Police Reform

Volunteer testers who called Nassau County police precincts and headquarters and spoke only Spanish, received help about 50% of the time, according to a new report by advocacy groups.

Waterbury police have largely stopped using police vans to transport prisoners in response to a man becoming paralyzed in a New Haven police van incident last month.

Officials in New Haven, Connecticut, announced prisoner transport and detention reforms Thursday in response to a police van driver braking suddenly while transporting a man in the back of the van, sending him flying headfirst into a metal wall of the vehicle and paralyzing him.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont vetoed a measure that would have allowed West Haven police to buy a military-grade vehicle called an MRAP.

Governor Ned Lamont vetoed a bill Thursday aimed at limiting government immunity in police chases, calling it overly broad.

Known as familial DNA searching, the technique allows law enforcement agencies to search the state’s DNA databank for close biological relatives of people who have left traces of genetic material at a crime scene.

Nearly all of New York’s Republican State Senators signed a letter to State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa to cancel standardized testing in schools in June.

They said Nassau police disproportionately polices nonwhite people, is not transparent about it’s data, is non-compliant with language access laws and does not have enough non-white police officers.

It was created following two cases in Bridgeport last year in which police did not quickly notify the families of 23-year-old Lauren Smith-Field and 53-year-old Brenda Lee Rawls, both of whom are Black.

Connecticut state lawmakers advanced a bill that requires police to report deaths and other incidents in a timely manner.