By Chris Powell
Hartford’s streets long have been notorious for the disregard of traffic rules and signals, and the other night such disregard killed a city police officer, Robert Garten, and seriously injured another, Brian Kearney. According to the police account, their cruiser, its emergency lights flashing, was struck at an intersection by a car driven by an 18-year-old high school junior who had just run two red lights speeding away from a police traffic stop nearby though he wasn’t being pursued. The registration of the young man’s car reportedly had expired and the car lacked insurance.
Horrible as this mayhem was, it wasn’t really a surprise. Like Connecticut’s other cities, Hartford is also notorious for murders and shootings, fatherlessness and other child neglect, educational failure, and the rest of poverty’s pathologies — the consequences of the state’s social contract, which holds that the only thing that can be done about poverty and its pathologies is to confine them, as exclusive zoning in the suburbs does.
The General Assembly has never audited the failure of poverty policy or recognized that it prompted and sustains exclusive zoning. Neither can the connection be discussed in polite company or examined by journalism. This year the closest the legislature could come to the problem of city mayhem was to allow municipalities to install street cameras to record traffic violations and facilitate identification and prosecution of offenders.
But this week Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers got incisive comment about street cameras from the president of Hartford’s police union, Sgt. James Rutkauski, who was assisting arrangements for his colleague’s funeral.
Street cameras, Rutkauski said, will be a joke until Hartford’s courts seriously punish offending drivers. “There’s no consequences” now, Rutkauski said, and the expense of identifying and apprehending violators recorded by the cameras won’t be recovered unless courts impose fines of $1,000 or more, which they are not likely to do amid the city’s poverty. If courts imposed any serious punishment for dangerous traffic violations, the very community endangered by the mayhem would call it racist, whereupon judges, police, and prosecutors would scurry away.
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As with much of what the legislature does, the purpose of street cameras is less to combat the problem than to let legislators impersonate relevance without risking its political consequences.
Criminal prosecutions are already so discounted in Connecticut that many crimes are committed by repeat offenders who have not been deterred by brief or suspended prison sentences and probation but whose release from or avoidance of prison is actually celebrated by the governor and legislators for reducing the prison population.
Indeed, while the governor and legislators clamor for impeding gun ownership, two-thirds of gun charges brought in Connecticut in the last nine years were dropped, usually in plea bargaining to gain convictions on other charges.
That is, despite the political posturing, Connecticut doesn’t take gun crime seriously. So even with street cameras, how seriously will the state take running red lights in Hartford, at least if no one has been killed? Even the young man charged in the crash that killed the Hartford officer is almost sure to receive leniency because of his age, even if convicted of manslaughter. Before long his friends will see him again, and they will not be much deterred from their own reckless driving.
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So what might Connecticut do if it ever wanted to get relevant with mayhem in the cities?
For starters, the state might ensure that the law deters in practice, not just in theory. No extremism would be necessary, since police, prosecutors, and judges can distinguish between rolling through a stop sign and running a red light.
The state might bolster its criminal-justice system so that staff shortages don’t necessitate as much discounting of crime.
The state might require long prison time for repeat offenders.
Most of all Connecticut might audit its poverty policies and try to develop some that accomplish more than increasing government’s payroll.
After all, while Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you,” he didn’t mean it was a great idea or a command.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 