On the whole, racial profiling in police traffic stops appears to be on the decline in Connecticut, according to a statewide police accountability project. But researchers want to take a closer look at several local and regional agencies.
At their November board meeting on Thursday, the Connecticut Racial Profiling Project identified in a preliminary report four divisions of the State Police, along with local departments in Berlin and Guilford, as warranting more scrutiny in a coming final report on traffic stops statewide from 2019 through 2022.
“For these departments, we do conclude that there’s strong evidence that a disparity exists in the rate of minority traffic stops made during daylight conditions,” said Ken Barone, project manager.
“It’s impossible to link these observed disparities to racial profiling,” Barone cautioned. “They could be driven by a variety of factors: police policies, individual bad actors, other factors. The results do provide strong statistical evidence that police in these areas are treating minority motorists differently.”
Guilford Police Deputy Chief Salvatore Nesci said Monday his department intends to fully cooperate with the project’s researchers.
“We here at the Guilford Police Department hold ourselves to the highest professional standards,” Nesci said. “And, as a profession, there have to be controls and metrics that have to be met. We fully believe that we were doing that, but if there's something that we're missing, then we need to know about it.”
The Connecticut State Police declined comment citing an ongoing investigation. The Berlin Police Department did not immediately return a request for comment about the preliminary report.
The State Police troops listed as worthy of closer analysis include Troop D (Danielson), Troop E (Montville), Troop H (Hartford), and State Police Headquarters (Middletown).
Earlier this year, Barone’s team prompted the ongoing investigations into the Connecticut State Police over allegations of falsified records of traffic stops that never happened, leading to warped data regarding the racial backgrounds of stopped motorists.
The June audit from the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project at UConn’s Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy found certain troopers may have falsified at least 26,000 tickets from 2014 through 2021, skewing reports on the race and ethnicity of pulled-over motorists. White motorists were overrepresented and drivers of color underrepresented in the records highlighted by the audit.
Since the audit’s release, State Police leader Col. Stavros Mellekas and Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection Commissioner James Rovella have resigned. New DESPP Commissioner Ronnell Higgins was present at Thursday’s board meeting, saying he’d been following the project’s work for a decade and has a good working relationship with Barone.
Correction: This story has been updated to identify the headquarters location of Connecticut State Police Troop H as Hartford. A previous version incorrectly stated it was Bradley International Airport.
