By CHRIS POWELL
Last week Hartford was the scene of three horrible incidents.
First a 17-year-old honor student at Hall High School in West Hartford was shot and killed and another young man was shot and critically wounded at around 2 in the morning in the heart of downtown, near the People’s Bank Arena. Police believe the student had been having a night out with friends and was not the intended target.
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Then a mentally ill man was fatally shot by police in his apartment when he raised a knife at them and at family members who had called for emergency social workers to help with a “mental health crisis.” The family says they hadn’t wanted police to respond but the police say the social workers asked them to come along, which is often prudent. The family’s lawyer accuses the police of triggering the man and is threatening to sue them.
And then a mentally ill man walked onto Blue Hills Avenue carrying a long knife and refusing appeals from friends and orders from police officers to drop it. From a safe distance the cops accompanied him as he walked in the street. Then he approached them as if attempting “suicide by cop.” A stun gun failed to bring him down so an officer obligingly shot him. He made it to a hospital in critical condition but died a few days later. Presumably there will be another lawsuit against the city.
What is most remarkable here?
First is that no official notice of these incidents has been taken by state government, apart from an investigation by liquor authorities of possible underage drinking at two bars near the scene of the high school student’s murder.
Underage drinking may explain why the student was where he was shot at 2 in the morning but is unlikely to have anything to do with why or by whom. Underage drinking has nothing to do with the disproportionate poverty and crime in Hartford and Connecticut’s other cities, nor with the many other “stray bullet” shootings there in recent years, shootings that also have escaped official notice at the state level.
For while Connecticut’s cities are small, such incidents there are considered the natural order of things and the cities’ own responsibility, though the cities are essentially wards of the state, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in state financial aid every year even as they are largely incapable of self-government.
Damage awards against the cities, like the $45 million New Haven paid to the man who was paralyzed in 2022 because a prisoner transport van lacked seatbelts, are to a great extent paid by all taxpayers in the state. Most just don’t realize it.
Second is that as politically correct as “de-escalation” sounds with the chronically mentally ill, it doesn’t always work — unless it is meant mainly to shift the blame for government’s failure with the mentally ill to the police.
Third is that Connecticut is full of chronically mentally ill people who, while usually not violent, are still not capable of caring for themselves, including most of the homeless population — people for whom there are no mental hospitals or secure “supportive housing” or even enough rudimentary shelters. In Connecticut mental hospitals are now deemed politically incorrect and more retrograde even than letting people freeze to death outdoors or attempt “suicide by cop.”
Fourth is that, given the thanklessness of the jobs and the scapegoating of the people doing them, a time may be coming when no one will want to be a cop in any city in the state.
Meanwhile the new session of the General Assembly is full of proposals to spend more money on trivial and ineffective programs, as well as patronage for the friends and lovers of legislators, legislators who are always looking the other way while Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven function as Connecticut’s open-air mental hospitals.
Insofar as the cities help confine problems state government has given up on, at least in that respect something can be said to work.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 