Volume 47 - Issue 1

THE NEW JOURNAL The magazine of Yale & New Haven

Volume 47 • Issue 1 • August 2014

staff publisher Briton Park editors-in-chief Eric Boodman Julia Calagiovanni executive editor Ike Swetlitz managing editor Maya Averbuch senior editors Katy Osborn Noah Remnick Ezra Ritchin A. Grace Steig associate editors Ashley Dalton Emily Efland Caroline Sydney Isabelle Taft copy editors Adrian Cheim Eva Landsberg Adam Mahler

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

photo editors Henry Ehrenberg Jennifer Lu design editors Hanh Nguyen Annie Schweikert Edward Wang Madeleine Witt

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2014 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students,Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $50. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

the new journal

Volume 47, Issue 1 August 2014 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

FEATURES 14 New Cops on the Block As states cut treatment programs, police learn to work with the mentally ill.

by Michelle Hackman

24 Playing the Cards Right Can an ID card help members of a vulnerable population feel at home in the Elm City?

by Maya Averbuch

STANDARDS 4

editor’s note

4

points of departure by various authors

9

snapshot Put It to the Test

by Caroline Sydney

34 poetry Carleen Liu, Ariel Katz

35 critical angle Unintelligent Design

by John Stillman

39 personal essay Impact

by Eric Baudry

41 poetry Hayley Kolding

Cover by Madeleine Witt, Edward Wang, and Annie Schweikert

AUGUST 2014

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editor’s note

Dear reader,

Welcome to the August issue of the New Journal! Around here, we talk to strangers. We tell stories. We take our time.

Also, we like to write.

In the last few months, we rode along with police officers, puffed on e-cigarettes, and became world renowned for our inventions (almost). We thought about what’s happening in New Haven these days.

We hope you’ll follow along on our journeys.

As always, we welcome all students—freshmen and seniors; rookies and experts; writers, photographers, designers, and business managers—to join the New Journal community! Contact us at editors@ thenewjournalatyale.com if you’re interested in getting involved.

With our best wishes and highest hopes for the year ahead,

Julia Calagiovanni & Eric Boodman, Editors-in-Chief

points of departure Lighting Up A journey into the wild west of electronic cigarettes

I

took a drag, and the vapor was thick and harsh.

The nicotine of a cigarette; the flavor of a hookah. My first taste of #VapeLife left the lungs feeling clean.

Inside the brick walls of Chapel Street’s White Buffalo Vapors, I sat at a hardwood counter known as the “juice bar.” Behind the counter, shelves held rows of brightly colored vials of “e-juice” — liquid nicotine mixed with flavored oil — everything from the woody notes of a heavy cigar, or a light strawberry blend. It was simple: choose a flavor, press a button on the vaporizer to heat the oil, and inhale.

Since its invention just a decade ago, “vaping” has exploded into a billion-dollar industry. Ecigarettes, which seek to imitate the look and feel of a traditional smoking experience, are the most talked-about part of the trend, as a safer alternative to old-school “cancer sticks.” E-cigarettes can be found in gas stations and pharmacies, and they are relatively cheap. But, until White Buffalo Vapors opened in March, high-end vaping was yet to be found in New Haven. The pipes aren’t meant to replace old-fashioned smokes; crafted in the shape of ornate tobacco pipes or steampunk machines, they can cost hundreds of dollars and are meant 4

for long-term use. Since it was my first time vaping, I didn’t drop any cash; Noah Morganson, an employee, lent me his pen-shaped vaporizer.

If Chapel Street passersby happen to look in these days, they’d probably see a handful of people inside, talking and vaping. But the owners of White Buffalo — Sammy Chamino, Sasha Zabar, and Max Young, all avid vapers and ex-smokers under thirty — have big plans for the space. They started with a register, some mismatched furniture, and a small case featuring a few expensive vaporizers, but now they are dreaming big: coffee, live music, a rustic vibe. This August, they tore out a drop ceiling and linoleum flooring to expose an old white tin roof and pine floor, leading all the way to a small back patio area, in preparation for a grand opening in the fall.

“We’ve had escaped convicts and police, firemen, and bus drivers. And lots of hipsters,” says Young, a quiet man with a dark beard and mustache. “We want to continue that kind of diversity.”

But the crew is still fighting against public distrust. E-cigarettes have exploded onto the market without any comprehensive health studies or FDA regulation, leading to a frenzy of media hype: THE NEW JOURNAL

SAMMY CHAMINO, MAX YOUNG, AND SASHA ZABAR, CO-OWNERS OF THE WHITE BUFFALO, OPENED NEW HAVEN’S FIRST E-CIGARETTE LOUNGE IN MARCH. PHOTOS BY JENNIFER LU.

rumors of a suicide by liquid nicotine injection, reports that e-juice shares ingredients with antifreeze, accusations that the industry deliberately markets to kids by offering flavored juices. Some concerns are justified, because e-juice spilled on skin can be fatal, certain low-quality juices are indeed made with toxins, and no data on the possible effects of second-hand smoke from e-cigarettes exists. But the owners of White Buffalo Vapors insist that they only sell high-quality, domestic, natural juice, and they do support certain precautions, like age restrictions on purchases. For the most part, though, they bring a playful attitude to their “vapeangelism” advertising, making liberal use of the #VapeLife hashtag and posting tweets like “Our #ecigs have all been sanctified & carved with protection sigils. No demonic influence in our vapes! Enjoy PURE flavor.”

On online forums, vapers are defensive of their choices, calling out people they dub “ANTZ” (Anti Nicotine and Tobacco Zealots). They provide testimony of their improved health since switching from analog cigarettes, and rejection of perceived anti-vape “scare tactics.” But at White Buffalo, the wacky group of vapers I meet are downright friendly, eager to bring new members into the fold; one tells me vaping turned him into a hobby electrician, since he worked on his vaporizers, while another describes how users will finish a single bottle in the shop by smoking over several hours.

Chamino, an energetic man who sports a wiry beard and army style jacket, points out that the customer base for vaping is as wide as that of cigarettes, including everyone from “blue collar workers to trendy Hollywood people.” That diversity brings an eclectic feel to the shop, but it may make it difficult to built cohesion there. Still, as people linger and vape, they bond over their fringe subculture.

They’re setting out to create a new community and establish an industry. Vaporizers, still in the wild west of untested products, owe some of their cool to pure novelty, but the goal of the White Buffalo folks is to stay ahead of the herd, and create a spot where vapers will come to stay.

--Tim Follo AUGUST 2014

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Stuck in Park Abandoned cars linger in a Yale garage

U

nder the cover of darkness, we drive into the PiersonSage parking garage, just north of Yale’s Science Hill. It is nighttime in mid-March. Two recent graduates, now Yale employees, promise a juicy story. I can’t help but think of the scene in “All the President’s Men” when Bob Woodward coaxes the Watergate story out of an informant in a parking garage in Washington, D.C. But our target that night is not a national scandal (though I still kept my hopes up); it is an unlikely fleet of abandoned cars.

“Welcome to the graveyard of elephants,” one of the Yale employees says as we descended into the bowels of the garage.

We creep up on a handful of tarp-covered cars, vaguely resembling sleeping pachyderms.

Upon closer inspection, three or four of the cars appear luxurious enough to belong in someone’s private collection. One stands out from the crowd.

The 1965 Dodge is so old that it has sliders instead of

knobs for the car radio. I worry that I will find a body inside, but instead I find a rusty paint scraper and a pair of shoelaces.

The stuffing explodes out of the back seat, but I cannot locate the animal that has been gnawing on the fabric. The odometer reads 67,256, and a 1994 New York emissions test sticker indicates the exact same mileage.

Either the odometer is broken or this car was moved from New York to Yale’s Pierson-Sage garage two decades ago.

The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles doesn’t help, but not for lack of trying.

A license plate search returned no registration or inspection records — records are deleted after ten years of no activity, according to Pete Bucci, the department’s public information officer. The decaying sticker provides the only evidence of this car’s strange journey.

While nobody — except one intrepid journalist — seems to have been thinking about this

car in over a decade, parking lot patrons are taking note of other abandoned cars. On the top level of the garage sits an old pickup truck. Its flat tires hint that it hasn’t been driven in a while, but that hasn’t stopped people from using it — as a trash dump.

Garbage litters the Chevy’s bed.

Broken windshield wipers poke through a layer of plastic bottles, coffee cups, and rusty hubcaps.

I can’t find the shredded documents; maybe they have already decomposed.

Someone has stuck a note underneath the windshield wiper that reads, “Is this truck for sale? If so, let me know.” I give Bill, the man who left the note, a call. He says that he noticed the pickup in July 2013, because his son has an identical one that needed some spare parts. Now, at the end of August, he hasn’t received a call back. When I return to the garage, the note is gone, but the truck remains.

It’s unclear why the truck hasn’t been removed. The

A TARP-COVERED CAR IN THE BOWELS OF THE PIERSON-SAGE PARKING GARAGE. PHOTO BY JENNIFER LU

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THE NEW JOURNAL

Chevy’s last visible Yale parking permit expired on May 28, 2012. Another five vehicles appear similarly abandoned in the garage. Some of the cars I found did not have any sort of permit altogether, and others had permits that expired years ago.

Ed Bebyn, Yale’s director of parking and transit, writes in an email that “essentially, these cars are permitted vehicles.” That is to say: Cars that are parking in the garage are required to have permits, so if a car is parking in the garage, it must have a permit. There are always some abuses, he adds, but a new sticker program to be implemented this fall should make the few offenders comply. Karen Peart, a press officer at the Office of Public Affairs, explained that only cars in open Yale lots are currently required to have stickers; Pierson-Sage is not an open lot, but rather a garage. The new program would extend the sticker requirement to Yale’s garages starting on Sept. 2.

However, she declined a phone interview, so I never received an answer about what would happen to these abandoned cars. If the New York DMV can’t even find a record of the ’65 Dodge, I doubt Yale can.

In his email, Bebyn said that some of the dustcovered cars belong to students who buy longterm parking and just keep the cars in the garage.

Some cars thus only appear to be abandoned. No conspiracy there.

But others have tires that look like they have not functioned in years, and their windshields do

not display valid parking permits. One has to wonder whether someone is really paying Yale nearly a hundred dollars a month to store his or her junk.

The persistent, suspicious presence of these cards indicates they are low on the list of the priorities of the parking administration.

Some people who pass through the garage are taking justice into their own hands — more accurately, their own fingers. Some have wiped messages into the grime covering a few of the cars.

The front window of a red Metro Geo: “DANG WASH ME PLZ.” Someone has drawn a frown, nose, and eyebrows on the hood. But nobody has taken up the task set forth by the anonymous complainant.

When I leave the parking garage with the employees that cold night in March, I am still searching for a story. But sometimes a garage full of cars really is just a garage full of cars. There are no secret documents here — except, perhaps, those related to the new sticker policy. This story is full of actors who go half way: laypeople interested enough to demand cleanup but lazy enough only to scratch off enough dust to leave their message, and a parking office interested enough to promise amorphous change but stubborn enough to not explain it.

Not all mysterious parking lots will bring down the presidency.

--Ike Swetlitz

Keep on Trucking Jon Roy makes a living from his food truck on Cedar Street

D

uring lunchtime, the stretch of New Haven’s Cedar Street between Congress Avenue and York Street is filled with the clanking of knives and the sizzling of frying fat. Nearly a hundred people mill about the two-dozen food carts clustered around the Yale School of Medicine.

“Where else can you get a full meal for five or six dollars?” asks Mary Weng, a student at the Yale School of Public Health, as she orders a halfchicken, half-steak burrito from one of the carts.

Standing in his food truck, Jon’s Lunch, on a cold Saturday in March, Jon Roy is working with AUGUST 2014

a steady rhythm. Wearing jeans, a black sweater, and a Bacardi Limón baseball cap, he serves up a “Yagi Soba,” which consists of salad, steak, and spaghetti, and a “Stinky Bomb” sandwich with gorgonzola, pastrami, onion, and sausage. Roy is one of the few truck employees who runs his own show, without a boss calling the shots over his shoulders. Every weekday, he pulls in at 9:00 a.m., waiting for the regular medical students, researchers, workers, and administrators who stop by between shifts.

When I speak with him in April, he is less than 7

thrilled that the New England winter has been so long this year. He’s tired of this weather, the constant chill. Business is slow when it’s cold outside.

“There are easier ways of making money,” he says.

But he has become a familiar face for people who form lines at his cart each day.

Customers reach into the till — a simple white bucket — to make their own change. “Trusting guy, isn’t he?” says an older man with golden glasses who stops by for a buffalo chicken wrap.

Roy works alongside trucks serving Chinese, Mediterranean, Japanese, Bengali, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Korean, Vietnamese, Italian, Ethiopian, and Thai food. But he offers straightforward American fare: subs, salads, and wraps. He prepares almost all of the food on site, drawing on lessons from childhood summers on an island near Maine, where his grandmother and great-aunt — a

JON ROY IS ONE OF A FEW FOOD TRUCK EMPLOYEES WHO RUNS HIS OWN TRUCK. PHOTO BY HENRY EHRENBERG

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“Julia Child wannabe,” he says — taught him to cook. They prepared recipes from cookbooks and television cooking shows together.

He ran a food truck with a friend starting two decades ago, but when his girlfriend — now his wife — got pregnant, he started his own business to cover the bills. Getting into the industry is not cheap; a used truck can cost around four or five thousand dollars, while a new one is usually around ten thousand. A yearly permit in New Haven costs $200.

Now he earns “enough to live comfortably,” he says, and he speaks with pride of his 22-year-old daughter, who is out of college and working for Next Step Energy, a company that designs and installs renewable energy systems. But when asked whether he would want to pass on his business, he chuckles: “No. This is my Social Security. I might lease it sooner rather than later.”

As we talk, a vendor from a truck on the other side of the street comes over to fish some change out of Roy’s white bucket, because he’s short a few coins.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” Roy says, rolling his eyes.

“But I’m a good pain in the ass, right?” replies his fellow vendor, grinning.

“Everybody’s really nice,” Roy assures, after the vendor has left. “When I got married, half of these vendors were at my wedding.”

He can never predict whether the business day will be good or bad, but the lunchtime crowd has sustained him through the years, along with the line of trucks on either side of him, making a one-man job a more social affair.

A man in scrubs who is paying for his food interrupts our conversation. “This is embarrassing,” the man begins uncomfortably. “But I forgot to pay you last time.” For an instant, Roy looks taken aback. A second later, he smiles, accepts the money for both orders, and tells his regular not to worry about it.

At 2:00 p.m., he begins loading up his materials and cleaning his cart. Then, he hitches it to a truck and drives back home.

--Lorraine James

THE NEW JOURNAL

Put It to the Test

snapshot

Elm City educators look for answers to their questions about the national reform movement

by Caroline Sydney

E

xams were approaching, and Lauren Canalori, a literacy coach at Fair Haven School, was apprehensive. In a few weeks, her students would be taking a new round of standardized tests, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). It was April 2014, and the tests would measure how well the district’s Common Core curriculum, implemented over the past three years, was working. Canalori had helped develop the curriculum and train teachers to execute it; now, her efforts would be put to the test. On the untimed examination, students in grades three through eight would have to tackle fifteen to seventeen questions, which would take an estimated two to four hours. Canalori’s own son would be taking the exam as well.

“He’s a really strong student, he’s a thinker, and he’s going to struggle on the test,” she said, after discussing the sample questions she’d seen. Bookshelves surrounded the round table at which she sat, in a small chair intended for a middle schooler. The brightly lit library was quiet after students had left the weekly lunchtime tutoring session.

The Common Core, one of the largest and most ambitious education reforms in the history of the United States, is an Obama-era project that replaces statewide standards in reading and math for kindergarten through twelfth grade with national standards. In 2009, experts across the nation wrote the new guidelines, aiming to reduce the dramatic variation in standards from state to state. While the federal government does not force states to adopt the Common Core, it provides additional funding for those that do, and forty-three states have decided to make the switch.

The New Haven test results will be released in the next six months, and teachers, parents, and students are all unsure of what they will look like.

AUGUST 2014

In New York State, where Common Core testing was implemented in the spring of 2013, the first tests were so difficult that they brought many students to tears. In some New York schools, as many as eighty-five percent of students failed, according to The New York Times.

The standards, which expect first-grade students to “identify who is telling the story at various points in a text” and fifth-grade students to “graph points on the coordinate plane to solve real-world and mathematical problems,” are not a curriculum in themselves. However, they do provide a classroom framework for educators.

In Connecticut, New Haven was one of the first districts to embrace the standards. Students and teachers have spent the past few years adjusting to a Common Core-aligned curriculum. And while educators hope that the city’s head start will show in the test results, opinions on the new standards are mixed.

When Carlos Torre, a member and former president of the New Haven Board of Education, talks about the Common Core, his voice is calm.

HANH NGUYEN

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He sounds like a lawyer explaining the facts of a case he knows he will win. And he feels that the Common Core standards are a key step in moving American education forward. “It’s the first attempt in this country to have anything that resembles a national conversation about what our students should be able to know, understand, or do,” he explained.

Architects of the Core, along with their supporters, think that every American child should be taught how to think critically rather than spend time memorizing formulaic strategies for taking standardized tests. That means that teachers will have to make fundamental changes in the way they teach. But they do have the new guidelines to point them in the right direction. For example, reading and writing are now supposed to take a more central place in every class.

“When you start to become departmentalized in the older grades, teachers start to become very territorial about what their content is and what they do,” Canalori said. “[But] the Common Core says very clearly that everyone is a literacy teacher.”

To make that a reality, she is helping her colleagues understand how best to teach different kinds of writing across subject areas. Now, in science class, students learn argumentative writing based on observations of experiments, while social studies lessons include persuasive writing based on data collection.

Under the Core, students also need to be able to read and analyze a wider variety of literary genres, and the Fair Haven 10

School’s library shelves show it: Both nonfiction survival narratives and Sharon Draper young adult novels exploring the lives of urban teenagers expose students to a variety of genres and satisfy Common Core requirements. In math, Howe said, students develop a stronger sense of numbers, acquiring a more intuitive understanding of how, say, place value works. They focus on fewer concepts, but delve more deeply into each one.

Before the Common Core, Canalori says, teachers often gave students “formulas” for answering different categories

WHILE THE TESTS ARE ADMINISTERED NATIONWIDE, STATES AND DISTRICTS ARE LEFT TO DESIGN THEIR OWN CURRICULA. of questions on state assessments. “We have all these passive learners now. I think that the Common Core is going to take that away, because we don’t know what the kids are going to be asked,” Canalori said. In the past, teachers knew what type of essay their students would be asked to write: Fourth grade wrote narrative, fifth expository, seventh and eighth persuasive.

Now, the test is unpredictable.

Students need to be trained in many different kinds of writing, because the old formulas will not work on test day.

Canalori knows that that

these tests are going to be a challenge. “The test is really hard. I firmly believe that teachers should have high expectations and that children rise to the expectations you set for them, and I’ve lived that in my career as a teacher. But the test is really difficult and I personally wonder if it’s developmentally appropriate.”

The already-difficult tests, she says, are made even tougher by the fact that they are taken on the computer. When I visited her at school, her students were busy practicing their computer skills, clicking away on desktops in the school library, building websites based on what they’d read about natural disasters. “I worry about their personal tech skills, but also I worry that we are somewhat behind in our technology infrastructure in the building and now we’re kind of running to play catch up,” Canalori said. Some schools simply have better equipment: Her son’s school in the suburbs supplies every student with an iPad, integrating technological literacy into everyday activities, but in Fair Haven, computers are often older models. But that’s changing: The school has received donated computers, and a state grant is helping schools across the New Haven district buy thousands more, largely intended to help students take the tests.

Marlin Coon, a sandy-haired student at the K-8 Worthington Hooker School in East Rock, took the test last spring, at the end of his third-grade year. He found that it was a little harder than tests he had taken previTHE NEW JOURNAL

ously, mainly because of the technology component. “I didn’t know what all the keys were.

Plus writing is much faster than typing,” he said, swinging his legs while sitting next to his father at a local coffee shop.

Parent Dave Coon, PTA president at Worthington Hooker, voices a different concern. He and his fellow parents are worried that excessive testing will negatively impact their children’s education by forcing teachers to spend instructional time coaching students for tests. And, at Worthington Hooker, where Coon’s two sons attend school, testing occupied the school’s computers and shut down its library for two months.

Many parents report that even homework doesn’t look like it used to.Carol Boynton, a second-grade teacher at Edgewood School, said that many parents, unable to understand their children’s homework, have asked her what’s so terrible about teaching math the “normal” way. She recognizes that these new standards cause anxiety for parents. “I see a lot of frustrated parents reacting,” she said. “And I understand that.” She tries to explain that “some of this [material] has been around forever. It’s not really new. It’s just being formatted in a new way.”

Roger Howe, a Yale math professor who helped design the new standards in math, explained that the national standards are just that—standards.

While the tests are administered nationwide, states and districts are left to design their AUGUST 2014

own curricula. That asks teachers to completely rethink the way they plan their lessons. Despite all the work he and others have put into the structure of the Common Core, Howe noted that “standards and implementation are just two completely different things.”

New Haven is used to tackling big problems in education reform. In the early nineties, both Connecticut and Massachusetts raised teacher salaries and educational standards. They both had had similar scores on a standardized test called the National Assessment of Educa-

EVERY TEACHER, IN EVERY CLASSROOM, IN EVERY SCHOOL, NEEDS TO BE PREPARED TO MEET THE STANDARDS. tional Progress (NAEP) in the eighties, and their math scores for fourth graders in 1992 were identical, both showing a jump in scores. But, unlike Connecticut, Massachusetts took an ongoing approach to reform, according to Howe, continually tweaking curricula and standards. Today, Massachusetts’s fourth graders rank second in the nation, while Connecticut’s hover around twentieth place.

This time, however, New Haven may be a bit ahead of the curve in preparing for the new standards and the associated

testing. Three and a half years ago, the New Haven Unified School District replaced the previous math curriculum with Singapore math, which emphasizes independent problem solving to guide students towards discovering concepts and formulas instead of memorizing them. And two years ago, they introduced the reading curriculum designed in part by Canalori. In this sense, Common Core standards aren’t so new after all, and New Haven’s classrooms are already moving in the right direction. “It’s new for the rest of the state, it’s new for most of the country…but it isn’t for us,” Torre said.

This early adaptation sets New Haven apart from other states and districts because it has given students, and most importantly, teachers, time to adjust to and understand the new methods. Howe believes this head start has prepared New Haven students “in a pretty significant way,” making the difference between a successful rollout and a failed one.

But every teacher, in every classroom, in every school, still needs to be prepared to meet the standards. “The essential thing for the Common Core, or really any kind of curriculum innovation, is that you have to make sure teachers are ready to do it,” Howe said. “And this is what the U.S. education system chronically fails to do.” A survey conducted by Education Week in October 2013 found that teachers spent fewer than four days in Common Core training 11

for both subjects. New Haven is hardly an exception and does not have many programs in place to provide teachers with opportunities for professional development and training to teach the Common Core.

The most promising program available—the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute—is facilitated and funded by Yale, rather than by the city or the state. The seminars, which work with teachers to develop innovative curricula that they then post online, target Common Core strategies, because that’s what teachers are most interested in learning about. But they are not certified by any overseeing organization.

Founding Director of the Institute Jim Vivian sees teacher support as a weakness of the rollout both nationally and in New Haven. He knows that his workshops only reach a handful of teachers, and even the lesson plans that they produce and publish for free online can only provide so much support. He worries that not enough similar programs exist to support teachers through the transition process.

Boynton attended her first seminar at YNHTI in 2007. She continues to attend the program and use the online resources, and she encourages her colleagues to do the same. “It’s what we need as teachers. It’s an experience that teachers can have that will provide them with the tools they need to approach the Common Core,” she explained.

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At both Fair Haven and Edgewood, students and teachers await results from the pilot round of SBAC testing. Scores from the pilot will not be used to make decisions about individual students’ placement or performance, but they will provide a general indication of how the district might perform once the final version of the test is administered next year.

Boynton feels a little more hopeful about the results that Edgewood School will receive this year. It was one of a few New Haven schools that participated in an earlier round of SBAC pilot testing in 2013, and her answer suggests that the tests are not to be feared. “Because we’ve been ahead of it a little bit, we’ve done it, we know a lot about what has to occur— not everything, but we have some ideas. I

don’t think the anxiety is as high as it is in other places.”

Educators hope the Common Core standards will better serve their students. But, ultimately, many encourage their students to look beyond the test. “I work at a school where the philosophy is that you are much more than a test score,” Leslie Blatteau, a high school history teacher at Metropolitan Business Academy, said. “We want students to demonstrate creativity, innovation, collaboration, problem solving, analysis, citizenship—all these things that involve much more than sitting down at a computer.”

Caroline Sydney is a junior in Silliman College.

She is an associate editor of the New Journal.

THE NEW JOURNAL

Troubling Legacies: Anti-Judaism in Antiquity and Its Aftermath TH E YA L E P RO G R A M FO R TH E STU DY O F A NTI S E M ITI SM

September 8, 2014 • 11:00 am • Whitney Humanities Center

Panel 1

erich gruen University of California, Berkeley • benjamin isaac Tel Aviv University, Israel dale b. martin Yale University

Panel 2

adele reinhartz University of Ottawa, Canada • ruth sheridan United Theological College, Australia harold attridge Yale University

Panel 3

george kohler Bar-Ilan University, Israel • anders gerdmar Uppsala University, Sweden paul franks Yale University • joshua ezra burns Marquette University

Panel 4

sarah hammerschlag University of Chicago • ward blanton University of Kent, UK j. kameron carter Duke University • ben dunning Fordham University

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, Program in Judaic Studies, and Yale Initiative for the Study of Antiquity and the Premodern World.

Made possible by a generous grant from the Goldhirsh-Yellin Foundation Followed by a reception.

AUGUST 2014

11:00am Introductions: Maurice Samuels; Associate Provost; Hindy Najman Panel 1: Non-Christian Greek and Roman Anti-Judaism?

11:15am Erich Gruen, “Was there Judeophobia in Classical Antiquity?”

11:40am Benjamin Isaac, “Greek and Roman Hostility: Cultural Incompatibility” 12:05pm Dale B. Martin (moderated session) 55 minute lunch break: 12:35–1:30pm Panel 2: John’s “Jews” and their Effective Force in Reception History 1:30pm Adele Reinhartz, “The Devil Incarnate: John’s anti-Jewish legacy” 1:55pm Ruth Sheridan, “Reproducing Johannine Anti-Judaism: The Case of Commentary on John 8:32” 2:20pm Harold Attridge (moderated session) 15 minute coffee break: 2:50–3:05pm Panel 3: Nineteenth Century Philosophy and Theology 3:05pm George Kohler, “Supersessionism in Jewish-Christian Debates in Germany between 1830-1870” 3:30pm Anders Gerdmar, “The Construction of the Jews in 19th Century German Protestantism: the Case of Tübingen professors Beck and Baur.”

3:55pm Paul Franks (moderated session) Joshua Ezra Burns (respondent) 15 minute coffee break: 4:25–4:40 Panel 4: Contemporary Legacies 4:40pm Sarah Hammerschlag, “The figure of the Jew and the New Universalism” 5:05pm Ward Blanton, “What is an Apparatus?” Machineries of Paulinism and the Force of the Name ‘Jew’” 5:30pm J. Kameron Carter, “(In-)Sovereignty in Palestine: Négritude and the Reproductions of Colonialism.”

5:55 pm Ben Dunning (moderated session) 6:25pm Concluding remarks: Maurice Samuels 6:30pm Reception

13

As states cut treatment programs, police learn to work with the mentally ill

New Cops on the Block

by Michelle Hackman / graphics by Madeleine Witt 14

THE NEW JOURNAL

O

fficer Mike Pepe is cruising around the Dwight-Kensington neighborhood when he gets the call. Two women, the dispatcher tells him, are sitting on a park bench at a nearby elementary school playground. They’re staring into space while a toddler lies screaming on the ground.

Pepe, a four-year veteran of the New Haven Police Department, quickly heads to the scene.

He finds the two women, perhaps in their thirties, their eyes bloodshot, ignoring the baby girl sobbing desperately before them.

Pepe climbs out of his cruiser. I follow about ten feet behind, wrapping myself tightly in a thick knit sweater. It is an unusually frigid afternoon for late April, too cold, I think, for a mother to bring her child to the park. The baby’s coat looks thin and shabby, not thick enough to shield her from the wind.

Another officer, Sgt. Mario Francia, arrives on the scene. As he and Officer Pepe approach, one of the women spots him and finally acknowledges the baby. “What happened, mama?” she slurs, not moving to scoop the child off the ground. Her companion remains too catatonic to react.

Pepe approaches the women, a kind look of concern on his face. It is immediately clear to him that both are high on something, perhaps PCP. “Hey, how are you doin’?” Pepe calls out, cautiously approaching the two women. “What’s your name?”

Again, neither woman responds. After a long pause, the one who had cooed at the baby a moment earlier utters, “Katina.” The second woman still does not speak; she cannot speak.

“What happened to her?” Pepe asks casually, gesturing at the child on the ground. “Did she fall or somethin’, guys?”

“She aright,” Katina responds in a daze, the baby’s sobs growing louder.

Pepe picks up the baby and starts bouncing her. The baby’s diaper, he later tells me, feels as though it is reaching the point of explosion.

“That’s my baby!” Katina raises her voice. “Why you actin’ like this? I’m just chillin’.”

“You seem, uh, very out of it,” he explains calmly, asking her to remain seated. “What’d you do today?” No response. “You do drugs? You drink?

Any alcohol or somethin’?”

PHOTO BY JENNIFER LU

AUGUST 2014

Pepe is calm and nonjudgmental. He continues for several more minutes, cajoling and soothing the women to the best of his ability, until an ambulance and a police cruiser arrive to take the two women away. Katina does not want to go, yelling that she has done nothing worthy of arrest.

But she succumbs to her handcuffs and her companion, still impassive, is loaded onto a stretcher to be taken to the emergency room. The baby’s godmother, who lives nearby, takes the child home.

“I think we handled that situation the best we could,” Pepe tells me back in the cruiser. But, several years ago, Pepe adds, he might have approached the scene differently. He might have expressed his frustration at the two women; after all, they had both willingly taken drugs, endangering the baby. Had he acted on these emotions, Pepe might have yelled at the women out of frustration, perhaps handcuffing Katina more aggressively. He could have decided to arrest both women, rather than sending one to the hospital. But Pepe now understands that when an officer rough-handles someone with mental illness, his actions can exacerbate the situation.

These days, Pepe responds differently to calls like these, thanks to a program in Connecticut designed to teach police officers how to recognize and work with individuals who are mentally ill. The program, run by a nonprofit organization called the Connecticut Alliance to Benefit Law Enforcement, or CABLE, has employed the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model since 2003. The core purpose of CIT is to intertwine the realms of law enforcement and mental healthcare— two fields that, until recently, have remained resolutely separate.

Decades ago, such a division made sense: A vast majority of Americans with a diagnosable mental illness lived out their lives confined inside state hospitals or other institutions. In 1955, at the peak of “institutionalization,” as the practice is now known, these facilities contained 339 beds per every 100,000 Americans. But from the late fifties through the early eighties, patients were discharged from hospitals and returned to their communities. The shift was partially intentional: Advocates of the plan believed that these individuals would live more fulfilling lives integrated into normal society. New psychiatric drugs, which were 15

emerging on the market at the same time, were thought effective enough to quiet anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and psychosis—many of the most severe syndromes that had originally forced states to institutionalize individuals. Civil commitment laws around the nation were reformed so that only the most severely mentally ill—those who posed an immediate threat to themselves or to others—could be hospitalized against their will.

At the same time, state budgets were shrinking, and state hospitals were a prime target for cuts. By the turn of the century, the number of beds per 100,000 people had fallen to twenty.

Dwindling funds, moreover, meant that states were not financially equipped to build the comprehensive, community-based mental healthcare systems necessary to care for people who had been discharged from hospitals.

Connecticut has one of the nation’s most well-funded and well-managed mental healthcare systems. Even so, says Madelon Baranoski, an as-

6% 6% of Americans have a serious mental illness

21% 21% of inmates in local jails have a recent history of mental illness

24% 24% of inmates in state jails have a recent history of mental illness (National Institute of Mental Illness)

16

sociate professor of Law and Psychiatry at Yale’s School of Medicine who teaches a module of CABLE’s CIT training course, not enough services have sprung up to provide the care once offered in hospitals. Consequently, many people with severe mental illness are left to their own devices, encountering mental health professionals only in times of crisis. Public health officials liken this neglect to only treating a patient with heart disease once he has suffered a heart attack—ignoring a serious problem until it becomes a crisis.

Nearly every day, police departments across Connecticut receive phone calls from families where one member with mental illness is in crisis; the callers fear either for the ill family member’s safety or for their own. In addition, in the state’s urban centers—cities like Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven—many homeless residents suffer from mental illness, wandering the city streets talking to themselves, disconnected from any available mental health resources. New Haven, in particular, has an especially large population of people with mental illness, largely because of its Yale-affiliated hospitals and its abundance of group-living homes.

Sgt. Chris McKee, an officer with the Windsor Police Department who has taught CIT courses for four years, says that, in general, police are not adequately taught to recognize signs of mental illness. “It’s our job to get a scene safe,” he says. “But we can’t run into a house with a bipolar person and put our hands on their shoulders and force them to sit down. They are going to pace. They are going to get up and fidget and feel anxious.

When the police tell them to do something, they don’t always listen.” In cases like these, McKee says, officers may arrest—or even shoot—the individual because they do not recognize his or her uncooperative behavior as a manifestation of mental illness.

CIT training attempts to prevent these situations by teaching police officers to recognize symptoms of mental illness and to use techniques that will calm people in crisis. What you need, Pepe says, is sensitivity: sensitivity in what tone you take, sensitivity in which words you choose, sensitivity in your physical interactions. Such an THE NEW JOURNAL

approach, proponents of CIT hope, reduces the risk of injury to both police officers and individuals with mental illness, diverting those individuals to mental health treatment instead of jail.

“Police have learned that the command presence that they use—usually with the bad guy or the robber—that command presence, yelling, being really forceful, doesn’t work with people with mental illness,” says Louise Pyers, the founder and executive director of CABLE. “It makes it worse.

So if they can identify, ‘Here is someone who clearly has a mental illness,’ they can come in a lot slower, be a lot less threatening, speak softly, ask questions in a non-threatening way.”

Pepe, a burly, dark-haired teddy bear of a man, is the perfect guy for the job. He can be gruff when a situation warrants it, but, for the most part, he is soft-spoken and jovial. As we drive in his cruiser, he listens to pop music and chats about his two kids. His speech, tinged with a mild Boston accent, is frequently punctuated with short, loud belly laughs. When we pass by other officers, he rolls down his window and shouts their nicknames. Though he wears a gun on his hip, and he has warned me that violence could come around any corner, I feel strangely safe sitting by his side. Perhaps it’s the unending banter. “I like talking to people,” he tells me over the whirs and beeps from the cruiser’s radio. “I have no problem talking to pretty much anyone.” (That’s good, because I’ve been in his passenger seat for close to seven hours.)

Pepe tells me that his CIT training, which he completed two years ago, has primarily taught him to slow down and use conversation as a way of making others feel comfortable. “You get sent to a call like, ‘guy standing in the middle of the street yellin’ and screamin’,’ you have no idea—you don’t want to put yourself in a situation to have that yelling and screaming become a fight between you and him.”

“That’s where I think some of the CIT stuff comes out,” he continues. “‘What’s going on, how are ya’, what’s your name, where do you live?’

You’re not gonna yell and scream at him, ‘Get out of the road! I’m gonna lock ya up!’” The latter kind of interaction, he says, can even act as a trigger for mental health crises.

Once Pepe has won someone over, it’s easier to AUGUST 2014

WHEN AN OFFICER ROUGHHANDLES SOMEONE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS, HIS ACTIONS CAN EXACERBATE THE SITUATION. convince him or her to go to the hospital without putting up a fight. After talking for long enough, some people even choose to go voluntarily. In cases where Pepe has been called to mediate, but decides that hospitalization is not necessary, he can pass the individual’s name along to New Haven’s CIT clinician, based at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. She can then follow up to connect the individual with mental health services.

Proponents of the CIT model emphasize that it expands a police officer’s range of options. Pepe says that, in some situations, he doesn’t have much choice. When he is called to a situation involving domestic violence, for example, Connecticut law requires him to make an arrest. But CIT teaches officers, in the words of Amy Watson, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Jane Addams College of Social Work, “not to arrest for stupid stuff ”—charges like “disorderly conduct,” when a person’s symptoms cause them to behave in disruptive, but not necessarily criminal, ways.

That doesn’t let people with mental illness off the hook for all crimes. “Certainly,” Watson tells me, “if you have a mental illness, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be arrested if you steal something. But if your voices are telling you to steal something, maybe arrest isn’t the most productive avenue.”

In 1988, police in Memphis, Tennessee shot a 27-year-old man named Joseph Dewayne Robinson. Robinson was in the midst of a mental health crisis at the time, cutting himself with a knife and threatening suicide. The officers repeatedly ordered him to drop the knife, but he only grew more agitated, moving toward the officers. They shot him eight times.

A public outcry surrounding Robinson’s death 17

led the Memphis Police Department and researchers at the University of Memphis to collaborate on a program that would teach officers how to interact more humanely with the mentally ill. Before CIT, patrol officers used to ask separate mental health experts to join them on calls requiring psychiatric training. But each police department’s fleet of mental health professionals was small—if they could afford one at all.

“IF YOUR VOICES ARE TELLING YOU TO STEAL SOMETHING, MAYBE ARREST ISN’T THE MOST PRODUCTIVE AVENUE.” CIT helps rank-and-file members to add these skills to their repertoire. (At least 2,600 local departments currently have CIT-trained officers on the ground, according to the University of Memphis’s estimate.) In New Haven, elements of the CIT model have been incorporated into the initial training that all patrol officers receive, and the department is attempting to send as many officers as it can afford to CABLE’s training courses. “I think it’s just an extra tool you use when you’re on the street,” Pepe says. “I think it’s for everyone.”

The numbers prove that Pepe’s success in the scene I witnessed wasn’t just an anomaly. In 2002, Dr. Randy Dupont, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Memphis, oversaw a project that tracked 1,200 individuals with serious mental illnesses who engaged with law enforcement officials during that year, to gauge CIT’s effectiveness in Memphis.

Six hundred had interacted with CIT-trained officers, while another six hundred had encountered untrained officers. Dupont and his colleagues only tracked individuals who were directly connected to community services and individuals who were sent to jail but soon diverted back into community services, so as Dupont puts it, “their paths converged very quickly.” Not only did the researchers find that CIT-trained officers were much less likely to send mentally ill individuals to jail than their untrained counterparts, they also found that mentally ill individuals who had briefly been ex18

posed to the jail environment were less likely to see an improvement in their psychiatric symptoms three months later, less likely to remain in treatment, and more likely to be rearrested. Dupont’s research, along with scores of other studies coming out of Memphis, encouraged other cities and states to consider the CIT model.

Just as the death of Joseph Dewayne Robinson spurred unprecedented collaboration between the police department and the mental health system in Memphis, an unexpected run-in with law enforcement was the catalyst that led Pyers to bring the Memphis model to Connecticut. In 1997, her son Seth, whose name has been changed in this story, was a 19-year-old engineering student at a university in New Jersey. Soon after entering college, Seth was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and prescribed anti-depressants. Every month, he would drive up to his hometown in central Connecticut for a routine visit with his psychiatrist. One morning that spring, Pyers was awoken early by a phone call. An officer from the local police department informed her that Seth had been shot in the stomach by an officer in the middle of the night.

Pyers was confused: Her son had come home for a doctor’s appointment just several weeks prior, and he was not due back home for several more. Seth was no longer a minor, so his psychiatrist could not have informed Pyers that her son had recently taken an emotional nosedive. Seth had attempted to take his own life by swallowing an entire bottle of over-the-counter painkillers. When that effort failed—“All it did was make him sick,” Pyers recalls—he began thinking about other, more fail-proof methods.

The evening before Pyers received the phone call, Seth had decided his surest option would be to use a gun. But he did not own one, and neither, he knew, did his parents. Then it occurred to him: Police carry guns.

So that night, he clambered into his car, sped to Connecticut, and led several police officers on a car chase. In an effort to end the encounter quickly, he rear-ended one of the cop cars. The officer Seth had rammed got out of his car, and Seth ran toward him shouting, “You better shoot me, or I’ll THE NEW JOURNAL

kill you!”

Pyers still remembers her son’s remorse upon waking from emergency surgery hours later. “He remembered looking into the officer’s face and said, ‘I brought this man into my nightmare, and I shouldn’t have done that.’”

Pyers, who had already been working in the mental health field, soon realized that her son required a case manager to oversee his treatment, so she quit her job to take care of him full-time. She could not help but wonder: How many others had come before her son, using police officers as the instrument in their own suicides?

She began researching the issue, and in August of 2001, she published her findings in the FBI National Academy magazine. One in four officer shootings, she concluded, are purposefully provoked by the victim—a phenomenon known as “suicide by cop.”

Pyers initially founded CABLE as a research and education non-profit to support further study on suicide by cop. But soon after she published her initial findings, she got a call from Captain

Ken Edwards of the New London Police Department. “I saw your information on suicide by cop,” she recalls him saying. “He said, ‘We’re doing a program here called crisis intervention training.

Do you want to see it in action?’” Pyers had heard about the CIT program in Memphis, and Edwards told her that his department had gone to Tennessee to learn how the program worked.

When she went to New London to attend a CIT training session, she realized for the first time that the scope of perilous interactions between law enforcement and people with mental illness extended far beyond suicide by cop. But she also remembers feeling surprised by the passion of the officers at the training, all of whom had volunteered to learn more about mental illness.

It was the conversations with these officers, she says, that helped her understand the full scope of the problem.

After the training, she approached Edwards and asked him if he would help her implement the program statewide. In 2004, CABLE, with Edwards’ help, won a grant from the Connecti-

28% In one study, 28% of people with serious mental illness were arrested in a 10year period. The majority of these arrests were for non-violent charges like crimes against the public order or property offenses.

Many experienced repeat arrests.

(National Institute of Mental Illness)

AUGUST 2014

19

cut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) that would enable Pyers to do just that. Now, the state pays CABLE about $65,000 per year to run five weeklong CIT trainings. It also offers each police department a $1,500 stipend per officer it sends to be trained. DMHAS issues about $20,000 in training stipends per year, according to Loel Meckel, the assistant director of DMHAS’s Division of Forensic Services.

The training, which spans five eight-hour days, includes educational lectures on different types of mental illness, role-plays to practice de-escalation skills, and a simulation of what it might feel like to hallucinate. For a more personal perspective, Pyers also invites the officer involved in her son’s incident to speak to the training attendees; he tells his story, and her son tells his own in a prerecorded video.

Baranoski, the Yale professor of psychiatry, teaches what she calls “Mental Health 101” on the first day of each training. She opens the module with basic science: She introduces officers to several broad classes of mental illness and their asso-

ciated symptoms. She explains how brain chemistry causes disturbances in thought. But, she always tells the officers, it is much more important for them to understand how to handle an individual in crisis than to recognize the specific illness plaguing him or her.

“The diagnosis doesn’t matter,” she explains.

“What matters is the state that the person is in when the police gets involved. They’re overwhelmed. Their usual behavior and their usual coping methods are not working. So how do you manage that? How do you get people to the right level of treatment?”

During the eight-hour evening shift on which I accompany Pepe, he receives no “Signal 90” calls—NHPD code for a situation involving a psychiatric crisis. (The call involving the two women is technically classified as a “Signal 98,” a drugrelated situation.) But Pepe tells me that this is rare. It is not uncommon for an officer to take one or two Signal 90’s per shift. And even situations that are not technically psychiatric crises—drugrelated crises, for example—allow him to use some

One year of incarceration for a prisoner (in both federal and state prisons) is $22,600

Assertive community treatment, which provides comprehensive services to people with serious mental illnesses, costs around $10,000 per person, per year.

(National Institute of Mental Illness)

$22,600 $10,000

20

THE NEW JOURNAL

of the skills that he learned in CIT training.

Each situation requires its own set of strategies, he says, but at the core of his approach is an attempt to understand what sort of help the mentally ill person actually needs.

“They might not know what’s goin’ on. So you have to slowly try to reel them in, to get them whatever help they need,” Pepe says. “Maybe they want medication. Maybe, at the end of the day, maybe the only reason they called you is because they’re just unsatisfied with where they live. They wanna go somewhere else, but they don’t know what to do.”

Pepe drives me past the Park Street Inn, one of the group-living homes he is sometimes called to.

A converted brownstone walk-up that dates back to the early 1900s, the three-story home currently houses 15 residents with a range of mental health conditions and substance abuse issues. Most often when Pepe comes here, he has been summoned by one of the residents. Their complaints, he explains, are often things like “This person is talking to me mean” or “This person put his hands on me.” Though two on-duty staff members manage the home at all times, the residents are granted a large measure of independence, and often they are the ones making the 911 calls. Still, Pepe says, he is not sure why they turn to the police.

“Maybe we’re just a different avenue,” he speculates. “They know, maybe we’ll just get them to the hospital a little quicker. I don’t know what they know. I think they just know 911.”

A few days after accompanying Pepe on his shift, I go back to visit the Park Street Inn. The house is managed by a team of social workers, but they work mainly in offices at the front of the home, on the first floor. Residents mill about the rest of the cramped space, wandering down to the kitchen, or gathering to watch television on a large flat-screen in the home’s cozy dining room.

Though the residents appear amicable when I visit, Dan Collins, one of the Park Street Inn’s program directors, tells me they occasionally clash or make “very poor decisions.” When one resident threatens the safety or well-being of another resident or staff member, he says, “Yeah, they’ll see an officer in blue.”

But in the thirty or so years he has worked in such environments, Collins says, he has never seen AUGUST 2014

officers interact with people who have emotional difficulties as well as Pepe and his colleagues do.

“Law enforcement’s understanding and skills at engaging our program members has just been getting better with each passing year,” he says.

He rattles off the names of several officers, Mike Pepe’s among them, who have been particularly effective. “They are more at ease. And they’re more comfortable and skilled at making a connection with the person.”

For example, he says, an officer might try to move a conversation into a more comfortable space. We are standing in the foyer of the home, a tiny round room with doors and hallways shooting off in every direction and a large fish tank at its center. He gestures around us. “You don’t want an explosive situation happening in this confined area,” he tells me. We walk down one of the hallways to the dining room, which has two red highbacked wing chairs in one corner. “So the officer might say, ‘Hey, would you be comfortable going to sit in the dining room?’” With that simple change, a CIT officer could solve a problem another officer might not even have noticed. “‘You smell like shit.’ ‘You stepped in dog shit.’

‘You smell like poop.’ ‘You stepped in poop.’”

Pepe remembers the relentless voices well. He was trying to make a purchase and count out exact change. But his headset was playing a looping recording of three or four voices, speaking at different volumes, sometimes overlapping one another.

It was, he said, the part of his CIT training that most affected him. The exercise gives officers a sense of what someone on the street might be experiencing when they say, “The voices told me to do this.” Each officer heard a different set of voices, echoing a different set of insults. By the end of the exercise, none of them held the correct amount of money. “You are literally like looking at your shoe, like, ‘What, are you serious?’” he recalls. “You literally just got so confused with all the different things that were goin’ on.”

The experience “doesn’t make a social worker out of them by any means,” Pyers says. “But it really gives them insight. We teach them to recognize symptoms and say, ‘Oh, okay, this person is obviously hearing things that I’m not hearing 21

right now, and that’s why they’re not responding.’”

CIT training has taught Pepe to be on the lookout for these symptoms in people on the street—not just in the people he encounters during calls. He says that as he drives, his head is always “on a swivel.” Many symptoms, he adds, are very easy to pick up. Patterns emerge: If someone is about to do something violent, he or she will often grind his or her teeth or tense his or her hands into fists. If someone is about to take off running, he or she will often first pull his or her pants higher on the waist. If someone is using drugs, he or she might be yelling in the street or sitting on a curb looking dazed.

But, Pepe emphasizes, he can quickly gain a much better understanding of what exactly is troubling someone just by chatting with them. “A majority of people are willing to talk. You just have to find that area that lets them open up.”

The research conducted on CIT training so far has proven promising but inconclusive. The 2002 Memphis study results were an early indication of the program’s potential, and the most recent studies suggest that CIT-trained officers arrest fewer people with mental illness and connect more with the mental health services they need. But existing data have not necessarily borne out the claim that CIT-trained officers use less force than their nontrained counterparts. Researchers have also not been able to determine whether a change in officers’ attitudes about mental illness significantly impacts their choices on the job.

“We have a reasonable level of confidence that [CIT training] can improve safety in encounters and probably increase the number of people that officers connect to services,” Watson, the University of Illinois professor, tells me. But, she cautions that these effects are only moderate. “A lot of officers who aren’t CIT-trained [already] do a fairly decent job—they learn what works.”

Pyers says that these findings mirror what she has observed in Connecticut so far. Officers are often required to arrest individuals with mental illness, especially if their crimes do not result directly from their symptoms. But, in the past decade, many others have been transported to the hospital for evaluations or connected to existing 22

services instead of being charged for a crime their illness led them to commit. And, whereas officers may have arrested a person with mental illness on a petty crime like breach of peace before the CIT model was implemented, they are now more likely to understand that such an individual would be better off in treatment than in jail.

Meckel, the state official who oversees the DMHAS grants that fund CABLE’s CIT training courses, says that the state cannot truly measure the CIT model’s success because it lacks sufficient data to do so. “The police are not in the business of doing these cost-benefit analyses,” Meckel tells me. “We can think of a lot of numbers that would be useful to have, but it’s not what the police usually collect.” It might be helpful to know, for example, the number of people diverted from the criminal justice system and instead connected with mental health services. But even if the police were able to track the number of people diverted into public programs, they would not be able to track those who have private insurance and seek help through their own providers.

“IT’S A SAD COMMENTARY ON THE STATE OF MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES. THE POLICE ARE STEPPING UP TO DO IT, BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE WILL.” “The difficulty of all of this work is that you can’t say you prevented something,” Baranoski says. “You can collect data over time and say, ‘O.K., maybe we’ve made fewer arrests.’” But a lot of factors can influence that statistic.

Still, by Meckel’s estimation, funding CABLE’s CIT training program turns out to be costeffective for the state. Assuming that CIT-trained officers prevent even a handful of individuals with mental illness from entering the criminal justice system, he says, the state is likely to save money.

Even when the state pays for community-based services including psychiatrists, psychologists, case managers, rental subsidies, and hospitalizations, these costs add up to a fraction of the yearly THE NEW JOURNAL

cost of sending a person with severe mental illness to prison. For example, according to a 2008 study conducted by the Connecticut Office of Legislative Research, the cost per individual at the Garner Correctional Institution, a state prison in Newtown that housed mainly inmates with mental illness at the time of the study, was $85,000 per year. By contrast, the average cost of incarceration across the state stood at $40,000. And when an individual successfully reintegrates into his or her community, it also becomes more possible for that individual to find work, require less financial support, and contribute to the economy.

Cost effectiveness aside, Meckel believes the CIT model offers Connecticut other, intangible benefits. It has, in his judgment, helped people with mental illness come to trust the police. “We want people with serious mental illnesses—who are much more likely to be the victim than the perpetrator of a crime—we want them to feel comfortable going to the police,” Meckel says.

“The more positive interactions they have with police officers, the more likely that is to happen.”

Watson takes a much more pessimistic view.

No one, she says, says it’s a terrible idea to train officers in the principles of CIT. But, she adds, the fact that police must take on such a burden speaks to just how inadequate the American mental healthcare system has become.

“It’s a sad commentary on the state of mental health services. The police are stepping up to do it, because no one else will.”

Near the end of my ride with Officer Pepe, I ask him if he thinks CIT is effective. He remains silent for an uncharacteristically long time, contemplating his answer. Finally, he responds, “You know, I think about it all the time. I sent this guy to the hospital two weeks ago. Did it help? What’d it do? We don’t really know those things, you know? I mean, we kind of are just the first step.”

Michelle Hackman is a senior in Berkeley College.

PHOTO BY JENNIFER LU

AUGUST 2014

23

Playing the Cards Right 24

Can an ID card help members of a vulnerable population feel at home in the Elm City?

by Maya Averbuch photos by Jennifer Lu

THE NEW JOURNAL

I

n the early morning of June 6, 2007, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials swooped into New Haven, handcuffs at the ready, searching the city for undocumented residents. By the end of the raid, they had taken thirty-two people off the streets of Fair Haven or from inside their own homes.

Families gathered in a local church to record the names of the missing.

The arrests shook the community and even prompted a response from the mayor at the time.

“Children have been traumatized; civil rights have been trampled; U.S. citizens and legal residents have been stopped and questioned without cause; and families have been ripped apart. America is better than this,” Mayor John DeStefano wrote in a letter on June 11, 2007, to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.

The appearance of dark-jacketed ICE agents was a startling setback for grassroots groups, whose advocacy on behalf of the city’s 10,000 to 15,000 residents without valid U.S. documents had been gaining momentum after years of work.

The arrests came just two days after New Haven’s Board of Alders voted to create the nation’s first municipal ID card. The Elm City Resident Card, as it was called, serves as photo identification for residents regardless of their immigration status.

The card was created with a few specific goals in mind. Undocumented immigrants, unable to open bank accounts, often carried or stashed large amounts of cash, making them prime targets for robberies. The card would allow them to presAUGUST 2014

ent identification at banks, open accounts, and store their funds safely. They would also be able to check out books from the city’s public libraries and enter public parks and beaches. And, since the government itself would issue the card, officials hoped that cardholders would feel comfortable approaching local police to report crimes.

“The Elm City card was a shot heard around the country for many of us trying to resolve these problems for low-income and immigrant groups,” says Dr. Paule Cruz Takash, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. New Haven, with a current population of about 130,000, was the first major city to offer a municipal ID card, and several other cities have since followed in its footsteps. San Francisco started its own program in 2009, and, as of July of this year, more than 21,000 people had obtained cards. With Takash’s help, Oakland, California, developed an ID that doubles as a debit card. Nearly 5,000 people have received the cards since February 2013. Los Angeles and New York City are also in the process of preparing their own versions of the project, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation 25

for IDs this summer, with plans for the city to roll But many current students have never heard of out the card by January 2015. the card. With limited use across the city, there The idea for a municipal ID wasn’t exactly is a renewed concern that the card will become a born in New Haven. Years before the Elm City sort of scarlet letter for the undocumented.

ID’s arrival, similar identification systems already It also turns out that some just won’t buy into existed in other parts of the country, according the city’s dream. Major banks do not accept the to “A City to Model,” a 2005 proposal crafted by card, so the problem of “unbanked” residents rethe community groups JUNTA for Progressive mains unsolved. When customers try to pay for Action and Unidad Latina en Acción, with the purchases with a check or credit card, businesses help of Yale Law School students. Florissant, Mis- sometimes refuse to accept the card as a valid form souri, a town of about 52,000 people, offered a of identification. The ID was never reformatted resident card to anyone who could provide photo to work with the city’s current electronic parking ID and a utility bill. The card provided access to meters, and the original proposal to make it a lowcommunity centers and local recreation facili- value debit card never took off. ties. Aventura, Florida, a town of about 37,000 Yet, as far as former Mayor John DeStefano people, issued cards for access to parks and city- is concerned, the federal government is the one sponsored programs to anyone who could provide making the mistakes. When I met him for coffee proof of residence. on an April morning, he calls its The Elm City Resident Card immigration policy “fundamendid not have revolutionary amtally broken and incoherent.”

WHILE NEW HAVbitions, according to Michael Dressed in a white shirt and a EN STILL RECEIVES Wishnie, who runs the Workgrey suit appropriate for his job CREDIT FOR BEers and Immigrants Advocacy as Executive Vice President of Clinic (WIRAC) at the Yale Law Start Community Bank—one ING THE CITY School. But the New Haven proof the few that fully accepts THAT LED THE posal went beyond recreation. It the Elm City Resident Card— asked local police and businesses DeStefano tells me that his aim WAY IN THE ID to accept the card as a form of was always to create “an open DEBATE, ITS PROidentification. And it had anothand welcoming community.” er important goal: It would allow His smiling face appeared on GRAM IS GETTING people to open bank accounts. the first sample ID, dated May LESS ATTENTION. This innovation made it the first 7, 2007, below the banner: “New municipal ID in the country with Haven: It All Happens Here.” implications for residents’ ecoIn his view, New Haven took nomic livelihoods and legal concerns. Suddenly, a bold stand against the federal giant. ComplicatNew Haven was making the national news. ing the matter, the government did not act with a While New Haven still receives credit for be- single voice; even when the Attorney General and ing the city that led the way in the ID debate, its other federal agencies approved plans for the card, program is getting less attention these days, and the Department of Homeland Security remained the number of sign-ups has dwindled. To date, wary. Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Secuover 12,300 people have signed up for the card, rity, told the Yale Daily News in April 2008, a year but nearly half did so in its first year. Decreased after the card’s aldermanic approval: “I don’t think press coverage and the disappearance of mobile that having identifications to enable people to live sign-up units may have contributed to the slump illegally is a good thing…It’s inconsistent with the in numbers. In 2013, there were only 1,234 cards law as we have it.” issued. About 550 Yale students signed up as part When I contacted DHS to ask about the curof a “New Haven Solidarity Week” in the fall of rent policy toward municipal IDs, the e-mailed an2007, demonstrating that the card was meant for swer dodges the question. “Secure driver’s licenses all residents, not just undocumented individuals. and identification documents are a vital compo26

THE NEW JOURNAL

nent of our national security framework,” reads the brief I received on the REAL ID Act, which Congress passed in 2005 in response to the 9/11 Commission to set standards for state identifications. However, the Elm City Resident Card was never meant to address the act’s goals: to regulate access to federal facilities, nuclear power plants, and commercial aircrafts. The response suggests that DHS disapproves of the numerous rogue states—not including Connecticut—that fail to follow these national standards, but the department may have bigger problems than one small city’s outdated project.

The office is quieter than it was in July 2007, when people lined up out the door to get the first Elm City Resident Cards; now, a few people wander in ahead of me to the wooden counters where staff wait, though none head over to the photo corner. According to office director Lisa Wilson, there is no accurate record of the number of cards issued each year since 2007, because the office’s software can’t crunch the numbers that far back.

Though she provided me with a total from the past year, she insists that she is unable to track the annual changes in registration numbers. Still, the department’s website and the downloadable application form suggest a certain sleepiness in the office; they lack, for example, consistent inforThe Office of Vital Statistics, where the mation about the hours during which an applicant municipal ID cards are issued, is on the ground can obtain the card, as though there is nobody enfloor of City Hall. A plain sign above the door suring they are updated. matches the bland interior, The lines are generally short, spruced up with a couple stock and for those who do come in, LIVING IN THE photographs of New Haven. getting the card is easy. The staff People line up, waiting for help does not ask for any information SHADOWS, PEOPLE from clerks. Blue signs located beyond residents’ full name, date COULDN’T HELP above the counters dictate genof birth, and address, in addition eral rules—“Expired Licenses & to the required documents. AcBUT FEEL THAT ID’s NOT Accepted.”—in large cording to Wilson, employees THEY DIDN’T white letters. do not compile information Applications for birth cerabout residents’ demographics, QUITE BELONG IN tificates, marriage licenses, and immigration status, or area of THE COMMUNITY. death certificates are available residence within New Haven. at the center of the room, as In essence, they operate with a though one can sort through “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but all of life’s milestones with a series of forms. For without any fanfare. However, the online applicathose interested in an Elm City card, a yellow pa- tion, which is more detailed than the single page per to the left states that a card can be obtained I get at the office, hints at the threat that follows with a valid photo ID and two pieces of mail. A some applicants: “Would you like the City of New tripod points outward, ready to take quick snaps Haven to keep confidential your name and resiof applicants. The cards, which are valid for three dential address as listed in this application to the years, can be issued on the spot, Monday through extent permitted by law?” Applicants check a box: Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Passports, birth cer- “Yes/Si” or “No.” Employees do not keep copies tificates, drivers’ licenses, national identification of the identifying documents, such as passports or cards, consular IDs, voter registration cards, and consular IDs, or proof of residence, such as utilvisas can be presented as proof of identity. Appli- ity bills or employment pay stubs. They collect ten cants must also provide proof of residence: insur- dollars from each adult applicant and five dollars ance and utility bills, bank statements, employ- from each child. Then they move on and assist the ment pay stubs, property tax statements, school next person in line. enrollment forms, voter registration cards, or Neither the city nor the police nor commuforms from a New Haven health or social services nity groups collect information on which ID card organization will work. holders lack federal U.S. documents. If those who AUGUST 2014

27

continue to sign up are indeed the immigrants who stand to benefit most from it, the card may have achieved some of its goals. Martha Okafur, who started as Community Services Administrator in June, said her department is in the process of assessing what still needs to be done to help the unbanked, and plans to discuss with banks their reluctance to accept the card.

But without the data, the only way to find out what’s really going on is to speak to members of the community.

Ten years ago, chances are that I would have been mugged on my bike ride to Fair Haven, says neighborhood resident Ruben Mallma, an organizer for the immigrant rights group Familias en Camino. Crime rates in the area were higher back then, and he credits the ID for contributing to a sense of safety in his neighborhood.

Fair Haven, the city’s immigrant hub and home to thousands, is the place to watch when following New Haven’s progress on immigration issues. It is difficult to obtain accurate figures, since undocumented individuals may be wary of officials who are collecting population statistics. But according to “A City to Model,” approximately 3,000 to 5,000 people in Fair Haven are undocumented. About half of the neighborhood’s population is Latino, with people from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and surrounding countries.

Mallma’s stories illustrate the difficult realities and daily problems that the ID card at28

tempted to address: Residents without bank accounts were often robbed, and were too fearful of the police to report the crimes. He knew of eight people living in a three-bedroom apartment in Fair Haven whose three-bedroom apartment was burglarized ten years ago but they did not tell police. Another man got off a public bus with the money from four paychecks in his pocket. He was chased by a thief until Mallma pulled him

cades ago, many of the people Mallma knew carried fake documents. Some had papers from people who were deceased in other states. Others used their IRS tax identification numbers instead of Social Security numbers. Living in the shadows, people couldn’t help but feel that they didn’t quite belong in the community.

“When the police knock on your door, or when the police stop you for driving your

HANH NGUYEN

into his house. Since police were often not alerted about these crimes, they could not keep accurate statistics. But newspapers reported that the undocumented were called “walking ATMs,” and people kept track of the situation through stories passed from one neighbor to the other.

Many of the city’s undocumented have little hope of obtaining citizenship, unless they are able to marry a U.S. citizen or find an employer to sponsor them. So they find ways to conceal their status. Two de-

car without a driver’s license, or when you try to buy something by credit and you are denied, you think, ‘What am I doing over here?’ You, as a person, you are nothing,” Mallma says.

David Hartman, the media liaison for the New Haven Police Department, states that when the Elm City Resident ID Card was first implemented, the number of burglaries and robberies reported in Fair Haven increased—and the police actually found that encouraging. The change suggested that people were more willing to reTHE NEW JOURNAL

port crimes. Overall crime rates dropped across the city in following years, and Hartman says that the ID card was part of the change. With more people turning to the police, “those people that were perpetrating these crimes realized that their descriptions were going to be out there,” making it more likely that they would be apprehended. Indeed, crime reports for the county show that the robbery rate dropped steadily after 2007, while the burglary and larceny rates jumped by several hundred in 2008 and then returned to lower levels. However, it is all but impossible to determine if the Elm City card was the primary cause of these changes.

At a small meeting of Unidad Latina members in April, I seat myself next to John Jairo Lugo, the bearded organizer whose name often appears in news articles about the latest immigrants’ rights protests. Unidad Latina, founded in 2003, is the new kid on the block, as far as Latino rights organizations go; its collaborator, JUNTA, which also works on issues affecting the Latino population, has been around since 1969. But there are still over twenty people gathered in the long, woodfloored room in the New Haven People’s Center on Howe Street.

There is an old A.B. Chase piano in the corner, next to the whiteboard where Lugo stands with a dry-erase marker in hand, poised for discussion. The walls are adorned with a black-andwhite image of Rosa Parks, a poster commemorating “AmerAUGUST 2014

ica’s Labor Heritage,” a painting by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and a collection of children’s drawings on colored construction paper with messages addressed to “Dear Mayor Toni Harp.”

Knowing that I came to hear people’s stories, Lugo turns to one of the other early arrivals and says, in Spanish, “Marco, you have the ID card, right?”

When the skinny man next to me assents, Lugo grins: “Your first victim,” he says to me, before turning back to the man.

“Only if you want to [talk], of course.”

“People want the card,” Marco Rodriguez tells me in Spanish. “It’s good.” Not great, not life-changing. But he did use it to open several bank accounts.

However, many people, he tells me, cannot apply for the card, because they do not receive utility bills in their name. That makes providing proof of residence difficult.

Lugo points to a couple other people as they walk in, repeating his question, and each man pulls out his card from his wallet and extends it toward me, so I can see. I know what the cards look like from photos, so I am not sure what more I am supposed to find printed on the white surfaces. It is simply a moment of proof, of providing the identification that was asked for.

The meeting’s agenda includes the dispute over underpaid, undocumented workers at Gourmet Heaven and the cases of several residents who were arrested by ICE. As Lugo attempts to rally people for a protest in the following weeks, he

tries to convince a woman in the back that one does not need to be documented to participate.

But after her own experience being detained, she is afraid to take such a risk: “I haven’t gotten over the trauma,” she says.

Looking back at the 2007 raids, New Haven’s most public round of deportation, it is clear that ICE cannot round up the undocumented without proper warrants for arrest. But it can entangle people in years of legal battles, with the threat of extradition constantly hanging over their heads. Of the twenty immigrants represented by the Yale Law School’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization after the raid, all were released except two, and the rest decided to either voluntarily leave the U.S. or to seek outside counsel, according to Wishnie. When eleven were awarded compensation of $350,000 in 2012, the Yale Law School reported that it was the “largest monetary settlement ever paid by the United States in a suit over residential immigration raids, and the first to include both compensation and immigration relief.” However, not everyone is so lucky, and no amount of money can take away the anxiety that the woman at the meeting—and thousands like her—live with daily.

This fear lies at the core of the Elm City ID’s struggles.

Even when official policies change, people’s attitudes might not. The ID card arrived soon after another victory for immigrant groups; in 2006, the local police department ruled that officers cannot ask about witnesses’ or victims’ immigration 29

status. This measure was intended to encourage undocumented residents to report crime; previously, if they gave their name to the police, they ran the risk of being matched to ICE’s national database. New Haven police followed officials in several other cities in declaring that their role was not to enforce federal law, but to keep the city safe. Last year, Connecticut as a whole took another step toward curtailing ICE’s powers by becoming the second state to sign the TRUST Act, promising not to detain immigrants unless they are convicted of serious crimes.

Still, a 2012 report by JUNTA and the Transnational Development Clinic at the Yale Law School stated that there is still “widespread suspicion” among Fair Haven residents about the resident ID card. Rumors persist, the report noted, that the card is solely for people who did not have papers or that federal officials will use it to detain undocumented workers. Okafor, the Community Services Administrator, says that until her staff starts meeting with focus groups and conducting interviews in September, they cannot know the community’s current attitudes toward the card.

Anecdotes are, for now, the only evidence.

The card hopes to make residents feel safer in their community, but after past run-ins with the local police, some residents remain wary. After the meeting, Abel Sanchez, who has lived in New Haven for fourteen years, tells me that a policeman stopped him three years ago while driving—“I knew it was racist,” he says—and did not accept the card. It is useful as an identification document when dealing with the city’s trash collection services, he adds. But he doesn’t have much more to say about it, and he knows of only a few friends who have one.

Domingo Lopez, who has lived in New Haven for twenty-two years, tells me the ID is important here. He uses it at businesses and hospitals, and he has even opened a bank account. But he has also had problems with the police, even during the time he has had the card: “They see that you’re Latino, and they bad-mouth you,” he says. However, when I ask him for more details, he tells me that his last problem with a policeman was five years ago.

Latrina Kelly-James, the deputy director for Development & Programs at JUNTA, says the 30

people she works with understand that ICE and local police operate independently, and that the municipal ID has helped give residents a sense of pride in New Haven. “The card makes them feel part of the city and makes them feel civically engaged,” she says.

However, the card is ineffective beyond city limits, where they may face other threats. In 2010, after being sued by residents, the city of East Haven was found guilty of repeatedly harassing Latinos. The city paid a $450,000 settlement in June 2014, but residents are still uneasy outside New Haven.

“When you have a welcoming city and two blocks down, you have a fear of being deported, that sense of fear is always going to be there,” Kelly-James notes.

Back in the People’s Center, Lugo asks a man who was released after being detained for eight months to come speak at the front of the room.

As the man tells it, he was on his way to buy a sandwich when the police stopped him and sent him to immigration services. Lugo pulls out a mailing envelope and, with a flourish, hands the man at the front of the room his own United States Employment Authorization Card. “You can get Social Security, and a driver’s license,” Lugo tells him, and the man looks genuinely moved as he holds the card in his hand, until someone shouts from the back, “You can pay taxes, too!” Lugo takes a photo of the man holding up the card as he poses at the front of the room.

Documentation is coveted in this community.

Even though the national card is just a temporary work permit, it is prized. And it grants far more privileges than New Haven’s local ID ever will.

The Elm City ID can help holders accomplish everyday tasks, but it only works if city organizations and companies accept it. Liberty Bank and Start Community Bank, both local banks, accept the card as a primary form of identification from people who wish to open a bank account. But, despite DeStefano’s early efforts, many of the city’s largest banks do not.

TD Bank, People’s United Bank, and Webster Bank do not accept the card as identification when opening an account. Webster spokesTHE NEW JOURNAL

person Sarah Barr said the bank is limited in the types of identification it can use, because it is a national bank that requires permission from federal regulators.

An employee at Citizens Bank who asks to remain anonymous tells me that residents come in once or twice a month requesting to open an account with the municipal ID. “I wish I could take it. I get so many people who come in and that’s all they’ve got,” he says, but a manager explains that the bank’s policy is based on “governmentissued IDs”—and apparently New Haven’s does not make the cut.

Chase, Wells Fargo, and Sovereign Bank will take the card as a secondary form of ID. First Niagara spokesperson Karen Crane said the bank would also take it “on an exception basis,” when New Haven residents who are applying for banking services do not have other approved forms of identification and if the bank manager approves it. She cannot guarantee the same outcome in every case.

The murkiness of banks’ policies leads to confusion among residents and means that fewer of them end up opening accounts. According to the 2012 JUNTA report, residents in the organization’s focus groups were more likely to try to open accounts at big-name banks, which means that some may have been denied accounts simply for turning to the wrong bank. (Start Community Bank, for example, had had only 148 people open

accounts using the Elm City Resident ID as of August of this year.) Only 48 percent of people surveyed reported having a bank account, and 27 percent stated that they used no financial services, including credit cards, prepaid cards, or checkcashing. Residents who could not open bank accounts because they lacked proper identification or because they didn’t understand the identification requirements were left without a safe, reliable way to manage their money.

Beyond the banks, only some local businesses accept the card as photo documentation. In a 2012 study titled “Documenting the Undocumented,” three Yale students concluded that Latinos were more likely than whites to be carded when paying with a check. However, stores were more likely to accept Ameracard—an unofficial ID, from a company based in Stamford that can be purchased online without proof of one’s identity—than the Elm City Resident ID. The problem, the researchers reported, was largely the municipal ID’s amateurish design and unofficial-sounding name.

If New Haven wants people to renew their ID cards, it will have to convince them that the card is a useful investment of time and money. At present, people lack information about its processing, and banks’ and businesses’ unwillingness to participate makes the card ineffective.

Luis Alberto Lopez, another New Haven resident, tells me that ten members of his extended family have the card, but it hasn’t helped them

UNDER NEW HAVEN’S MUNICIPAL ID LAW, RESIDENTS CAN APPLY FOR AN ID AT THE OFFICE OF VITAL STATISTICS AT CITY HALL WITHOUT PROOF OF IMMIGRATION STATUS.

AUGUST 2014

31

much. Bank of America turned it down when he attempted to open a bank account, and Walmart and Comcast refused to accept it as photo ID when he tried to make credit-card payments several years ago. A policeman in North Branford stopped a car he was a passenger in and asked about the ID, “Where did you get this one?”

“As soon as I realized that nobody takes it, I realized that I better use my passport,” Lopez says, referring to his Mexican documentation.

Another immigrant couple Mallma introduces me to says that neither of them has the card, though they have been living in New Haven for eight years. The man tells me that the consular ID he uses marks him as a foreigner, so the Elm City ID would probably be good to have. But his wife states they did not have much information about it earlier, and now she cannot apply because her passport is expired. Their answers about the card are, in many ways, halfhearted; they alternate between lukewarm positivity and verbal shoulder-shrugging. After a prolonged conversation, the man concludes that there is no real difference between the municipal ID and the consular one: “I don’t get a better job if I have the card. It neither betters nor worsens life. It’s the same.”

The municipal ID has certainly helped some New Haven residents, but with mediocre reviews and little current publicity, current residents may not hear about the benefits in the years to 32

come. And the 2014 changeover in the city’s administration introduced a new set of officials who were not around for the extensive community discussions that led to the creation of the card.

Though Laurence Grotheer, the new mayor’s communications director, tells me that the city is still considering adding a debit function to the card, he adds that there is no real timetable for such a change. Instead, he

points to another city project, the Shop•Dine•Park gift card, released in January 2014, which can be loaded with money to serve as a debit card at parking meters or to make purchases at more than two hundred participating local businesses—as the flagship ID card never could.

At present, seemingly more legitimate forms of identification also threaten the success of the New Haven card. Starting in

2015, undocumented immigrants will be able to obtain Connecticut drivers’ licenses, though they will be marked “for driving purposes only” on the back and will have to be renewed every three years.

Emily Tucker, an attorney for immigrant rights and racial justice at the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, says that New Haven’s work still serves as a model for the rest of the country, where municipal ID’s are the focus of many people’s efforts. The center has been one of the groups instrumental in developing the legislation in New York, after conducting a comprehensive review of the nation’s municipal ID card programs. “New Haven was at the forefront, so all of the lessons learned from that campaign, we knew they were going to come up for us too,” she says. But they also took into account the card’s shortcomings.

Theoretically, a municipal ID could offer even more advantages than a DMV-issued card or a Shop•Dine•Park card. Where the city has failed—in getting an official-looking design and offering discounts to card users—cities such as San Francisco and Oakland have succeeded.

In New York City, where the undocumented population consists of about 500,000 people, some of the key concerns raised at the start of the Elm City ID program and those in other cities are being revisited on a larger scale. Questions remain about why New York City will keep copies of applicants’ documents—such as pay stubs or children’s educational records— THE NEW JOURNAL

for at least two years. The New York Civil Liberties Union refused to support the legislation because of concerns that the police department, FBI, or Department of Homeland Security could force the city to turn over the records without probable cause.

There is still a vocal group of Americans opposed to measures that are so openly supportive of immigrant groups, and these voices exacerbate the worries of the population now gingerly approaching new forms of identification. William Gheen, the president of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, states that New Haven is still a sign of the federal government’s terrible willingness to turn a blind eye to the “illegals” in the country.

When the card was first released, his group distributed bilingual pamphlets in forty states with the instructions: “Come to New Haven CT for sanctuary. Bring your friends and family members quickly.” His opinion has changed little since 2007, when anti-immigrant groups such as the Yankee Patriot Association, Southern Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Reform, and the Community Watchdog Project protested against the card.

“It sends a clear message to encourage illegal aliens to enter the United States,” he says.

DeStefano, the former mayor, is not blind to the city’s failure to build a complete support structure for the immigrant population. But he slips out of the precision of policy makers into the language of an idealist AUGUST 2014

when I ask why he still believes that the country will come to embrace its immigrants: “There is an American identity that does value freedom and does respect hard work and does value choice and does respect decency,” he says.

Even if New Haven’s municipal ID card still needs some work to be effectively integrated into the political, social, and economic life of the city, it outlined a process to help residents considered “illegal,” allowing other cities to learn from the Elm City’s successes and missteps.

Okafor, of the Community Services Administration, says expects to see Toni Harp’s tenure as mayor to bring greater collaboration with banks, as per the card’s original goals.

The summer has brought the early stages of planning, as she attempts to assess the barriers still in place for undocumented residents who have not managed to open accounts. In the meantime, many are still in economic limbo.

Idealists brought the card to New Haven, but it remains to be seen whether the idea can stay alive—and whether programs like it are the right answer for America’s undocumented. “We strive for perfection. We do not always accomplish perfection,” DeStefano adds, before he leaves for work.

IF NEW HAVEN WANTS PEOPLE TO RENEW THEIR ID CARDS, IT WILL HAVE TO CONVINCE THEM THAT THE CARD IS A USEFUL INVESTMENT OF TIME AND MONEY.

Maya Averbuch is a junior in Berkeley College.

She is the managing editor of the New Journal.

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poetry From Persephone

Watching

I know the best mornings are made of pancake batter, warm skin, loose stockings, how to count tree rings, the precise moment to bite into a persimmon— how to catch them before they splatter onto the ground.

The red in my bottom lip is proof I shouldn’t have, but I swallowed the pomegranate seed anyway.

This is what happened when a twenty-three-year-old humpback threw herself out of the water: the guide told us that breaching is inexplicable, and that she herself once tried to lob her body out of its context.

We hooted when our whale hit her white tail against the sea surface.

It makes me want to cry, a woman said.

A line of red blood ran down a man’s ankle from an old wound, recently disturbed, maybe by the ship—it sent us all into each other.

We stepped on feet, grasped strange shoulders— there weren’t enough rails to hold.

Girls in identical dresses used their hands to keep skirts from becoming inverted umbrellas: they staggered. The guide said in her ponytailed voice, whale tails are like fingerprints.

We jostled each other as the black tire back rolled into and out of our air and the intersection tail split the horizon.

Finally, there was the full whale, whose largeness was still unseen even when the body came before us.

We stretched our cameras and tried to keep out the whorls of fingers.

When I came home for the holidays, I didn’t tell my mother a tree started growing inside me without her my roots have sunken into things darker than soil deeper than earth, and I’ve started to hunger for things other than harvest.

But in postcards to her from places like empty apartments and the edges of the ocean, I write: “Doing fine. Miss you.” in the language of the dead.

I never pick the prettiest flower anymore, pluck it right out of the ground.

That is something girls do— girls who do not know how easy it is for the ground to break open, how fathers will stand by in old college sweatshirts and watch.

The difference between sinking and drowning is the acceptance of fate.

Sometimes I dip myself in the river to forget.

All the hours are violet here.

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—Ariel Katz

—Carleen Liu THE NEW JOURNAL

critical angle

Unintelligent Design

Aspiring inventors navigate an industry that makes big profits from their unrealized dreams

by John Stillman

L

ast year, I embarked on a mission at the behest of the great American inventor Greg Steiner, whose legend preceded him, as legends often do in the era of the World Wide Web. I discovered him while searching for what remained of the workbench tinkerer. Lacking fluency in the arcane languages of the high-tech tools that had come to govern my life, and armed with a degree in history, of all things, I feared being cut off by the 21st century’s blade of progress. I wanted some assurance that the tinkerer lived on.

Steiner is, after all, the creator of the famous Squeeze Breeze, a hand-held spray bottle with an attached fan that allows users to cool off by misting themselves during, say, a Little League practice. The Squeeze Breeze is the epitome of what he calls “junk inventions,” items that can be made in five hours or less. Having sold 80 million units, Steiner is king of the junk inventors. And here he was, offering his Midas touch to wannabes like myself. On Steiner’s website, an Einstein-esque caricature named Professor Thinksalot declares his noble intentions: “Sincerely Helping the First Time Inventor.”

I had read that the wellspring of Yankee ingenuity had slowed to a trickle. After Eli Whitney ’92 (that’s 1792) invented the cotton gin, Yalies all but ditched the business of simpler machines. The inventors of yore—Ben Franklin and the like, whose Eureka moments became the stuff of American folktales—were consolidated in corporate R&D departments, which discouraged the more radical, harebrained, and heroic breakthroughs of decentralized innovation. Individuals in the U.S. are granted fewer patents today than they were in the seventies, both on a per capita basis and as a percentage of overall patents issued.

AUGUST 2014

I wondered what had become of the tinkerers who comprised that shrinking sliver, and how, in this day and age, they could ride their ideas to the top. So I decided to try it myself.

Like any good junk inventor, I had an eye on life’s smallest, peskiest, and least-addressed problems. Loofahs grow moldy, dryers turn socks inside out, car seats overheat when you park in the sun. Solving these issues is hardly a priority for the human race, but if everyone aimed for the Nobel Prize, the shoelace would never have been invented.

“THE WRAPPER-COMPACTOR” JOHN STILLMAN

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Professor Thinksalot offered a list of “the most important inventions” to help me on my way: Telephone, Light Bulb, Microwave, Airplane, Printing Press, Computer, Skateboard, Pacemaker, Can Opener.

I clicked on “Inventors Club,” and entered my name and email address while membership was still free. When the site failed to process my request, I called the number for the company’s office in Downers Grove, Illinois, and was greeted by the shrill buzz of corporate extinction.

But in the days that followed, the idea came to me. ‘Eureka!’ as they say.

I encountered many naysayers on my journey from idea to product, but rejection only hardened my resolve to forge ahead. I entered in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society’s “Elevator Pitch Competition” with a shot at winning $300, but I never even got to present my idea to the judges. I also entered in the “What’s your thousand dollar idea?” competition sponsored by a student hacking group called Y-Hack, and I finished in ninth place, behind seven proposals for software applications and one for a t-shirt brand.

Forsaken by Steiner, Thinksalot, and my classmates, I sought a local support group in the Inventors’ Association of Connecticut, hoping to pick up some pearls of wisdom from industry veterans and meet other innovatively inclined Average Joes. At the IACT monthly meeting, a few dozen people a

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few dozen years older than me gathered to discuss their hopes, their fears, and—with shifty eyes and cautious words—their ideas. When their leader, Dr. Douglas Lyon, a short, sinewy man with a stringy ponytail and a Ph.D. in Computer and Systems Engineering, asked me to introduce myself to the group, I told them I was an aspiring firsttime inventor in my senior year at Yale, majoring in history.

“Oh, so you invented history?” quipped an elderly man in the group. The room erupted in laughter.

“[THESE COMPANIES] DON’T MAKE THEIR MONEY FROM THE INVENTION. THEY MAKE THEIR MONEY FROM THE INVENTOR.” “I’m reminded of an old joke,” Dr. Lyon chimed in. “You can tell a man’s profession by the way he responds to a new invention. The engineer asks, ‘How does it work?’ The accountant asks, ‘How much does it cost?’

The history major asks, ‘You want fries with that?’”

Again, the crowd went wild.

Tail between my legs, I returned to the Internet to seek other help. A cursory Google search returned a handful of companies advertising their

ability to turn inventors’ ideas into high-grossing products— dream factories, I thought. I completed the forms provided and submitted my idea. Before long, my phone was ringing off the hook with calls from representatives all over the country, eager to lend me their wisdom.

Needless to say, I was flattered.

When I walked into his office in Braintree, Massachusetts, Carl Cook, a New Product Recruiter for Invents Company, LLC, asked me to sign a form acknowledging that the odds were not in my favor.

“Ninety-one thousand people have sat in your shoes,” Cook said, and that was just last year. Of those hopeful inventors, a mere 381 made it to the next stage, in which the company’s researchers, engineers, and marketers get involved. From that point, just eleven inventions made a profit for their inventors.

We met in a three-room suite across the hall from American Laser Skincare (whose door promises “Beauty Through Technology”) in Braintree Executive Park. The reception area bookshelf was decorated with “As Seen On TV” inventions: the Booty Slide, the Lint Lizard, Silly Slippeez, the Sift & Toss. Cook’s sole colleague at Invents Company’s so-called Boston office was Bruce, a portly, avuncular man roughly one decade Cook’s elder. Both employees wore black-gray paisley-patterned ties and had ruddy complexions.

THE NEW JOURNAL

Cook explained the company’s services: a patent search and feasibility report ($800 to $1,100) and then, should the projections look promising, representation (another $8,000 to $11,000). It wasn’t cheap, but I was beginning to believe in my idea. Besides, only a coward folds a royal flush. Moreover, I didn’t have to put down any money just yet. I charged ahead with my pitch and slid the preliminary sketches across the table.

I call it the Wrapper-Compactor: a little tube for disposing wrappers and other small pieces of trash, complete with a little plunger to cram them into the bottom. Never again would Cook have to worry about the detritus generated by the dish of Jolly Ranchers on his desk.

I could tell he was impressed.

He submitted my idea to Tom D’Francesco, at the New York office, for review.

“If anybody,” D’Francesco told me over the phone, “—myself, Carl, anybody—tells you, ‘Yeah you have a great idea,’ they’re blowing smoke up your butt.” I tried not to let his gruff manner discourage me. “If we went on every inventor’s gut feelings, I don’t even wanna tell you where we’d be.”

I asked for more information on Invents Company’s top products, but he dodged the question. His advice was simple: “Don’t compare yourself. Don’t get caught up on the products that made it. Focus on all the products that didn’t make it.

Find out why they didn’t make it.” Defiantly eager to behold success, I called up one of the AUGUST 2014

inventors touted on the Invents Company website.

Anthony Capozzo lives on a quiet street in Milford, Connecticut, with his wife and two children, in a house with central heating, bathrooms, and a backyard deck fashioned with his own two hands. He makes a living repairing washing machines, dryers, microwaves, and refrigerators, and has mounds of spare parts stockpiled in his own personal man cave. He also sawed a hole in the ceiling so that he has space to practice his golf swing.

The ultimate do-it-yourselfer, Capozzo invented the Sure Tarp, a tarp with weighted edges, so that when a storm blows in, you can cover your gear quickly (no need for bungee cords) and head indoors. He took his idea on the train into Manhattan, entered a 7th Avenue skyscraper and rode the elevator up to the 11th floor, where a representative named Phil laid out the total cost of his venture with Invents Company: $12,000.

This was out of Capozzo’s price range, but when he pitched the investment to his siblings, they got on board. The Capozzos love to gamble, he says, and the Sure Tarp was an once-in-a -lifetime opportunity.

After completing the initial research, Invents Company developed a thirty-second television commercial to gauge consumer interest in the Sure Tarp.

Despite D’Francesco’s claim that the company runs ads in carefully calculated locations to get an accurate understanding of the product’s potential, the ad ran

a total of four times exclusively in San Diego, where the average annual precipitation is less than twelve inches. By comparison, Capozzo’s hometown of Milford gets 50 inches per year. Though consumer response was positive, Capozzo was told, none of the 30,000 manufacturers in the Invents Company network were interested in producing the invention.

When I visited Capozzo at home, I saw that the firewood in his backyard is covered by an old-fashioned tarp. It had been there ever since his prototype broke. He has vented about the debacle to his nextdoor neighbor, Bob. We meandered over to Bob’s stoop, and Bob launched into a rant about those insufferably out-of-touch New Yorkers who let the Sure Tarp die. It’s a conversation the two friends have rehashed time and time again.

“We all hope Tony gets rich!”

Bob said.

“No, I don’t wanna get rich, Bob,” Capozzo replied. “I just wanna pay my mortgage off.”

When Cook informed me that Invents Company had decided to pass on the WrapperCompactor, I chalked it up to bureaucratic myopia and turned my attention to the other suitors who had been flooding my voicemail with eager entreaties.

There was Bob White, of Patently Brilliant, who told me, “Yours is a long term product— it’ll be around for a long, long time,” and informed me of the $800 pay-to-play fee.

There was Didier from Mi37

ami who, before even mentioning the price tag for his company’s services, asked, “Are you doing this alone or do you have support from your family?”

But there was one man who seemed different than the rest.

His name is Stephen P. Gnass, and inventors of all stripes sing his praises on the testimonials page of his website.

“I have come to depend on him to protect me from my own excitement to keep me from making a poor decision,” confess the inventors of the Swivel Car Seat.

“Stephen has a seemingly bottomless wellspring of knowledge,” writes the creator of Bliss Trips: Guided Journey CDs. “You zeroed in on what we needed to do and showed us exactly how to move towards bringing our dreams to fruition,” attest the inventors of the Metra Stress Reducer.

Gnass’ website describes him as a TV-famous “inventors’ advocate.” Though he holds no patents himself, he has made a career of advising inventors. He offers prospective clients a thirty-minute “free complimentary brainstorm,” just the sort of nostrings wisdom I’d been looking for. Before our call, I consulted his “Successtimonials” page, where I read of Gaile Spalione, inventor of Mop Flops. I decided to track her down.

When I reached Spalione at her home in Reseda, California, she was babysitting her grandchildren. She conceived of dualpurpose footwear around seventeen years ago, as she bustled 38

about the house caring for her children and dreamed of a way to collapse two domestic duties into one. She took her idea to a variety of companies, and ended up losing $25,000 to crooked people who promised much and delivered nothing. She attempted to file suit against one such racketeer, Davison & Associates, but was ultimately unable to recoup any losses.

In 2000, Spalione filed for and received a patent, paid to manufacture a first round of booties, and produced a com-

AFTER ELI WHITNEY ’92 (THAT’S 1792) INVENTED THE COTTON GIN, YALIES ALL BUT DITCHED THE BUSINESS OF SIMPLER MACHINES. mercial for a local television station. The cost was exorbitant, but her mother generously mortgaged her house to help fund the venture.

Still looking for ways to promote her product, she found a convention geared for inventors looking to market their wares.

She paid the entrance fee and set up a booth to promote her product. At the convention she met the organizer, Stephen P. Gnass.

He offered her a free consultation, and the two quickly developed a rapport.

“Dear Stephen,” Spalione’s

Successtimonial reads, “I must take this opportunity to express my sincerest gratitude for having your sound advice and wisdom guiding me through this tangled invention process. You are my rock!”

The piles of unsold Mop Flops in Ms. Spalione’s garage— roughly 2,000 pairs—offer a markedly less reassuring testament to the difficulty of making it as an inventor. She had contacted a Chinese manufacturer in hopes of lowering production costs, but when the shipment arrived, she discovered the measurements had been lost in translation, leaving her with a lifetime supply of Mop Flops too miniature to wear.

Though Spalione doesn’t regret the venture and remains a devotee of Gnass, she admits disappointment at the outcome.

“I was hoping my idea would take off and I would become a millionaire overnight,” she recalled wistfully.

“I’m still waiting.”

For Spalione and countless other would-be inventors facing similar marketing and supply-chain complications, the prospect of a one-stop-shop that shepherds you from idea to product is a tempting one. But as I learned from Gnass during our complimentary conversation, it’s never that easy.

“You would think that there would be a company that does it all for you,” Gnass told me.

“Just hire them and they’ll do the drawing, make the prototype, give you the book, do the research, and take the invention THE NEW JOURNAL

to trade shows.” That was exactly the impression I’d been under.

My associates at Invents and elsewhere had led me to believe they could magically bring my idea into reality. But having gone toe-to-toe with these companies for decades, Gnass wanted to set the record straight: “They don’t make their money from the invention, they make their money from the inventor.

They’re not stealing inventions or anything like that because that’s not where they make their money.”

In other words, they operate by selling inventors’ ideas back to the inventors themselves. The multi-phase, official-sounding process does little to advance the product to market. Instead, it exists to enamor inventors of their own ideas. These companies charge a small fortune and deliver their clients an overestimate of market demand and an exaggerated feasibility report.

The world of analog innovation these days requires more than ingenuity and elbow grease; at some point, you have to call in the professionals.

The creation of an inventing industry within corporate R&D departments leaves outside inventors to navigate an obstacle course that almost always costs them thousands of dollars before they give up and leave their idea by the wayside. Whereas software developers or app inventors—the tinkerers of my generation—can go from concept to market without lifting a finger from Home Row, junk inventors depend on entities much larger than themselves. Even a genius can no longer act alone—and that leaves him vulnerable. That’s why companies like Invents Company exist, and why they will continue to exist as long as average Americans like myself dream, even of junk, beyond our means.

John Stillman is a 2014 graduate of Yale College.

AUGUST 2014

personal essay

Impact

A Yale alumnus reflects on a trauma that struck us all

by Eric Baudry

T

-minus three hours. Your alarm goes off at 6:30 AM. You wake up having no idea that today you will watch a woman die.

T-minus two hours. Your residential college’s student council, on which you’re a sophomore representative, is the first to arrive at the tailgate.

This is a victory, the chance to pick the best patch of grass. When the party starts, your grills will be prime real estate. You think there might be some advantage to being away from the crowds, but you’re too cold to make this point. The temperature is forty-five degrees, it’s the start of Thanksgiving Break, and you could be in bed under your IKEA comforter, Warmth Rate Four.

T-minus one hour. At 8:30, the first revelers trickle in, drinking or drunk or both. You’ve landed the position of Kebab Czar, so as soon as the grills are fired up, they assault your face with smoke and flood your nostrils with the smell of cooking meat. You don’t mind, because the grills are warm, and the closer you stay to them the less you fantasize about being back in your dorm. By 9:00, your world has become an endless wall of people, a human landscape broken only by the occasional grill or U-Haul. As promised, your tailgate seems to be the epicenter of activity. Drunk and hungry bodies descend on your shrimp and lamb kebobs like it’s their first meal in weeks.

T-minus one minute. At 9:38, someone yells for more hamburger buns. You’re standing near the supplies, so you reach under the plastic table to grab another bag. When you stand up you see a UHaul truck driving through the crowd. It doesn’t strike you as alarming or even abnormal because this is a tailgate and there are hundreds of people 39

and dozens of U-Hauls.

Impact.

The U-Haul hits another U-Haul.

Time is no longer linear.

You see a body on the ground at the same time you see a woman get hit, and you don’t know which happened first, if you’re remembering or just projecting backwards from the scene in front of you.

Your insides twist violently, like a cloth being wrung out.

The sequence plays again in your mind, rearranged but still scrambled.

The U-Haul blares its horn.

It hits another U-Haul. You see the second U-Haul smash into a third. The sound of two U-Hauls colliding isn’t as loud as you would have predicted.

People run out of the way.

A woman gets knocked aside.

A woman gets run over.

She disappears under the truck and is spit out the back end, flying ten feet and landing on her stomach.

There is a body on the ground.

You see the driver get out of the truck. His face looks like he’s just run someone over. Which is exactly what he’s done.

Other images arrive. There are ambulances and police tape and the crowd has cleared a space.

Just moments before there had been countless bodies. Now there’s just one body, and the ground is coated in a layer of discarded paper plates and red solo cups.

You think it can’t be real. People on the other side of the field are still dancing. But there are paramedics and a stretcher. Someone is checking a pulse and a DJ is yelling through a megaphone to keep dancing. He doesn’t know about the body. You wish somebody would tell him. You would tell him, but you feel like you’re underwater. You’re holding your breath. You try to breathe but the air is too heavy. You feel like you’ve taken too much NyQuil. Your mind runs through the same moments on repeat: the truck, the horn, the crash, the body.

A minute passes, or an hour. Other people arrive at the tailgate, wanting to party. Looking for a drink and a good time. There’s been an accident, you try to tell them. “What happened?”

40

they ask. It’s then you realize there are other questions you could ask, questions like what if you had set up your tailgate just fifty feet away, or what if the driver had turned the truck towards you, instead of away?

Your best friend wants to watch the football game. You tag along, but you don’t do much watching. It’s like you’re drunk, only you’re sober.

It’s everyone else who’s drunk. A man two rows in front of you moons the crowd.

You can’t stop the reel from playing. The quarterback throws a pass and the U-Haul slams into the parked vehicle. The crowd cheers and her body spits out the back end. It’s all superimposed.

Two films at once, one over the other.

The truck hits the woman hits the ground.

At halftime, the commentator announces she’s dead. There’s a moment of silence. A minute, ten seconds, you can’t remember. It’s too short.

People shouldn’t be playing football, you think.

Some friends leave the game early to find something to eat. You follow, but food does nothing to relax the knotted sensation in your gut; no amount of mozzarella sticks or cheap pizza stops the procession of images in your head. You don’t say anything because you want to be polite — you don’t want to ruin everyone else’s day, but you wonder why they haven’t thought of ruining yours.

“It’s OK,” you would tell them, “I can’t stop thinking about it either.”

This is not the first time you’ve encountered death at school. During your freshman year, a girl’s hair got caught in a lathe. Twelve months later, a boy filled a lab with gas. You read about these incidents in the school newspaper over cereal and orange juice, but their deaths felt distant, diluted.

There were already too many degrees of separation for raw emotion. There’s no filter for death that happens right in front of you. No arranging of facts or well-placed quotes from people who knew the victim. Just the immediate flash of sensations. Then the endless repetition of memory.

The truck, the horn, the crash, the body.

Eric Baudry is a 2014 graduate of Yale College.

THE NEW JOURNAL

poetry Bonescape I took my sister to the boneyard when she refused to accept that any skull but her own might have its strange, flat patches.

She was naive and expected crania, on principle, to be round as the spinning Earth. No use explaining how calcification exceeds such simple calculus.

And so we wandered the white forest with its shadows appearing not as black but as other shades of white.

More amazing, the trees, when they are jointed, their branches ossified.

Also the ferns, each leaflet like the parts of a toe. Bright fleshless squirrels and wandering, naked moose.

Molly was vulgar and asked a passing man if we might find a river of marrow.

Must she have ignored the un-yellow rattling of wind across his hollow ribs?

Shame on her for forcing a confession of how dry it is ‘round these parts.

Or was it my own fault, not having heeded the request to leave our wet garments at the vestibule?

I may have been to blame. I, the eldest sister. Still, it was my younger who pointed at passersby and howled in appreciation.

“Stop, stop!” cried one skeleton.

“You’re looking at me like I have meltaway bones!”

And indeed, Molly was salivating over the limbs of sugar and food dye.

Damn that sister of mine, with her flat skull and infamous appetite.

—Hayley Kolding

AUGUST 2014

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endnote

YALE UNIVERSITY

JUDAIC STUDIES COURSES - FALL 2014 SEMESTER CORE COURSE JDST 200 Jewish History and Thought to Early Modern Times, Ivan Marcus TTh 11.35–12.50 ANCIENT PERIOD JDST 016 Authorship, Originality & Forgery, Hindy Najman MW 9am-10:15am JDST 110 The Bible, Christine Hayes MW 11.35-12.50 JDST 256 Dead Sea Scrolls: Damascus Document, Steven Fraade W 9:25am-11:15am JDST 392 Mishnah Seminar Tractate Rosh HaShanah, Steven Fraade Th 9:25am-11:15am MEDIEVAL & EARLY MODERN PERIOD JDST 270 Medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims In Conversation, Ivan Marcus, T 1:30pm-3:20pm MODERN PERIOD JDST 025, Intellectual and Cultural History of European Jewry, 1648–1933, David Sorkin MW 9.00-10.15am JDST 289 Representing the Holocaust, Maurice Samuels & Millicent Marcus TTh 2.30-3.45pm(& film screenings) JDST 332 Zionism, Elli Stern, MW 2:30pm-3:45pm (JDST 336) PHIL214 The Philosophies of Hegel and Schelling Paul Franks MW 1.00-2.15 JDST 337 Same-Sex Love in Jewish History, Shaun Halper W 3.30-5.30 JDST 338 Beyond the God Hypothesis, Gabriel Citron M 3.30-5.20 JDST 340, Political History of European Jewry, 1589–1897, David Sorkin MW 1.30-2.20pm HEBREW LITERATURE & LANGUAGE HEBR 110 Elementary Modern Hebrew I Ayala Dvoretzky (M-F 10.30-11.20 or M-F 11.35-12.25) HEBR 117 Elementary Biblical Hebrew I Jonathan Pomeranz TTh 11.35-12.50 HEBR 130 Intermediate Modern Hebrew I Shiri Goren (TTh 11.35-12.50 or TTh 4.00-5.15) JDST 321 Hebrew Modernist Poetry, Hannan Hever Th 3.30-5.20 JDST 323 State and Society in Israel, Dina Roginsky TTh 1.00-2.15 JDST 360 Hebrew in a Changing World, Dina Roginsky MW 1.00-2:15pm JDST 401 Academic Texts in Modern Hebrew, Dina Roginsky MW 2:30pm-3:45pm JDST 409 Conversational Hebrew: Israeli Media, Shiri Goren TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm GRADUATE COURSE JDST 651 Theories of Authorship & Canon, Hindy Najman & Irene Peirano T 1.30-3.20 JDST 652 Mutual Influences in Jewish, Pagan, Christian, Samaritan, and Muslim Art in the Southern Levant in Late Antiquity, Rina Talgam W 1.30-3.20 JDST 670 Intro to Pahlavi (MiddlePersian), Oktor Skjaervo T 1.30-3.20 JDST 677 Marxism and Literature, Hannan Hever JDST 799 Religion& Performance of Space, Sally Promey &Margaret Olin M 3.30-5.20 Judaic Studies enables students to develop a substantial knowledge of the history, religion, literature, languages, and culture of the Jews. Jewish society, texts, ideologies, and institutions are examined in comparative perspective in the context of the history and culture of nations in which Jews have lived and created throughout the ages.

Please note that information on courses, including meeting days and times, is subject to revision. Students should check the on-line course information for the fullest and most accurate information

AUGUST 2014

Program in Judaic Studies Yale University 451 College St., Rm. 301 New Haven, CT 06511 Tel – (203)432-0843, Fax – (203)432-4889 judaicstudies.yale.edu

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F E S T I VA L 2 014

WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZES DRAMA

Kia Corthron Sam Holcroft NoĂŤlle Janaczewska FICTION

Nadeem Aslam Jim Crace Aminatta Forna NONFICTION

Pankaj Mishra John Vaillant Prize Ceremony with keynote by Zadie Smith Monday, September 15, 5 pm Sprague Hall 98 Wall Street

Literary Speed Dating Tuesday, September 16, 6 pm Beinecke Library 121 Wall Street

Prizewinners Reading Thursday, September 18, 7 pm Whitney Humanities Center 53 Wall Street Book signing to follow

For a full list of festival events visit windhamcampbell.org