The Hollow neighborhood of Bridgeport, along North Avenue.
— Photo by Lima16
MANCHESTER, Conn.
What happens in Connecticut when a 15-year-old lives in a home with abusive and neglectful parents, drug abuse and violence, ends up on the street, joins his friends in car thefts, gets high on marijuana, steals another car, leads police on a chase, drives the wrong way on a one-way street, strikes other cars, is cornered in a parking lot, puts the car into reverse to escape, knocks over an officer, and is fatally shot by him?
In Connecticut what happens is that the boy's family, who messed him up, gets $500,000 from the City of Bridgeport to settle a lawsuit asserting that his death was actually a federal civil-rights violation.
This presumably will be the final chapter of the story of Jayson Negron, whose life ended in a fairly predictable way in 2017 and reflected the widespread neglect of Connecticut's children and the failure of government to do much about it.
Ironically, the settlement was approved by the Bridgeport City Council this week just as Connecticut, mourning two police officers murdered by a drunken madman in Bristol, sought to show support for police generally. Though the settlement falsely implied that the Bridgeport officer was in the wrong in the case of the young car thief, it did not provoke much comment around the state.
Neither side in the lawsuit wants to talk about the award. The City Council may have treated it as a nuisance settlement recommended by the city's insurer to avoid the risk that a judge or jury, sympathizing with the boy's survivors despite the facts, might produce an adverse verdict and a larger award.
But the officer who shot the boy had been fully vindicated by a state's attorney's investigation that, incidentally, showed that the boy's supporters, trying to provoke outrage, repeatedly lied when they claimed that the car the boy was driving was not stolen as police said it was.
Until recently Connecticut had been failing to exact the necessary accountability from its police officers. New law establishes the office of inspector general to investigate police use of force, curtails the immunity of officers from lawsuits, and prevents the state police from concealing complaints of misconduct. The new law is said to be demoralizing police, but then any greater accountability would. Accountability in government is a necessity and must take precedence over employee morale.
But the settlement of the lawsuit in Bridgeport was not a necessity but a convenience, an excuse for the city not to support its police when they are in the right and an excuse for government not to demand accountability from wrongdoers.
Jayson Negron became a danger to the public because his family catastrophically failed him. Now they're getting rich at public expense, some people will call it justice, and, in this age of political correctness, no one in authority will dare to contradict them.
The "justice for Jayson" for which the boy's defenders clamor would have been decent parents.
WHITHER COLUMBUS?
But there is also plenty of lawlessness on the official level in Bridgeport.
For two years Mayor Joe Ganim has been expropriating the statue of Christopher Columbus that stood at Seaside Park in the city, though, according to the city's legal department, the city's Parks Commission, which has been protesting the expropriation, is the statue's exclusive custodian.
It's not clear what the mayor wants to do with the statue. First he had it placed in a barn at the park and lately had it moved to an Italian social club.
Of course, the mayor may worry that the statue risks vandalism if it remains in a public place, just as Columbus statues in Waterbury and elsewhere have been vandalized by people who consider him an agent of brutal Spanish imperialism more than a daring and world-changing explorer. (Strange that the people who are so upset with Columbus that they vandalize his statues don't seem to have vandalized anything, or even protested, in regard to their own country's recent imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
In any case the Columbus statue in Bridgeport is for the Parks Commission to dispose. Expropriating and hiding it just avoids the decision that needs to be made in the open by the responsible agency.
The statue's expropriation also adds to Mayor Ganim's sorry record of lawbreaking.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
