Lori Reynolds stood behind the circle of occupied chairs at the public safety town hall meeting on Friday evening and demanded more action from Mayor Arunan Arulampalam.
“You’ve been avoiding us,” Reynolds told him, speaking into a microphone. “His children should not live with regret saying ‘I should have not called 211.’”
Last month, Reynolds’ best friend lost her brother, Everard Walker, after he was fatally shot by a Hartford police officer. He was the first of two men killed by Hartford police in February after their families called for help during a mental health episode. Both victims had knives in their hands when shot.
The meeting at the Downtown Public Library Friday, which was attended by over 50 community members, was held just hours after Arulampalam announced he had fired police officer Joseph Magnano, a new officer still in a probationary period who had fatally shot Steven ‘Stevie’ Jones in the North End just eight days after Walker was killed.
“In the body-worn camera footage of the incident, as well as publicly shared videos, I saw three officers work together as a team to de-escalate a mental health crisis in a way that exemplifies the best of our police department. The actions of Officer Magnano do not measure up to those standards,” Arulampalam said in the press release.
While most attendees agreed with the mayor’s decision, tension prevailed as they argued Magnano’s firing is not enough. They noted the officer involved in Everard Walker’s shooting, Alexander Clifford, is still on duty, gun violence trauma prevails across neighborhoods and mental health services remain underfunded.
“We need a supervisory or administrative review of what happened, we need a review of where the supervisor was at the scene,” Alyssa Peterson said to Arulampalam, claiming they should have used tasers or batons instead of a gun in their handling of the situation with Jones.
Walker was shot by Clifford on Feb. 19 after police officers were sent to his house when his family called 211. Eight days later, Magnano, within seconds of arriving at the scene, fatally shot Jones nine times in Blue Hills after his family called 911. Both families wanted mental health support services.
The public safety town hall had been rescheduled multiple times and was one of the demands raised by the North Hartford Public Safety Coalition, a group that came together with other organizations like Hartford Communities That Care to check in on neighbors days after the shooting and organize trainings for community responses to mental health crises.
At the start of the town hall meeting, a group of Dare to Struggle Connecticut Chapter members broke into the circle, handing out flyers featuring Walker’s face and the word ‘justice’ printed on the bottom.
After the mayor repeatedly asked the members of the political organization to sit down and join the circle to share their concerns and demands, community members stood up, grabbed the microphone and told Dare to Struggle members to leave.
Attendees noted that it was Dare to Struggle members who interrupted the mayor’s State of the City address recently, arguing his office has not reached out to the Walker family’s lawyer.
The mayor has not spoken directly to Walker’s family. City spokesman Cristian Corza told The Connecticut Mirror that they have “tried to get in touch with the family but it has been difficult.”
“My father’s body is all over Facebook and the footage of his death is everywhere and has been shown on the news numerous times, so it is not right that the officer that shot him gets to hide his identity and we demand for his photo image to be released,” Menen Walker told the CT Mirror.
During the town hall, community residents noted that before the most recent incidents, there was an overall collective trauma neighbors carried and lack of mental health support along the way.
“Are there trained mental health providers here today? Are there actual crisis responders? Did y’all do that and provide us that, for us? Because, Lord, I would love that right now, cause this is all very triggering,” North End resident Jennifer Perez-Caraballo said.
Chavon Campbell, director of Hartford’s Office of Violence Prevention, mentioned they reached out to their community partners to get a list of clinicians, but that “unfortunately, didn’t get response specifically for this event.”
As of now Corza said there is no set plan, as the administration officials will first debrief after the town hall.
One day earlier, at Jones’ funeral, Rev. Al Sharpton delivered an eulogy calling for accountability.
“We all know Stevie had a problem. But we want to know what problem the officer had,” Sharpton said. “We came to let this family know that we did not just come today, we’ll come back over and over again. Because if you can shoot Stevie in cold blood, you can do it to one of our loved ones. This must be treated with justice.”