Ariela Lopez, Contributing Photographer

Lieutenant Brendan Borer’s patrol shift as New Haven Police Department’s downtown district manager usually begins around 2:15 p.m. and concludes around 4 p.m. Borer’s regular route, he described, focuses primarily on the intersection of Chapel Street and Temple Street, adjacent to the New Haven Green.

The Green acts as a “transfer hub” for high schoolers, NHPD Communications Officer Christian Bruckhart told the News. The Cooperative Arts and Humanities Magnet High School is a block away from the Green, and Bruckhart pointed out that students from farther schools can take public transportation to the bus station just across the strip of popular restaurants and stores on Chapel Street. 

“Kids will go there after school, congregate there. The manager tells them to leave and they swear at the manager, throw stuff around and make a mess,” Bruckhart said. 

Borer initiated the collaborative Connecticut Violence Intervention Program in 2022, which works together with the Board of Education’s dropout prevention “officers” and the city’s Youth and Recreation department to suppress adolescent conflicts downtown. 

“I knew that this wasn’t solely a policing issue,” Borer said. “There’s a lot more to it, reasons why kids are downtown after school and kind of getting some of the things that they are. So I quickly wanted to bring the Board of Education and youth workers on board to attack the problem from a number of different angles.”

Borer said that the downtown officers’ primary job now is to make sure that fights do not break out among adolescents. Since the current school year began on Aug. 29, the job has been relatively smooth. As of Thursday, only one juvenile has been arrested in Borer’s district since the school year began.

“There were like two or three incidents on that first day,” Borer told the News. “There were some arguments and stuff, nothing turned into a full-blown fight.”

School administrators joined the coalition of officers downtown on the first day. Borer attributes the relative calm to the additional resources available to support the police.

Borer clarified that an “argument” would entail “loud verbal arguing and fighting,” but not physical violence. Officers intervene early in arguments to prevent them from escalating.

“Sometimes we’re able to de-escalate immediately,” Borer said. “Sometimes a student could be apologetic, and truly correct behavior like that, or sometimes it just keeps going and going until you have to make an arrest or a counselor is able to make that connection.”

NHPD officers only make arrests for particularly violent cases, Bruckhart told the News. In cases of physical harm, they have had to use pepper spray to break up fighting. 

To prevent overextending their resources, officers employ a triage strategy when dealing with multiple juvenile conflicts at once. 

“You have to pick and choose your battles, right? If some kid is yelling profanities and you’re spending time dealing with that, and then there’s a fight going on, you need to go to more serious incidents first. A lot of it’s just moving them along,” Bruckhart said.

If New Haven police officers break up conflict on school grounds, they defer the situation to school administrators or student resource officers, Bruckhart said.

Borer’s patrol is just blocks away from Yale’s campus. NHPD Chief Karl Jacobson and Yale Chief of Police Anthony Campbell are in close communication to coordinate patrol coverage in the downtown area, Bruckhart said. 

Borer clarified that there are no Yale Police Department officers currently joining the NHPD officers on patrol downtown. However, they are sworn officers in New Haven, Bruckhart said, and are therefore permitted to make arrests if they came upon a situation that would require one.

A Yale Police Department statement confirmed YPD’s involvement in patrolling the downtown region.

“At the request of New Haven Police Chief Jacobson, Yale Police provide additional patrols in the College and Chapel Streets area,” the statement said.

Beyond a low number of arrests and interventions, Borer pointed to a safer climate noticeable to local businesses.

“To my knowledge, all the stores are running normally,” he said. “But we did have doors that were closed, like serving out of like a window to prevent people from coming in.”

The New Haven Police Department has 10 patrol districts.