Mark Twain Library Invites Community Members to Conversation on Policing in Connecticut

Written By James Bairaktaris
Mark Twain Library, Redding:

The Redding League of Women Voters is co-hosting a program with the Mark Twain Library on Thursday, February 10th to explain what Connecticut is doing and how it has made a difference in making our communities safer. In this program, Ken Barone, Associate Director of UCONN’s Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy and the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, will lead a virtual discussion @ the Mark Twain Library about Connecticut’s model, which has already been adopted in five other states. 

 

“The Redding League of Women Voters was interested in learning about community policing and we often hear only about what is not working or what we are doing wrong,” said Redding League of Women Voters President Kim O’Rielly. “We learned that Connecticut is making great strides with regard to racial profiling and we thought it was extremely important to bring that awareness to the whole community.”

 

This program evolved when the civil unrest in 2020 prompted community members in Redding to find out more about what was being done, or could be done, in their own town and discovered that Connecticut has been at the forefront of creating and implementing this data-driven system that is successfully reducing racial disparities in policing.

 

Barone has been leading the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project (CRP3), which is the group tasked with collecting and analyzing the data collected from traffic stops, since its inception a decade ago. To date, the findings from CRP3 have helped reduce racial disparities in several Connecticut communities while improving police effectiveness.

Following his presentation Barone will be joined by Redding First Selectwoman Julia Pemberton and Redding Police Chief Mark O’Donnell to answer questions about policing in Redding. 

“I am looking forward to the discussion and learning more about Ken Barone’s methodology and analysis of the annual traffic stop data collected from all police departments across the state, a mandatory requirement under state law, and what we can all learn from it,” said First Selectwoman Pemberton. She added, “Chief O’Donnell and the men and women of the Redding police department are committed to the highest standards in community policing. Chief O’Donnell’s focus on providing training, including anti-bias training, to all members of the department supports this commitment.” 

 

Chief O’Donnell said he also looks forward to the presentation and added, “I hope to be as informative as I can.”

 

During this virtual program, Barone will address what racial profiling looks like, how our history has impacted policy, improvements that have been made to address racial disparities in traffic stops, and what this tells us about our roads being safer for everyone – community members, officers, visitors and even motorists passing through.

 

Connecticut first enacted a law more than 20 years ago that prohibited any law enforcement agent from stopping a motorist purely based on race, color, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. It was another 13 years before the Connecticut General Assembly made improvements to that existing law which called for action to actually address the racial profiling concerns, which is when this data collection system was implemented.

 

Barone has co-authored six statewide reports analyzing municipal and state police data for evidence of discrimination and he has trained over 800 law enforcement officers since 2014. In addition to Connecticut, Barone has investigated and analyzed data in Rhode Island, California and Oregon. The results of his efforts are proving effective.

Register on the Mark Twain Library website www.marktwainlibrary.org or call the Library at 203-938-2545 for information.

James Bairaktaris
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