MAYOR BRONIN JOINED NEWSNATION TOWN HALL ON CRIME

Published on August 02, 2023

HARTFORD, CONN (August 2, 2023) – On Monday, Mayor Luke Bronin joined the mayors of Toledo, Ohio, Durham, North Carolina, and Little Rock Arkansas, along with law enforcement officials for a national Town Hall about crime in America, hosted by Newsnation’s Chris Cuomo.  The town hall focused on several far-ranging topics, as mayors answered questions from audience members about root causes and potential solutions for violent and nonviolent crime in America.

REGARDING THE INTERSECTION OF MENTAL HEALTH AND CRIME, Mayor Bronin said: “Mental health is an incredibly broad category and an incredibly broad term, and it includes a lot of things. I think it ought to include just the fact that we’re seeing more and more people having trouble managing their emotions. You see that on airplanes, you see that in road rage, you see that show up in so many different ways. That’s a mental health issue, and we have to talk about that, and we have to address it.

“And then you have the much more acute type of mental health, you know, diagnosed clinical mental health problems, and as you said Chris, and I think it’s a really important point, the vast majority of people with mental health issues are not violent, but there are people who are. There are people who have an extensive history of violence, and an extensive history of diagnosed mental health issues, and too often in our country, the only place where those people can get any treatment for those issues is in prison. And they should get treatment in prison. I think they should get better treatment than they’re getting when they’re in prison.

“But the real problem is when they get out, they don’t get it. So you have so many examples of people who are on meds and managing when they’re in the correctional system, and when they’re out, they fall apart. And it’s devastating to their lives, and it becomes dangerous to communities. And I do think this is, as a nation, across the country, a failure of systems and a failure of us as a society to recognize that we have to do more. And I think in some cases, that may mean that you have to compel people to get treated… Somebody, in talking about what New York was trying to do in this area, said it’s not coercion, it’s compassion when you’re helping somebody who needs treatment get treatment, and I think that was really well said.

“I also think that we have to recognize that this will take an investment of resources. Right now, we don’t have the places that have the capacity to provide this kind of support. Emergency rooms aren’t the place, but too often, they’ve become the place. Our police, if they see somebody who’s repeatedly threatening people in the community but hasn’t yet committed a crime, they don’t have a lot of options. Sometimes, the only option they have is to bring somebody to the emergency room for a short period of time, and oftentimes, that emergency room, which isn’t equipped to deal with that challenge, will say ‘we don’t have a medical reason to hold this person. We’re going to let him out.’ And then you have no answer because there are not the places, the facilities, the support structure in place to deal with that.

“Now, there’s a whole spectrum of things you could be doing. We should be doing a lot more on supportive housing because not everybody needs to be in an institutional setting, and a lot of people can actually live independent, healthy lives if they’ve got that support, and that’s an investment well worth making because it’s a fraction of the cost.”

REGARDING RESTORATIVE JUSTICE, Mayor Bronin said: “The idea of the ‘three strikes laws’. That was crazy. It was crazy from a public policy standpoint. It was crazy from a taxpayer standpoint. It was crazy just from a human standpoint…

“I think there are so many ways in which that policy failed, but I think you said at the start, ‘fear the simple solutions to complex problems’, I agree with that. There are not simple answers here. I do think that there need to be consequences, but we also have to make sure that when we impose consequences, we’re not then just cutting people off from opportunity down the road.

“One of the things that my community’s still dealing with is that the overincarceration that we saw in the 1990s and the early 2000s closed the door to opportunity for so many people. They can’t figure out how to get back on track because they can’t get a job, many times, they can’t get housing because of that record. We have to find a way to make it possible for people to get back on track, so I just think on so much of this conversation, we have to reject the false choice. It’s not about ‘Tough on Crime, lock people up forever’ versus doing nothing. It’s about having reliable, predictable, real, swift consequences, making sure that those consequences correct behavior as best you can, and also making sure that they then don’t result in somebody being stuck forever without the ability to build a different kind of life, because that’s not good for anybody. That doesn’t make for safer communities. That doesn’t make for a safer country.”

REGARDING FALSE DICHOTOMIES IN COMMUNITY SAFETY, Mayor Bronin said: “I want to come back to this point about framing this in false choices. I think most Americans believe, and I think most of us believe, and I think most Democrats believe, saying that as a Democrat, but I think probably Democrats and Republicans, that you can support the police and have accountability for police, that you can work to prevent crime and invest in prevention and getting to the root causes, and you can make sure that you are holding accountable people who are committing acts of violence against other people in your community. Those things aren’t in tension with each other. You can do both of those things.

“And I want to disagree with your characterization of what the Democratic Party orthodoxy is. I’m not here to talk about partisan politics, but since you framed it that way, I actually think what I just said is actually a statement of what the Democratic Party stands for, is that you have to do both of those things, in both places. Accountability and support for our police. Prevention and accountability when it comes to crime.

“And coming back to the start, when, in the introduction, you talked a little bit about the work that we’ve done in Connecticut that I helped to lead to push for some reforms that would increase accountability for repeat serious firearm offenders because we were seeing the same people commit acts of violence, sometimes when they were out on parole or probation, and we were able to get that law changed, and I think the vast majority of Democrats, and certainly the coalition that pushed that was a coalition of Democratic mayors in our state, but the Democratic governor, the Democratic mayors, the Democratic legislature all supported that, and at the same time, the Biden administration has put resources into funding police and also put unprecedented resources into supporting community violence prevention through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that passed last year.”