CT state police ticket falsification allegations raise broad concerns in forum

For state Sen. Patricia Billie Miller, chair of the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, that Connecticut State Police may have written 25,000 fake tickets pertaining to racial profiling is a matter of rights.

Miller, spoke at a nearly full house at the downtown University of Connecticut campus as residents and others broached concerns about reports of the fake tickets and the impact it has on racial profiling. Milles assured those who gathered that police accountability is taken very seriously.

“I’ve spoken to the governor and he takes it very seriously. But your voices are important. …it’s very, very important for your voices to be heard,” she said. “This is about our rights. And this is about racial profiling. This is about all the money that we spent as legislators to get the data we need is gone down the tubes, because the numbers are skewed. The numbers mean nothing because of this false information.”

The forum, held by the Greater Hartford NAACP Branch, included a presentation of the Connecticut State Police Traffic Stop Data Audit 2014 to 2021 report findings by Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project Manager Kenneth Barone.

Barone said that the audit report was done due to the board’s concern that racial profiling records may have been intentionally falsified by troopers and constables. The audit of hundreds of thousands of tickets, was designed to determine whether there was merit to the concern and if so, the extent of any problems.

Barone said that overreported records with evidence of false or inaccurate data were more likely to be reported as white drivers and less likely to be reported as Black or Hispanic drivers, and records that were underreported by troopers were more likely to be Hispanic or some other race and less likely to be white drivers.

The report

He said that the audit contains general findings, which include the analysis identifying that there were a significant number of unsubstantiated infraction records that were submitted to the racial profiling database by troopers and constables during all years covered by the audit.

Other findings based on the analysis include that Barone and his staff have a high level of confidence that false and inaccurate records were submitted to the racial profiling database, he said.

The report says the most significant impact of false and inaccurate records occurred between 2014 and 2018. It also says that although the number of unsubstantiated records has declined, the problem persisted through 2021.

The report also said that while some infractions reported to the Centralized Infractions Bureau appear to have met the criteria for submission to the racial profiling system, they were not reported, which the report says is a violation of requirements of the Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act.

The report’s analysis found the demographics recorded for records where there is a high level of confidence that the information is false or inaccurate made a substantive and statistically significant impact on previously published analyses.

The report also suggests a historical pattern and practice among some troopers and constables of submitting infraction records that were likely false or inaccurate to the racial profiling system, with the issue appearing to have been more prominent in Troop F in the Central District and throughout all the troops in the Eastern District.

‘It still contributed to racism overall’

Following Barone’s presentation, forum attendees posed questions and voiced their concerns.

National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives Connecticut chapter member Gary Wallace asked whether there would be an opportunity to know the motivation behind falsifying tickets.

Barone said that he can only speak to the four investigations that the state police have completed and made public.

“We didn’t investigate, we didn’t go out and interview people. But in those four cases, they did ask them and the answers vary. One trooper said, it was in the report that Hearst Media made public, that they were having trouble at home and they didn’t want to get transferred to another troop, and they needed to appear more productive,” Barone said.

“And so they were entering record. They were making stops that were false, so their supervisor would be satisfied. But there were different versions of that, which the state police articulated in those investigations. As we say in the report, trying to answer that question…we’re data people, and that’s for another entity,” he said.

University of New Haven faculty member Lorenzo M. Boyd said he wondered if something worse could be happening, as there is only data for infractions, not traffic stops with written or verbal warnings.

Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project Senior Policy Analyst James Fazzalaro said information on warnings is part of their database, but while they have an independent way to verify accuracy of stops that result in infractions, warnings do not get reported to any specific place, whether they are issued locally or by state police.

“To do the same kind of an analysis of warnings, we would have to figure out how to basically do the same kind of comparison we did here for infractions,” he said.

Fazzalaro said it is complicated because since the COVID-19 pandemic, state police results shifted from infraction toward warnings, in part because concern about the virus meant troopers didn’t want long contacts with motorists. “But we’re now past that. And that dynamic is still in the data. So we’re starting to try to figure out whether we’re dealing with a permanent shift in stop outcomes that will make it more difficult to audit all of the data that we audited this time,” he said.

Both Senator Miller and Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project Advisory Board chair, former state Rep. William Dyson, encouraged anyone with concerns to make their voices heard to the state legislature and get involved when it comes to this issue.

ACLU CT Public Policy Advocacy Director Claudine Constant said that what has come to light is concerning.

“Regardless of the intent, regardless of what people meant to do, regardless of what it was if it was laziness or not. It still contributed to racism overall,” she said. “This is a system-wide issue, not just a couple of bad apples. Systemic, and I hope we can keep that in mind as we walk through the data and really start having these difficult conversations,” she said.

NAACP Connecticut State Conference President Scot X. Esdaile said the issue is extremely important because it involves racial profiling.

“These are people from our communities that are getting pulled over to speak from our communities that are being mistreated,” he said. “And now we’re finding out that there’s fake reports and fake tickets that are going out … but we also have to talk about accountability.

“These individuals need to be held accountable for their actions. We’ve fought vigorously to get these racial profiling laws to come into fruition. And now they’re skewing the numbers, they’re playing with the numbers. They’re striving to get promotions off of these false numbers, and they need to be held accountable. And we need to demand that they’re held accountable for this,” he said.