Stephanie Washington shimmers in gold earrings, gold nose piercings, gold necklaces, and a gold belt. Sitting in her friend’s fashion boutique in West Haven, a leg tattoo reading “perfectly imperfect” peeks through her skirt.
It’s been over five years since Washington was thrust into the center of New Haven’s movement for police reform.
Two days after her 22nd birthday, on April 16, 2019, Washington’s then-boyfriend, Paul Witherspoon, was driving the both of them home. When the car approached a traffic stop, Hamden police officer Devin Eaton and Yale police officer Terrance Pollock opened fire on the couple. Pollock had matched Washington’s car to a description in a false report of an armed robbery. Witherspoon was physically unharmed from the driver’s seat. Pollock was grazed by Eaton’s bullet and minorly injured. Washington needed twenty-two staples in her stomach.
A sixteen-year veteran of the Yale Police Department (YPD), Pollock was suspended for thirty days without pay and reassigned to an administrative, non-patrol position after an independent review. The investigative report of the shooting said that Pollock, who fired three of the sixteen shots, was justified in his use of force because he believed Eaton and Witherspoon were exchanging gunfire. Eaton, who fired the four bullets that struck Washington, was charged with assault and reckless endangerment. In May 2022, New Haven Superior Court Judge Brian Fischer sentenced Eaton to three years of probation and 450 hours of community service.
In 2020, Washington filed a lawsuit seeking over fifteen thousand dollars in damages against Eaton, Pollock, and multiple municipal entities. The lawsuit declared negligence and unreasonable seizure, as well as a violation of Washington’s Fourth Amendment rights and the policing agreement among New Haven, Hamden, and Yale. In 2023, a year after Eaton resigned, Washington settled her lawsuit for 1.1 million dollars.
Now 27 years old, Washington has accepted that the long scar across her stomach may never fade.
“I had to work super hard on not letting what happened to me devour me,” Washington said. “But I lost myself completely. I didn’t know who I was.” She became afraid of therapy and mistrustful of everyone except for Witherspoon, her lawyers, and her biological and adopted mothers. In 2020, Washington cut off all her hair as a symbolic restart.
Washington’s attack, coupled with the international vitality of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, galvanized efforts toward police abolition across Connecticut. But five years out, these efforts have not materialized into lasting or effectual reforms.
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Founded in 1894, the YPD is the oldest college police force in the United States. In the mid-to-late 20th century, driven by rising student enrollments and civil rights and antiwar protests, college police forces emerged to maintain security and enforce laws on university campuses. In 1992, the City of New Haven codified YPD’s ability to arrest anyone in New Haven, and gave YPD felony arrest powers extending to the borders of Connecticut—encompassing three million people unaffiliated with Yale.
Yet, the YPD is still Yale’s police force. Unlike officers of the New Haven Police Department (NHPD), who are paid with public funds, YPD officers receive their salaries from the University’s private funds. Today, the University maintains a privately owned, privately funded police force of ninety-three officers. A 2008 lawsuit revealed that YPD’s operating budget at the time was over ten million dollars.
Officers from the YPD who are certified by the Connecticut Police Officer Standards and Training Council can be deployed by the NHPD. The certification includes 818 hours of training in patrol skills. Meanwhile, specialized training, such as in implicit bias and de-escalation, is available but not mandatory. Activists have framed this system as a “triple occupation” of New Haven, which is policed by Yale, NHPD, and Hamden police officers.
Similar acts of violence have rippled throughout U.S. universities, more than a third of which fund private and armed police forces. In 2013, a Morgan State University police officer was involved in the killing of 44-year-old Tyrone West. In 2015, a University of Cincinnati police officer fatally shot unarmed 43-year-old Sam DuBose. In 2018, a University of Chicago police officer shot fourth-year student Charles Thomas.
After Washington was shot, Yale students were immediately called to action. Around midnight, three days after the police attack on Washington and Witherspoon, a group of Yale students coalesced at the Afro-American Cultural Center. They formed the Black Students for Disarmament at Yale (BSDY) to demand the defunding and dismantling of the Yale Police Department; a differential, or “fit-for-purpose,” call response system devoid of armed police officers by the end of the 2020–21 academic school year; and the reinvestment of these funds to support New Haven organizations that serve Black and Brown communities. BSDY led two weeks of protest for their demands.
BSDY, along with four other undergraduate and graduate student groups, united as the Abolition Alliance at Yale (AAY) to demand that the YPD be dissolved. They argued that because policing in the United States was birthed from the need for Southern slave owners to capture and punish runaway slaves, it is foundationally violent and racist, it cannot be simply “reformed away.”
“By dedicating millions of dollars to so-called campus policing, Yale is in reality investing in the policing of residents throughout the Greater New Haven area,” AAY members said.
Central to AAY’s argument is the claim that the majority of cases that YPD responds to do not require an armed response and could be handled by Yale Security. According to a 2018 report by AAY, 85 percent of crimes that the YPD responded to were property crimes, which do not involve force, or the threat of force, against victims. In their August 2020 op-ed, AAY members wrote, “We realize that Yale cares more about the security of its property than the security of the different people the institution comes into contact with.”
The report also argued that YPD exaggerates its necessity in Yale and New Haven. In 2020, former YPD Assistant Chief Anthony Campbell ’95 DIV ’09 told the Yale Daily News that the YPD receives 20,000 to 30,000 calls annually, but AAY found that only 10,604 calls to the YPD were logged for that year. Those calls were mostly of a medical nature—once again raising the question of why the YPD arms its officers to address medical situations.
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Amid outcries over Washington’s shooting, the administration took their own action. In June 2019, Yale commissioned a consulting firm called Twenty-First Century Policing Solutions (21CP), an outgrowth of an Obama initiative that was comprised of academic and civic experts on policing.
As Black Lives Matter protests reached their height after the murder of George Floyd in spring of 2020, Washington’s story gained increased resonance in New Haven. “I never, at least in the conversations I had, felt that we had to convince people that we were doing something worthwhile,” Jaelen King ’22, president of BSDY, remembered. “It was more of a conversation of how we implement this.”
In June 2020, after months of analyzing police procedures and interviewing New Haven residents and Yale students and staff, 21CP published its assessment of the Yale Police Department, which had two primary recommendations: first, to establish a “differential response” model where non-police resources like mental health providers and residential college advisors serve as the first response in situations that do not require armed enforcement, and secondly, to enhance collaboration with the community to strengthen trust.
After 21CP released their report––amid a national outcry over police violence after the murder of George Floyd––Yale promised to meet several demands, including policing without military equipment, implementing new scenario-based training in de-escalation techniques, and requiring all officers to intervene in and report any incidents of excessive use of force by a fellow police officer.
BSDY responded to 21CP’s report, underlining that its proposed reforms overlooked the racial disparities in policing. Furthermore, BSDY argued that reforms have not stopped ceaseless incidents of police brutality. Banning chokeholds in NY did not stop the murder of Eric Garner; de-escalation training in Seattle did not stop the murder of Charleena Lyles.
BSDY noted that while they proposed absolute abolition, 21CP’s “differential response” model maintained the need for armed police along with alternative response methods. 21CP also recommended strengthening the relationship between YPD and NHPD by sharing information through updated technologies and systems. Further cooperation between the two departments, BSDY argued, would only “[disregard] community members’ demands and [entrench] a system of over-militarized, overreaching policing and surveillance.” BSDY advocates secured meetings with Campbell and former Director of Public Safety Ronnell Higgins, but King said that the meetings didn’t result in any meaningful change.
In November 2020, the YPD announced that it was piloting a differential response to improve “YPD’s productivity by more efficiently using the department’s total resources.” YPD has since updated its dispatch center to greet callers first with “Yale Dispatch, is this a medical, police, or fire emergency?” For mental health issue-related calls, two plain-clothes officers now respond in an unmarked patrol vehicle.
Washington appreciates the time and effort Yale students put towards advocating for her. “A lot of the Yale students [supported] me,” said Washington. “Thank you. Thank you for that.”
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Five years after 21CP Solutions’ report and the tide of BSDY and community activism, the YPD has not been defunded or demilitarized. In spring 2024, the YPD employed at least 3 Skydio drones—military-grade drones used extensively by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israel Defense Forces—to surveil peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters. Assistant Chief of Police Von Narcisse, in an April 30 email to Campbell, which has since been released to the public through a public records request by student journalist Theia Chatelle ’25, celebrated that “we have a legit police force, ready to go, 24-7. We don’t need to, and won’t, wait for law enforcement capabilities to mobilize. We can and will do it ourselves, swiftly.”
In 2024, the YPD’s Police Advisory Board—a decades-old group of students, faculty, and community members who gave recommendations to department leadership—dismantled after its two student representatives graduated and were not replaced. All mentions of the board have been wiped from the YPD’s website. But even during the Board’s existence, student representative Craig Birckhead-Morton said that the group never met, even though Campbell said it received civilian complaints.
In a January 20 email responding to questions on YPD reforms, Head of Public Safety Duane Lovello wrote that implementing 21CP Solutions’ recommendations “remains ongoing” and the differential response model “continues to evolve.” Lovello added that multi-million-dollar financial investments have been made to improve the radio communications system and a centralized operations center.
In a January 13 email, University President Maurie McInnis expressed her support for the differential response model, but made no comment on any specific or new initiatives she would like to see.
Bullet fragments still dot Washington’s spine because they are too close to a nerve to be extracted. She still feels occasional back and leg pains but notes that the pain is manageable. Every April, around her birthday, the same anxiety returns.
NHPD reforms have similarly fallen flat. As of October 2023, the NHPD budget of $43 million was four times greater than the city’s funds towards human services, such as disability services, elderly services, public health, and youth and recreational services—which have remained stagnant since 2019. In 2019, the Board of Alders unanimously passed a resolution in favor of the New Haven Civilian Review Board (CRB), which is tasked to investigate complaints against Yale and New Haven police officers. As of April 2024, the CRB is only two-thirds full because of its stalled nomination process.
Moreover, YPD and NHPD continue to use ShotSpotter, an audio-based gunfire detection technology first implemented in 2009, which notifies officers of suspected shootings. Since then, ShotSpotter apparatuses have been expanded three times—most recently in 2022 through the addition of sensors. The 191 ShotSpotter sensor locations in New Haven are concentrated in predominantly Black and Latine areas. Of the 108,131 New Haveners that live in a neighborhood with at least one ShotSpotter sensor, 24.8 percent are white, 36.2 percent are Black, 30.3 percent are Latine and 4.5 percent are Asian.
BSDY kept a list of YPD incidents, some self-reported. In 2020, this included a YPD officer stopping a Black student biking near Pauli Murrary college and a YPD officer explaining to a Black student the necessity to keep “undesired people” off campus during COVID-19 move out.
On September 19, 2024, Jebrell Conley, a 36-year-old Black man and alleged member of New Haven’s Grape Street Crips gang, was killed by gunfire in a confrontation with one New Haven police officer, one New Haven police sergeant, and one state police sergeant. While protesters acknowledge Conley’s criminal history, they urged that the aftermath would have been different if Conley was white, and called for the discharge and decertification of the officers who shot Conley. But none of the officers were discharged—two were placed on paid administrative leave. New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Police Chief Karl Jacobson both said that they believed the officers used “appropriate force.”
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Bullet fragments still dot Washington’s spine because they are too close to a nerve to be extracted. She still feels occasional back and leg pains but notes that the pain is manageable. Every April, around her birthday, the same anxiety returns.
Washington says that the lawsuit settlement hasn’t dramatically changed her day-to-day life. She still works a 9-to-5 at a bank; she still has to pay the bills. She recently completed an online Fashion Merchandising course at Cornell.
She says she hasn’t seen the type of police reform she hoped for—the reform that activists were organizing around in 2019. The settlement, she says, doesn’t amount to the justice she craves.
“People scream justice for this person, justice for that person. But what does it mean to the person you’re screaming justice for?” Washington asks. She says no amount of money could amount to just compensation. “Justice, to me, is people taking accountability for what happened, not just like: ‘Oh, I’m throwing a sorry in your face.’”
But Washington remains optimistic about the possibility of reform. She understands the expectations that police officers grapple with. “I know police officers that are very sweet and kind,” Washington said. “I don’t hate police officers. I don’t have any hate in my body.”
Washington believes that sensitivity training could better prepare police officers to handle complex situations. Her experience in customer service as a waitress influences her to imagine how the compassion expected from customer service employees could be applied to police officers. For Washington, effective police reforms require a complete mindset shift—not just training—in which police carefully and compassionately assess their ongoing situation. She’s prepared to fight for it.
“A lot of people are not here to talk about it anymore,” Washington says. Most people, she notes, do not survive police brutality. “For me to walk, and talk like before––I should be a voice for police brutality.”
In 2021, Washington began designing clothes as a way to heal and rediscover herself. She describes clothing design as the one thing that kept her “sane” and “leveled” after being shot. Inspired by her adopted mother, who would sew and alter Washington’s clothes, Washington loved the way she could tell a story through customizing outfits.
She’s developing her clothing brand HD, which she hopes will become an in-person store. HD stands for Honeysuckle Dozier: her zodiac flower and her biological last name. HD also stands for high definition, which is a reminder for Washington to weave her dreams to life. She wants to spread love through her brand. “I don’t want to only be known as the girl who was shot,” she says.
Washington’s smile spreads across her face. “I gave my own self justice.”
-Sophia Liu is a sophomore in Berkeley College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.