By Chris Powell
Anyone listening to the demand for “justice” made by the “civil rights lawyer” who came to New Haven last week to exploit the paralyzing injury suffered by a Black man in police custody might have thought it was another George Floyd case of murderous racism. But police video, quickly made public, depicted instead the routine idiocy of life in Connecticut’s troubled but politically correct cities.
The incident seems to have gone this way.
A man with a criminal record that made it illegal for him to have a gun brandished one at a block party, causing a call to police. Officers arrested him but he resisted being taken away for booking. He was suspected of being drunk and was handcuffed and put into a police van whose passenger compartment had a bench but no seat belts.
On the way to police headquarters the man kicked the passenger compartment to protest his arrest. When the van driver braked abruptly to avoid a collision, the man fell sideways and slid forward along the bench. His head smashed into the wall at the front of the compartment, injuring his neck, leaving him unable to move.
He called for help. The van driver stopped and looked at him, called for an ambulance, and drove on to headquarters.
At headquarters officers seem to have thought the man was drunk rather than badly injured and they dragged him out of the van by his feet and put him in a wheelchair and then a cell, possibly worsening his injury. Then an ambulance took him to a hospital.
Police conduct was callous and contrary to regulation about prioritizing medical help, but nothing suggested racism. At least one of the officers handling him was Black.
But the bellowing lawyer posed a question that might be worth answering anyway: “Why don’t they believe us when we tell them we’re injured?”
Maybe this time it was because the injured man had been fooling around in public with a gun he possessed illegally while being drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest.
In law what matters here is only that the arrested man’s injury was incurred while he was in police custody. That his injury was accidental or aggravated by misunderstanding the man himself helped cause doesn’t diminish police liability.
Unless the man recovers quickly, which seems unlikely, since he already has undergone several surgeries, the city will be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages, his lawyer will enjoy another spectacular payday for showing up at an exceedingly simple case, and one bunch of taxpayers or another will bear the expense.
Since, like Connecticut’s other cities, for practical purposes New Haven is a ward of the state financially, ultimately the bill may be borne by state taxpayers.
And since Connecticut lately has received from the federal government billions of dollars that were created out of thin air, money creation that is behind the inflationary fever ravaging the world, as a practical matter everyone on the planet will pay.
Yet despite this vast money creation, despite the P.C. bleating long emanating from New Haven and state government, and despite the hundreds of millions of dollars city government and state government have paid their employees in raises and pensions in the years since the city police acquired the van in which the unfortunate man was so badly injured, no one ever got around to putting seat belts in it.
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, and then the horse, the rider, and the war.
Government in Connecticut abounds in missing nails, systems that don’t work as they pretend to, no matter how much money they get. Yet they are never audited for results.
Even as that lawyer was bellowing for justice in New Haven, a state court was approving a $9 million settlement for a man long held at the state hospital for the criminally insane in Middletown whose repeated abuse and psychological torture by dozens of hospital workers had been captured on surveillance video.
Many hospital workers were fired, others prosecuted and convicted. A few got their jobs back. But the scandal was not well reported and Connecticut hardly knows about it.
So next on state government’s agenda is what is being called “hero pay” — that is, more bonuses for government employees.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 