Lorenzo requests a five or six months’ extension to gather the complaints, and Judge Blumenfeld grants thirty days, estimating that there are six or seven complaints filed a month. In reality, that number is about thirty seven per month, and the department is unable to produce them in time, or simply does not have them.⁸ The preceding exchange casually sums up the impossibility of accountability within the HPD in 1970: “people are loath to keep records where complaints are made to them about themselves.” The issue of complaint records is a kind of metonymy or originating symbol representing the nature of police power, troubling the Plaintiffs even before the consent decree was enacted. It would remain central to the case’s litigation throughout the decades to come.

Together with the issue of reform, racial diversity within police departments remains a major topic of discussion in Hartford, and continues to be until the present. Many residents hope that the presence of Black and Latino police officers will result in the use of less force and fewer deaths, as their presence within the department would ideally diminish the culture of racism. This vision hinges on the paradoxical position in which these officers find themselves; having to identify with both the militaristic arm of state power, as well as with the communities most harmed by policing.

This topic emerges in the pages of the Hartford Star, the city’s foremost Black newspaper, during the initial filing of Cintron. Carl D. Smith’s opinion essay “Black Police and the Community,” (1970) offers a nuanced view of the contradiction that remains a crucial sticking point in conversations about police reform. Smith points toward the increasing racial pride among many Black officers, which on one hand, offers a gesture of hope rooted in the growing awareness of mutual respect within departments. Yet, on the other hand, most of the article remains critical of this possibility, and notes the tendency for all officers to abuse their power. Smith writes that the Black officer is viciously disrespected as “the ghetto’s oppressor-in-residence,” and that “in part compensation for this loss of prestige and respect, many black lawmen have used the ‘strong arm of the law’ to restore the respect and have redirected the symbolic prestige represented by the uniform to themselves.”⁹ Despite that such a critique has long been raised, racial diversity has remained a consistent aspiration within visions for police reform, being coterminous with the arc of history of Cintron.