EMILIA OTTE/The Connecticut Mirror - The Connecticut Mirror
•6/12/2026
Connecticut is developing a new, community-driven curriculum for police officers who work in and around certain urban areas — a requirement of the state’s six-year-old Police Accountability Act of 2020 that could finally come to fruition later this year.
Last September, the state contracted with Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory to create a Community Engagement Training Program, through which it will develop training for officers in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven and their surrounding communities — a total of about 34 municipalities.
The curriculum, which is still in development, will focus on three core issues: implicit bias among officers, reconciliation for past harms to minority communities and “procedural justice” — the manner in which officers interact with people on a daily basis.
Chris Collibee, spokesperson for Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget office, said the agency worked with the University of Connecticut’s Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy to “review national best practices and ensure Connecticut delivers high-quality training that supports both community and law enforcement safety.”
He said an initial request for proposals had yielded no results, and a second received only one submission that the agency determined to be unacceptable. “As a result, a decision was made to sole source the contract to Yale, based on their established work with the Department of Justice and recognized best practices,” Collibee said.
Jorge Camacho, director of the Justice Collaboratory, said the developers plan to use a “train the trainers” model, where representatives from the police departments will learn the curriculum — a roughly 8-hour program — and then bring it back to their respective departments. They’ll begin rolling it out in 2027.
Ernest Stevens, managing director for the Council of State Governments Justice Center, which is collaborating with Yale on the training, said the process would include three community advisory boards — one to review the development of the curriculum, one to review the plans for training, and a third to give feedback on how the training is conducted.
“It’s truly not to go in there (for) either side (to) try to make a point. What we’re trying to do is go in there and try and make a difference, and I think if you can focus on that, focus on the people involved and not the problem that everybody seems to point at, then you have the opportunity to have these real successes,” Stevens said.
Stevens, who spent 30 years as an officer in the San Antonio Police Department, said the training would need to do more than just “check a box.” It needed to make a lasting impression on the officers.
“ I have sat through crisis intervention trainings that have put me completely to sleep, and then I’ve sat through some where the engagement and the way that the material was presented was a lifelong lasting experience for me. So that’s truly what we’re trying to develop (for) Connecticut,” he said.
Police Chief LJ Fusaro of the Town of Groton, who leads the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, said police chiefs had received an invitation to attend a gathering in July to learn more about the proposed curriculum. He said they don’t know much about it yet but they’re “always open to new and innovative thinking.”
Police officers in Connecticut are already required, under the training provided by the Police Officers Standards and Training Council, to take a three-day social justice seminar in which they study implicit bias, procedural justice and relations between the police and the public.
But the Justice Collaboratory’s Camacho said a lot of current training is outdated. And he pointed to another key difference: The new training is being developed in collaboration with the community, where previous programs were handled mainly by police.
He said trainings are often created in the wake of high-profile events and can be influenced by conversations around those events rather than focusing on the more common daily interactions police officers have with residents of a given area.
Still, the curriculum is being developed at a time when police relations — particularly in Hartford — are under intense scrutiny. Two men, Everard Walker and Stevie Jones, were killed by Hartford police officers in February. Both men were experiencing mental health crises when they were shot, and the incidents sparked calls from community members for accountability, including new legislation dictating how police should respond during a mental health crisis. (In May, former Hartford Police Officer Joseph Magnano, who shot and killed Jones, was arrested for manslaughter.)
Cassandra Ramdath, research director for the Justice Collaboratory, said that while rare use-of-force cases tend to make the news, those are often not the central concerns of communities.
“When you talk to communities, they’re upset about, like, ‘I’m walking from here to there and the police are harassing me,’ or ‘They’re stopping me,’ or ‘Their tone is making me feel a certain way,’” Ramdath said. “So it’s actually these smaller, more day-to-day encounters that community members want addressed.”
Stevens said the San Antonio PD requires police cadets to participate in an “immersion program.” As part of their training, the cadets are sent to the areas of town where they will be assigned as officers, and they’re expected to spend time at community centers, participating in community meetings and getting to know people.
“We know that culture will trump policy any day. If you don’t know the culture, who cares what your policy says? You’re never going to connect with community,” Stevens said.
Ramdath said members of the community would be actively involved in creating the curriculum. She said the researchers were working with an advisory board that will help develop and review the training, and that community members would be asked to give feedback.
One of the three pillars of the new training program is what’s known as “procedural justice,” the idea that the behavior of a police officer during routine interactions — such as a traffic stop — is just as important as whether or not he or she gives someone a ticket.
Stevens said the critical part of a positive policing interaction is making sure the person feels heard, trusted and validated.
“ You could have even a negative outcome to where you end up saying, ‘I need to write this person a ticket.’ Even if you have that type of outcome, as long as the individual feels validated, like they were treated fairly throughout the process, that’s the goal of procedural justice,” Stevens said.
Stevens said a second part of the training, on implicit bias, would be focused less on changing the way officers think and more on creating policies that minimize bad interactions. For example, Stevens said, a department could create a policy that if an officer chases down and handcuffs a suspect — an inherently tense situation — a different officer would be responsible for transporting and booking the suspect, eliminating further contact with the first officer.
The community would play a particularly key role in the third element of the curriculum — reconciliation — which involves looking at historical harms of policing and how to build back trust.
Ramdath said this could look different from one community to another, and it would be up to the community members to dictate what reconciliation looks like.
Camacho said, “Law enforcement can’t answer what it means to reconcile. We as academics can’t answer it on behalf of the community. It’s the community that has to help us understand what that means, as opposed to it coming from the outside in or the top down.”
Camacho explained that police officers may come into communities in a way that is friendly, polite and well-intentioned, but without knowledge of the history of how the community and police have interacted in the past. This can leave them confused when community members respond to their friendliness with hostility.
“ This training will help equip officers with greater knowledge, greater techniques in how to anticipate and actually deal with those situations in ways that will allow them to understand what’s going on better, to recognize it for what it is, and to respond in ways that are appropriate and that kind of lower the temperature of those police community relations,” Camacho said.
Stevens and the researchers at Yale’s Justice Collaboratory said policing has changed broadly since 2020.
Camacho said there’s less of what he described as a “warrior mentality that had really taken prominence in the early 2000s up until the 2010s.” Instead, he said, “You see this shift in mindset toward what we commonly refer to as a guardian mentality, as the counterpoint to that warrior, hyperaggressive, hyperviolent … hypervigilant form of policing that views everyone as a suspect and everyone as a risk threat.”
Ramdath said there has been a stronger focus on health and wellness for police officers, as police departments struggle to recruit and retain people. She said there’s a particular focus on training new recruits.
“Chiefs and captains and the type of people who are up-top, they really do want to change. They don’t want the excessive uses of force. They don’t want to be viewed as a racist,” she said.
Ramdath said police have also become more interested in working with other professionals, like social workers, in first-responder situations.
She and Camacho said part of new training could help with situations, like those that led to the death of Stevie Jones and Everard Walker, by showing police officers that the solution to mental health calls isn’t always more law enforcement.
“When someone is in a situation that they might need more support on … that doesn’t always mean backup. It doesn’t mean calling their five other officers. Sometimes it means calling a social worker or calling a substance use (counselor) or whoever it is,” Ramdath said.
Stevens said he wants to see policing return to the fundamental purpose of serving the community.
“This type of training, I wish it was more than a day,” Stevens said. “We spend so much time learning how to shoot a gun and drive a car, and we spend very little time teaching officers how to communicate and deescalate situations. And I just think we need to flip that upside down.”
This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
