Three fatal police shootings three weeks into the new year are testing recently passed laws aimed at scrutinizing the actions of police officers in Connecticut and igniting debate about whether police are capable of policing themselves.
In a rare move, the state Division of Criminal Justice announced Saturday that it would assume control of the investigation into the shooting of 19-year-old Mubarak Soulemane by a state police trooper in West Haven last Wednesday. The decision followed protests by family members and activists who said state police detectives should not investigate a shooting in which a fellow state trooper was involved.
“We aren’t even three weeks into the year and this is the third person to die at the hands of police in 2020. Police violence is a pandemic in Connecticut. THIS MUST END,” ACLU of Connecticut Executive Director David McGuire said in a tweet Monday.
While clergy members in New Haven have called for a federal probe into the shooting, both state and federal authorities have said no official request has been made for such an investigation.
“We understand that the state is following its statutory protocol to investigate an officer-involved death. At this point, no request to investigate, or to assist the investigation, has been made to our office,” the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut’s office said in a statement Tuesday.
Acting Chief State’s Attorney John J. Russotto said Tuesday that Middlesex State’s Attorney Michael A. Gailor would lead the probe into Soulemane’s death. New London State’s Attorney Michael L. Regan was initially assigned to the investigation but he is currently preparing for a lengthy trial in a triple-murder case that is scheduled to start in March.
But those moves were not good enough for the more than 200 protesters who gathered outside New Haven City Hall on Tuesday evening to demand a federal civil rights investigation into the shooting.
The Rev. Boise Kimber and members of Soulemane’s Yankasa community, a nonprofit organization supporting Ghanian Americans, pleaded their case to public safety Commissioner James Rovella on Tuesday afternoon, Kimber said.
“We do not trust the state to investigate the state, so we are asking they turn this over to the U.S. Attorney,” Kimber told the crowd.
Soulemane’s family and friends also mourned the loss of a kind, generous young man affectionately known as “Mubi” who “battled a mental illness” and, though he might have committed a crime and led police on a dangerous chase, did not deserve to die instead of facing a courtroom.
“He was our son, he was our brother, he was our nephew. The community is sad and this is an unprecedented situation in the annals of our history,” Soulemane’s uncle, Alahaji Muhammad Murtala, told the crowd in New Haven. “On behalf of the community, I would like to thank all of you for the outpouring of the support, the condolences you have expressed.
“We hope and pray that the justice we are looking for will be properly served. As much as we don’t condone the issue of carjacking and whatever allegations they have leveled against him, we as a community, as law abiding citizens, we want justice to be done. The boy shouldn’t have died the way he was massacred.”
Fueling questions of the officers actions in West Haven was the quick release of more than 90 minutes of body and dash camera footage that showed Trooper Brian North firing as many as seven shots at the teen. The footage was out to the public a little over 48 hours after the shooting.
The state police, following a law new this year that requires the release of the footage to the public, said it captures a small portion of what happened.
But not long after it came out, the ACLU of Connecticut, longtime watchdogs of police violence, was questioning whether a trooper, in pursuit of the black New Haven teen, said a racial slur.
State police responded that they are “100 percent certain” that a racial slur was not used, but they were still removed from investigating the matter.
The Division of Criminal Justice will report their findings to Gailor, who will determine if the killing was justified.
The debate about whether the slur was or was not used is another reason federal investigators should be called in to handle the case, said Tark Richard Aouadi, executive director of the Connecticut chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“Had this been a white person or somebody who looks like me … or somebody without a mental illness, they would have been Tasered and probably pepper sprayed, but they would not have been shot dead,” Aouadi said.
The West Haven killing was the first time state police detectives were not assigned to investigate a deadly police shooting in recent memory, moving up discussions in the Division of Criminal Justice to change how state police are investigated when they open fire.
Last year, the state’s attorneys discussed in a meeting changing the process and bringing in their inspectors to assist with the probes, an apparent attempt to eliminate bias.
No final protocol was established before inspectors were assigned to investigate Soulemane’s killing.
“The immediate concern has now brought this issue to the forefront and we are now implementing what was in the discussion stages in response to the immediate need to respond to this tragic incident in West Haven,” Russotto said.
But the 13 state’s attorneys did agree last fall to expedite their investigations, which often take months or years to complete. Following reporting in the Courant that showed Hartford State’s Attorney Gail P. Hardy left deadly police shooting probes open for years, the state’s attorneys late last year agreed to a 120-day deadline for use-of-force decisions following submission by state police of their investigative files from the deadly shootings.
With no new deadly police use of force in the last month of 2019, the shooting death of 30-year-old Michael Gregory in Ansonia on Jan. 2, assigned to Danbury State’s Attorney Stephen J. Sedensky, is the first to fall under the new timeline.
Meanwhile, state police, who have also been blamed for delaying deadly police shooting investigations, have committed to completing their end of the case within three months.
Kira Ortoleva, a close friend of Soulemane, encouraged protesters’ advocacy to change the way police shooting investigations are handled, but she also implored the crowd to remember Soulemane as a human life cut short.
He was the friend who took her in when her parents kicked her out of the house and nearly every friend he made had a similar story of his generosity, Ortoleva said as she helped lead the mass of protesters on a march through downtown New Haven. She echoed leaders calls that the rash of police shootings has become a crisis in the community, invoking the name of 15-year-old Jayson Negron, who was fatally shot by a Bridgeport police officer later found to be justified in the shooting.
“Mubi was the only person there for me that night when I had nowhere else to go,” she said. “He was not the boy they are painting in the media, he was more than that. He was a son, he was a brother and he was an amazing person. He deserved more than what the state police have given him and so do Jayson Negron and other young black boys in Connecticut.”
