Concerned Citizens, who offered a model of complaint collection that was more inviting than Internal Affairs (all below). These local actions formed a foundation for faith, in the potential of reform, a commitment which has always required nurturing in the face of tremendous resistance. This faith is what enabled Hartford residents and political activists to bring their anger to the courtroom via Cintron, and what empowered them to continue pushing against the HPD’s trouble for half a century more.