By CHRIS POWELL
When he peremptorily fired the Hartford police officer who shot and killed a mentally ill man who was walking through his neighborhood with a long knife and was refusing police commands to drop it, Mayor Arunan Arulampalam last week worsened a bad situation and probably increased city government’s financial liability.
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Many people throughout Connecticut may have seen police body camera and bystander video of the incident. Three officers were escorting the man at a safe distance and trying to talk him out of his mission, which seems to have been to commit “suicide by cop,” especially since he had already cut himself with the knife. He also disregarded appeals of family and friends to drop it. Shots from a stun gun failed to bring him down. A fourth officer arrived, drew his gun, also told the man to drop the knife, and was approached by the man, who may have seen this as his best chance to get killed. Whereupon the officer obligingly shot him nine times in quick succession, mortally wounding him.
Hartford police deserve special sympathy, being assigned to keep order in a city that has become an open-air mental hospital, where every month brings more a hundred similar “mental health crisis” calls — the euphemism for psychotic episodes — even as state government has no mental hospitals for the chronically but not yet criminally insane. But even police sympathizers may wonder why the man had to be shot so many times so fast, or why the officers couldn’t have kept escorting him downtown for coffee in the hope that he would tire of walking, come to his senses for a moment, and surrender.
The law still may be on the officer’s side. An officer may use deadly force if he reasonably fears for his life or the lives of others. The police would not have been summoned by the disturbed man’s family and officers would not have been escorting him if they all didn’t fear that he was putting lives in danger. More efforts to humor and isolate the disturbed man might have been nice but were probably not legally required.
The state’s inspector general is investigating and will decide for purposes of prosecution.
Mayor Arulampalam is entitled to think, as many people do, that the police should have kept escorting and ducking away from the man as necessary for a while longer. But the mayor could have reached that conclusion long before he was interrupted by critics of the police during his “State of the City” address, and long before he attended the funeral of the disturbed man, who was Black, and heard civil rights leader Al Sharpton and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump make the incident a racial issue. Crump even charged demagogically that the man was shot because he was Black.
So now the fired officer and his union can plausibly argue that the mayor succumbed to political pressure instead of following due process and giving the officer a chance to defend himself.
It is easy to imagine an expensive result here.
The inspector general will regret that more time wasn’t spent escorting the disturbed man but will acknowledge that the officer who shot him was within the law.
The mayor will stick by the officer’s firing and it will go to state labor board arbitration, where firings of unionized government employees are seldom upheld. The officer’s penalty will be reduced to a few weeks of suspension and some retraining and he will be reinstated with a lot of back pay.
The disturbed man’s estate will sue the city and win or settle for a few million dollars.
The city’s police will keep getting more than a hundred “mental health crisis” calls every month, times will get harder, mental illness will increase, the whole state will move closer to being an open-air mental hospital, and no one in authority will ask why or do anything relevant about it.
But at least Mayor Arulampalam will have gained sufficient political cover with his constituents.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 