Chris Powell: The $45 million Randy Cox case displays Contradiction of Two political Principles in Connecticut
MANCHESTER, Conn.
While there was plenty of negligence in the case of Randy Cox, the man who was paralyzed after his arrest by New Haven police in 2022, the court decision concluding the case's criminal aspects suggests that the negligence really wasn't that of the officers it was blamed on.
Cox had gotten drunk and was holding a bottle of liquor and brandishing a gun he carried illegally as he walked past a street fair, scaring people, one of whom called the cops. They arrested him and put him into a van for transport to the police station. Inside the van he resisted arrest, yelled, kicked, and rolled on the floor before sitting on the van's bench. But the bench had no seatbelts and when the driver stopped hard to avoid a collision, Cox slid head-first to the wall at the front of the passenger compartment, breaking his neck.
Rather than wait for an ambulance, the officer driving the van continued to the station, where other officers didn't believe Cox's protests that he couldn't move. They figured he was just drunk and faking injury, so they manhandled him into a wheelchair and then into a cell before medical help arrived.
Since Cox is Black, New Haven and then the country were filled with shrieks of racism as his catastrophic injury became clear, though most of the officers who handled him after his arrest were also members of minority groups. Mayor Justin Elicker, who is white and whose city is two-thirds minority, was quickly intimidated out of treating the situation honestly. Scapegoats were needed to calm the political controversy.
Fortunately for the mayor, five officers were soon charged criminally. Two pleaded guilty in plea bargains -- one of them was fired and lost her appeal for reinstatement and the other retired. The remaining three insisted on innocence and this month were more or less vindicated. Superior Court Judge David Zagaja granted them "accelerated rehabilitation," a probation that dismisses charges, ruling that the officers had not meant to hurt Cox and had not caused his catastrophic injury.
Impartial observers could have seen as much long before now. The city's responsibility for Cox's injury was entirely a matter of the failure to install seatbelts in the prisoner transport van, a failure dating back many years, a failure for which New Haven and its insurance company have paid Cox and his racism-contriving "civil-rights" lawyer $45 million, which, it is hoped, will cover the lifetime care Cox is likely to need.
While politically correct Connecticut may not be able to acknowledge it, the heavier responsibility here falls on Cox himself. Getting drunk in public is never a good idea. Getting drunk, carrying a gun illegally, and brandishing it at a street fair, scaring people and compelling police to arrest you, is a worse idea.
Of course no one is paying more for his mistake than Cox himself, but if he had been white and a member of the National Rifle Association, he might not have been forgiven as quickly he was, with the criminal charges against him dropped because of his injury and the mayor, still playing politics, treating him as an innocent who was persecuted by the police.
As for the three officers who now have beaten the criminal charges against them, all were fired but one regained his job through an appeal and the two others continue their appeals.
Mayor Elicker says he disagrees with the judge's decision to dismiss the charges against the three officers, so presumably he will continue to oppose reinstating the two still appealing. But a fairer resolution would be a settlement reinstating them with less than full back pay in recognition that for three years they have suffered far out of proportion to whatever they did wrong.
All this leaves political liberalism in Connecticut to sort out the wonderful contradiction of its two silliest principles: that minorities are always right, and so are members of government-employee unions.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
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