Politics and Policing in Hartford, 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

This project attempts to give shape to a certain landscape, one that could be mapped as “police-community relations” in Hartford around the year 1970, but is encountered as rockier territory. Lusher, too.

This study aims to bear witness to some of the deaths and debilitating injuries suffered by Hartford residents, mostly young Black and Latino men, at the hands of the Hartford Police Department (HPD) in 1970 and the years immediately before and after: Dennis Jones, Charles Jones, Gary “Mike” Hansley, William Casey, Abraham Rodriguez, Efrain Gonzalez, and James McMillan. These acts of violence had a profound effect on the city’s political scene and the lives of North End residents, a working-class and predominantly Black and Puerto Rican section of the city. Each tragedy was met with tremendous 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.” The names of these men have not been spoken in the public sphere (to this author’s knowledge) since the 1970s, so this text hopes to serve as an archival intervention unearthing stories which should never have been overlooked. 

What follows relies primarily on research conducted in newspaper archives online and in physical collections at the Hartford History Center and the Connecticut State Library. The most significant publication used is the Hartford Courant, the city’s largest and most active daily, which is entirely digitized. Another valued resource is 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. If police-community relations boils down to “black citizens vs. white establishment,” as one Hartford resident put it in the CCHRO report, the Courant usually sympathizes with the latter. The research process for this piece required constant vigilance in order to stay aware of the ever-present narrative scheming of this white morality, with its racism, classism, and particular valuation of human lives. One shining outlier within the Courant is the work of reporter Theodore Driscoll, who covered Hartford politics during this era 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.” 

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. 

This narrative is continuous with its sister section in the CCP, our study of the HPD’s consent decree, Cintron v. Vaughn. What happened in 1970 provided 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 lasted until 2023, the longest tenure of this kind of reform measure in US history. Although this story is filled with tragic events, it also offers a history of imaginative public safety that can inspire local efforts on a similar scale. Consider the Oakland Civic Patrol, in which volunteers provided effective community protection in the early 70s; the Guardians, an organization of Black HPD officers who protested internal discrimination and police brutality among their own; or the Concerned Citizens, who offered a model of complaint collection that was more accessible than Internal Affairs. These local actions formed a foundation for faith in change, a commitment which has always required nurturing in the face of power.