Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor

For decades, the Yale Police Department had a “Police Advisory Board” — a group of students, faculty and community members tasked with providing recommendations to department leadership on matters of controversy. But last year, after a semester fraught with policed protests and student arrests, the board was quietly discontinued.

Years of heightened tensions between the YPD and the Yale community erupted in 2019, when a Yale police officer was present during a police shooting that severely injured a 22-year-old Black woman. In 2022, a decades-old civilian complaint review committee known as the Police Advisory Board was revamped and given expanded powers to review complaints over officer conduct, rather than just the department’s responses to such complaints.

But by the time a wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests led to dozens of student arrests this past April and May, the Advisory Board ceased to exist. Mentions of the board disappeared from the Yale Police Department’s website over the summer. The board’s two student representatives graduated in May 2024 and were not replaced. When contacted for this story, Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell stated through a communications officer that the advisory board is “not currently active.” 

Community calls for YPD reform post-shooting  

In the early morning hours of April 16, 2019, a Yale Police officer and a Hamden Police officer fired their weapons at Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon, an unarmed young Black couple in a car in Newhallville. The Yale officer, who had been patrolling Yale’s Science Park around 4 a.m., had left his post to come to the assistance of Hamden officers responding to reports of an attempted armed robbery. Washington was rushed into surgery for serious but non-lethal spinal bullet wounds, which a State investigation ultimately determined were caused by the Hamden officer. She subsequently sued the University, unsuccessfully.

Exactly six months after the shooting, which sparked a wave of anti-YPD protests led by Yale and New Haven community members, the University commissioned an external review of the YPD. 21CP Solutions, a consulting firm led by members of former President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, embarked on an eight-month probe into the department’s standards and practices. Through listening sessions, interviews and reviews of YPD protocols, the consultants compiled a list of recommendations for improving the department’s responses to public safety concerns and its interactions with the community it aimed to serve.

Despite affirming the importance of departmental oversight, 21CP made no specific recommendations on an implementation method for such accountability in its 79-page resulting report. 

“We note simply that, to enhance community trust and confidence in the police and to alleviate the concerns of some community members that the University may be unduly protecting problematic officers, YPD and Yale should consider establishing an oversight mechanism for its internal investigations of officer performance,” the report reads. 

The report acknowledged that Yale “has created a Police Advisory Board” that “may fulfill an oversight function going forward.”

That advisory board was not new; the Yale Police Department had operated one for decades. The News’ archives confirm an Advisory Board’s existence as early as 1971, when it addressed a case in which a YPD officer was accused of asking one student to “bug” another student, sparking campus controversy. A University Police Advisory Board chaired by a criminology professor emerged to review the allegations, Richard Goldsby, then-Head of Pierson College, recalled.

The board’s early existence is also documented in the labor contracts between the University and the Yale Police Benevolent Association, or YPBA, the department’s union of officers and detectives. Officer Michael Hall, the YPBA’s current president, said that the contractual language about the board has remained the same for “nearly 40 years.” 

The latest police union contract, which expired in 2023, states that if the advisory board were to recommend disciplinary action against a member of the police department, any resulting penalty would need to meet the standards of just cause laid out in the contract.

Hall noted that the contract’s current language about the board has not been a contention in the ongoing negotiations for a new YPBA contract, and that these same guidelines will presumably be in the new contract when it is finalized.

Although the board has existed for decades, its operations were recently altered, Hall said. In 2022, the University changed the body from an “appellate review” board to an “initial inquiry” board, he said. 

Under the original board’s terms, members only oversaw appeals from civilians who were dissatisfied with the original disciplinary outcome of their complaint, or officers dissatisfied with the outcomes of complaints filed against them. The revised board would directly accept complaints through a form on the YPD’s website and provide recommendations to the YPD. Hall wrote that he believes the board underwent this change because of the “George Floyd incident/protests” of 2020.

In fall 2022, former YPD Chief Ronnell Higgins — who then worked as the University’s inaugural associate vice president for public safety — convened the group of seven who would comprise the revamped Advisory Board. The board members each represented different sectors of the University, as well as the New Haven community. 

Heather Calabrese, a strategic communications administrator in the Office of the Secretary, served as chair of the board. Caroline Lefever LAW ’24, a law student and member of Yale Law School’s policing clinic, represented graduate students, and Craig Birckhead-Morton ’24, a Yale College student who participated in activist circles, was the undergraduate representative. Former Head of Pierson College Stephen Davis represented the faculty, while Greg Kharabadze, a medical school administrator, was another staff representative. A third staff position was labeled “TBD.” YPD Lieutenant Christopher Halstead served as the board’s officer representative. Finally, John Lewis, a local pastor active in the Connecticut Center for Nonviolence, which holds sporadic training sessions with local police departments, was appointed to represent the New Haven community.

By February 2023, the names of the 2022-23 board’s seven members were posted on the Yale Police Department’s website. Months later, the website was updated to list the members of the 2023-24 board, unchanged except for the fact that Davis — who left New Haven for a year to pursue research —  was replaced by faculty members Sarah Mahurin and Arnim Dontes. The third “staff” slot labeled “TBD” remained unfilled. 

Sometime between June 3 and Sept. 14 of last year, all mentions of the board were wiped completely from the YPD’s website.

The board that wasn’t

Craig Birckhead-Morton — who became a board member during his junior year at Yale College — was involved in Black Students for Disarmament at Yale, a group active in protests after the 2019 shooting of Washington and Witherspoon. As its members graduated during Birckhead-Morton’s time at Yale, the group’s operations dwindled. Birckhead-Morton served as the Yale College Council’s inaugural “student organization liaison” in the 2022-23 school year. When Higgins invited the YCC president, Leleda Beraki ’24 SPH ’25, to serve as the undergraduate student representative to the Police Advisory Board, Beraki recommended Birckhead-Morton for the position.

Birckhead-Morton’s work on the board consisted of a tour of the Yale Police Department headquarters in February 2023 and a series of online training sessions in civilian complaint review, he said. Lewis, the New Haven representative, recalls only meeting the other members of the board “once or twice.”

Birckhead-Morton said he believed the board’s primary function was to review civilian complaints and advise the chief of police on how to respond. But Birckhead-Morton said that, to his knowledge, the department did not receive any complaints during his two-year tenure on the board, so the group never met.

In reality, the YPD did receive civilian complaints during Birckhead-Morton’s tenure. Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell, who replaced Higgins as chief in summer 2022, said in November that the YPD has received “one to two” civilian complaint reports every year that he has worked there. 

While Birckhead-Morton served on the board, a complaint could be submitted online in two ways: directly to the Office of the Chief, or through the form on the Advisory Board’s webpage.

A police union document from 2022 delineating the Police Advisory Board’s terms and procedures specifies that the YPD must transmit a copy of a complaint it received and a summary of the investigation status to both the Advisory Board and the union within three days of receiving a complaint that warrants an investigation. If the chair of the board received a civilian complaint through the board’s online form, she would have 72 hours to transmit it to the YPD chief and police union leadership. Hall, the union president, said that — to his knowledge — the board never met to review any complaints received through its form.

Campbell, meanwhile, said that the board’s operations were mostly under the purview of Calabrese and the other board members, as well as the police union, whose contract establishes the parameters for how officers can face discipline. The chief’s office, Campbell said, was intentionally less involved in facilitating the board. 

“We didn’t run it, so we didn’t want to put our hand in it,” he said.

Calabrese declined to answer questions about her role on the board. Yale’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications provided a statement attributed to Calabrese, claiming the board is “not currently active; the university is reviewing the charter and considering refinements to its scope of advisory responsibilities.” That statement is identical to the one shared with the News by Campbell’s communications representative. Over the course of six months, a total of six University employees sent this exact statement to the News. 

Davis, the faculty representative, said he never actually served on the board because of his research leave during the 2023-24 academic year. Mahurin, his replacement, does not recall attending a meeting. Kharabadze left Yale this year. When reached for comment, he referred questions about the board to Calabrese, who did not respond. 

“We have nothing further to add to the information already provided, which is on behalf of the university, including Yale Public Safety and Heather Calabrese,” a public safety communications officer wrote in November.

Birckhead-Morton and Lefever both graduated from the University in May. In August, Birckhead-Morton asked the current Yale College Council president, Mimi Papathanasopoulos ’26, to nominate a student to replace him on the board. Unaware that the board had become inactive, Papathanasopoulos forwarded a nomination to Calabrese that month, but never heard back. 

2024 campus arrests reignite community tensions with YPD 

Birckhead-Morton last heard from the board on March 12, when a YPD assistant chief reached out to notify board members of an upcoming “in-person training,” according to emails reviewed by the News. That training was never scheduled, but Birckhead-Morton would encounter Lieutenant Halstead, the board’s officer representative, a final time before he graduated. 

Alongside Black Students for Disarmament, Birckhead-Morton participated in myriad left-leaning activist groups at the University, including Yalies for Palestine, a collective whose ranks swelled during the Israel-Hamas war that began on Oct. 7, 2023.

On Monday, April 22, 2024, Birckhead-Morton was one of 44 Yale students detained for criminal trespassing after three nights sleeping in a protest encampment on Beinecke Plaza, while their cluster of tents was cleared from the quadrangle.

In an April 30 email to Yale Public Safety Director Duane Lovello, YPD analyst Lisa Skelly-Byrnes noted that one of the “student leaders” arrested on April 22 was a member of the Advisory Board. She recounted having met Birckhead-Morton a year prior when he toured the YPD. 

In her email to Lovello, Skelly-Byrnes claimed the student had refused to shake her hand, and wrote that she later was told he “had ties to the NBPP” — the New Black Panther Party, a Black Power collective designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations for antisemitic comments attributed to its leaders. Birckhead-Morton said that he did not remember meeting Skelly-Byrnes and denied having any ties to the NBPP. He added that the disrespectful encounter Skelly-Byrnes described in the email “sounds out of character.” 

“Do we know how these folks are selected and screened?” Skelly-Byrnes wrote in her note to Lovello. “I know students in college experiment with ideologies but maybe we should screen better.”

On May 1, Birckhead-Morton was arrested again, charged with disorderly conduct and a second trespassing count after leading a nighttime rally outside the University President’s residence. That night, Halstead put him in handcuffs, officer narratives of the arrest confirm.

Two of the three other protesters arrested that night — neither affiliated with Yale — were detained forcefully. Video footage shows YPD officers tackling the individuals to the ground, and holding them there. Yale Public Safety commissioned an external review of the arrests, which a hired private law firm completed in August but never released publicly. A published summary of the review’s results concluded that one of the involved officers did not follow “best practices” when making the arrest.

Birckhead-Morton did not participate in the external investigation nor did he independently submit a civilian complaint, he told the News. He attributed both decisions to concern over his then-pending criminal charges.

“I think it’s important that not lawyers but administrators and faculty and students can really look at this themselves,” Birckhead-Morton said in a November interview. “This was an opportunity that was taken away from [the board] that they should have had, and that was put in the hands of some external lawyers. I think that truly is unfortunate.” 

YCC seeks action after campus arrests, proposes new Advisory Board

On Jan. 26, the Yale College Council passed a bill calling for increased YPD transparency and oversight. Inspired by communications obtained through a records request from the YPD, the writers of the proposal took issue with the department’s use of drone footage and ID card swipe tracking to monitor the spring’s pro-Palestinian protests, as well as the department’s communications with local employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Among the bill’s recommendations is a call to establish an “independent oversight board” of two undergraduate students, two graduate students and five faculty members — a similar makeup to that of the board dissolved over the summer. The new board proposed in the resolution would be tasked with “reviewing YPD surveillance practices, use of force policies, and collaborations with external agencies” and would publish an annual report on its findings. The proposal does not mention civilian complaint review responsibilities, but cites the University of California system’s police accountability boards, which do formulate recommendations on investigations into civilian complaints.

In an interview with the News after the bill was proposed, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis said that the administration does have plans to revive such an Advisory Board, which would include student representation. Lewis acknowledged the existence of the previous board but could not provide a reason for its “lapse” in activity.

“What I’ve learned about university committees,” Lewis said, “is that a lot of them have very important roles to play, but they don’t always meet according to the assigned schedule. They’re very dependent on changes in personnel or changes in the membership. If students graduate, or a faculty goes on sabbatical, or something like that, the committee might stop meeting, and it might just get dropped by mistake.”

The Yale Police Department was founded in 1894.

Nora Moses and Karla Cortes contributed reporting.