“Father Of Community Policing” Dies

High Times makes Pastore a national decriminalization hero within months of his becoming chief.

Former New Haven Police Chief Nicholas Pastore, a product of the pre-Urban Renewal Hill neighborhood who implemented groundbreaking reforms decades before America embraced them as conventional wisdom, died Tuesday at the age of 87.

Pastore: Left a complex legacy.

A complicated, larger-than-life figure, Pastore was mourned as a trailblazer whose ideas continue to guide how New Haven addresses criminal justice.

“He was the father of community policing,” current Chief Karl Jacobson said, noting that neighborhood-level and community-partnering policies Pastore pioneered in the 1990s continue to this day as a foundation of New Haven policing.

“He was my mentor and close friend,” said Shafiq Abdussabur, whom Pastore recruited to the force after encountering him protesting police along with fellow Muslim activists. ​“If there was a hall of fame for police chiefs, Chief Pastore who revolutionized policing in modern day America would be at the top of the list. His innovations and vision for community policing lives on today in the professional skills of thousands of police officers and law enforcement executives throughout the world.”

“Chief Pastore,” former Mayor Toni Harp remarked, ​“changed policing in New Haven and made our communities safe. He proved that community policing works.”

From promoting drug decriminalization to pushing violent cops off the force; from actively recruiting Black and brown and female and LGBT cops to downplaying arrest numbers as indications of success; from engaging gang members to partnering with child-psychologists and social workers to help kids exposed to violence process trauma, Pastore was ahead of his time. In pursuing those plans, he delighted in poking protectors of traditional military-style policing and provoking protests and public controversies. Including making enemies who were able to exact personal revenge.

The road to reformer and complicated actor in the racial upheavals of the late 20th century began on Legion Avenue and Oak Street, back when it was a scrappy melting-pot neighborhood not yet decimated by the Urban Renewal bulldozer and white flight. The line between good guys and bad guys, cops and criminals, law enforcement and law breaking, between people who stood to make history and people who stood to make trouble, bent and curved and moved back and forth before young Nick’s eyes, and continued to when he became an adult making life-and-death decisions.

The Neighborhood

The son of factory workers Victoria (Ruggerio) and Vincent Pastore, Sr., young Nicholas Pastore went to bed under a net; Victoria put it there so rats wouldn’t bite him in his sleep. Pastore put paper in his shoes to block the holes.

Like other Italian immigrants, Pastore’s grandfather made his own wine, four barrels at a time, in the basement. Once a year, when he’d come upstairs with the barrels, it was cause for celebration, singing, and feasting. He’d crack open the best barrel for the family to drink. He’d sell off the others for $2 a gallon. The worst batch went to wine vinegar — or to the vice cops who snooped on Italian immigrants’ homes. Technically, they were looking to raid home-brewers. In reality they came to shake the families down. They loved the elder Pastore’s wine, even the fourth-best barrel.

As Pastore got old enough to leave the house on his own, he got to know all the characters on the street. He loved people; he loved bustle. The neighborhood’s thoroughfares, like Legion Avenue, teemed day and night with hustlers, bakers, jewelers, laborers, entertainers — Black, Jewish, Italian, Irish. They didn’t meet inside each other’s homes; many Black families were confined to the shabbiest row of fire traps in the neighborhood. Everyone came together on the sidewalks. They fought, bartered, and joked. They played basketball and softball in the Scranton Street schoolyard and in the park at Davenport Avenue and Asylum Street. Pastore earned coins as a Shabbes goy, turning on lights for religious Jewish neighbors on the Sabbath.

At age 10 Pastore set up a shoeshine stand. He did more than buff footwear. He helped Nutter Koletsky, New Haven’s very own version of the fabled Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, look out for the vice cops. When word came of an imminent raid, Pastore hid Koletsky’s bookie slips in the shoeshine box. In high school, Pastore got a job in the store that served as a front for Nutter Koletsky’s profitable black-market operations.

In January 1957, months short of graduation, Pastore dropped out of high school to enlist in the armed forces. Later that year, orders from President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent Pastore’s unit to Little Rock, Arkansas, to confront an opposing army: Gov. Orval Faubus’s National Guard. Faubus took a stand against the school desegregation ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education; he defied an order to allow Black children into an all-white high school. With some half-dozen fellow soldiers, Pastore was assigned to escort one of the Black girls to school amid death threats from crowds of angry whites. Each morning Pastore went to the girl’s home. The girl was scared to go to school.

“This is important,” her mother told her.

Pastore rode on the back of the truck taking the girl to school. ​“Go home, you n*****-lovers!” white women yelled at the soldiers.

The harsh realities of Little Rock all seemed memories from another world when Pastore returned to New Haven upon finishing his two-year stint. In 1962 he joined his friend Mike Sullivan in taking the test to become a police officer. He got hired and quickly earned a reputation for knowing the street. Since Pastore had always felt deprived by the limited education he had received growing up in the Hill, he devoured courses on policing. He would also pursue a college degree on the side. His street contacts, his reservoir of information on safe-crackers and numbers runners, helped the department arrest crooks like Eddie Devlin, who landed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. 

Pastore earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. By 1967, a year shy of his 30th birthday, Pastore made detective.

Shadows of his Little Rock encounter came back to him in August that year, when riots broke out in New Haven. Pastore found himself marching down the street en masse with fellow police officers like army troops. They put out fires, confronted groups of Black citizens, searched for snipers. They herded people like cattle. People punched Pastore. Pastore punched back.

But now Pastore was in his hometown. He was in the neighborhood he grew up in. Only now people were burning it. And he saw strangers: They didn’t know him even if they knew who he was. He didn’t know them even when he knew who they were. So New Haven in August 1967 felt more like Little Rock than his hometown. Who was on whose side? That could depend on the day, or the encounter. It could change the next day.

The next year Pastore took charge of the police intelligence division. He inherited a phone-wiretapping operation that had four machines running around the clock at the old Court Street police headquarters illegally recording the calls of protesters, politicians, professors, anyone seen as a threat to the establishment. It would later be revealed as perhaps the largest per-capita urban ​“red squad” wiretapping operation run by a city police department in conjunction with J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO-era FBI.

Pastore said he had no qualms about monitoring activists promoting violence, he said, the way he did the bookies and protection rackets that remained the division’s top priority. In his view, they endangered his city.

So when the Black Panthers came to town at the height of the late 1960s unrest, Pastore enlisted his extensive network of informants. He had them attend meetings posing as sympathetic supporters and report back to him. In 1969 one of those informants, Kelly Moye, called him to report that the panthers wanted to borrow his car to drive a tortured suspected informer named Alex Rackley (who wasn’t an informer) out of town to murder him. Give them the car, Pastore advised — setting in motion a series of arrests that put the national chair of the Panthers on trial and brought thousands of hippies and antiwar protesters to shut down the city with threats of blowing up Yale. (Read about all that here and here.)

After the dust settled, after New Haven like the rest of Urban America retreated into the hangover haze of the 1970s, Pastore decided to reveal the secret of the civil rights and civil liberties violations. He became the star witness at explosive 1977 hearings revealing the details of the illegal wiretapping, leading to the firing of a police chief and a class-action settlement paying 1,238 targets between $1,000 and $6,000 apiece.

That earned Pastore belated praise from some liberals and some activists and Black people involved in criminal justice — and the lifelong enmity of white NHPD cops. He left the department not long after on a disability leave. He launched suburban business ventures, keeping an ear and an eye on New Haven’s streets. He wasn’t done yet with policing.

BDP, RIP

The door back in opened in 1990. The previous year Pastore had privately advised his friend John Daniels in Daniels’ successful quest to become New Haven’s first Black mayor. He helped Daniels craft a central campaign platform: overhaul the NHPD and bring an emerging concept called ​“community policing” to town.

At the time New Haven’s department were notorious for military-style abuse of the city. A team of officers called the ​“Beat-Down Posse” patrolled lower-income neighborhoods and randomly stopped to beat up young people on the streets. Male undercover cops propositioned patrons leaving the Partners gay bar at York and Crown, then arrested them for alleged lewd acts. The chief, a proud Marine, promoted and publicly praised cops sued for violence, including several, like Vincent Raucci, who were later revealed to have alleged ties to the drug trade.

Daniels shocked the city by naming Pastore the new chief. Pastore then shocked the city by ramming through changes:

• He oversaw the creation of 10 neighborhood-level districts each with a police substation, a top cop, and locally based officers who got to know the neighbors and worked directly with them.

• He pushed out top cops associated with the Beat Down Posse, which he disbanded. (One of those cops subsequently became East Haven’s police chief, promoting the cop who killed Malik Jones to department spokesperson and threatening the feds when they came to town to investigate and successfully prosecute massive racist brutality and corruption in the ranks.) Pastore had Vincent Raucci internallly investigated and pushed off the force, after which the FBI raided his out-of-state home and wrote a report alleging he had falsely arrested a man for murder because he owed mobsters drug-dealing money.

• He personally recruited Black community members to the force, while advertising nationally in the LGBT press. He put a civilian cop in charge of the police academy, where officers learned not just how to arrest people, but how to work with the community to work on problems underpinning crime.

• He invited community activists, including a former Panther he helped imprison, to craft joint programs on prison reentry and to mediate truces.

• With Donald Cohens of Yale Child Study Center, he crafted a program linking officers with child psychologists and social workers to work with children who witness or experience violence; U.S. Congress subsequently passed a law to replicate the program in other cities.

• He worked with AIDS activists to implement a model needle exchange program with Yale Medical School. Its success sparked similar programs across the nation.

• He pushed cops to stop arresting street dealers for low-level drug crimes, instead ramping up intelligence to enable the cops to arrest leaders of six major drug gangs to decades-long prison sentences; High Times featured him as a law-enforcement hero.

To many white cops, Pastore’s moves made him a heretic, an enemy, not a villain. The police union protested his changes as anti-cop. When Pastore disciplined a cop for violence against a citizen, the union called a weekend-long ​“blue flu” when they jammed police radio as Black officers worked double or triple shifts to respond to a wave of shootings. They fed the New Haven Register a front-page story about how Pastore had gave a slice of Modern pizza to a murder suspect brought in for questioning, fueling the idea that he liked criminals better than cops. Pastore said he shared his pizza because the man hadn’t eaten for 72 hours; he refused to publicly reveal that the man had subsequently confessed to the murder because, he said, that would look like he had fed him to trick him rather than because he was hungry.

60 Minutes came to town to feature this Vincent Gardenia-looking unlikely policing revolutionary who didn’t carry a gun (“Guns scare me”) and knew as many ​“bad guys” as men in blue. As soon as the Sunday evening segment ended, calls poured in to the NHPD from liberal admirers and outraged citizens across the country. Pastore reveled in the attention.

“I’m so happy,” he said, ​“I could smoke a joint!”

Pastore hung on; he won over a subsequent mayor who had campaigned to fire him. Because suddenly New Haven became a safer city. A much safer city. Violence rates, including homicide, plunged from epidemic levels in the late 1980s to the lowest levels since the LBJ presidency. And slowly the country was reassessing the military us-versus-them model of policing.

But Pastore’s foes didn’t give up. The top pushed-out Beat Down Posse cop, before joining East Haven’s force, collaborated with a then-rising right-wing writer named Tucker Carlson to produce a hit piece on Pastore and his liberal ideas for a national magazine called the Weekly Standard. Meanwhile, Pastore’s inclination to ignore boundaries when rethinking policy extended to his own personal life. In 1997 an ex-cop publicly distributed state child-protection agency file showing that Pastore had fathered a child with a sex worker and denied it until a DNA test proved it. A scandal erupted, again making national headlines. Pastore resigned (and raised the child).

The Battle Continues

His policies lived on, even deepened. A generation of cops like Anthony Campbell brought a new approach to policing in the Pastore mold.

Campbell grew up in Harlem, attended Yale College and Yale Divinity School, then joined an NHPD that now embraced people like him in its ranks. He went on to run the police academy, then serve as police chief. He now serves as Yale’s police chief.

“Nick did something no one else had done — he invited the marginalized in our society to actively participate in this democratic experiment, and his faith in the community paid off,” Campbell reflected Wednesday.

“Nick was bold and forward-thinking, well ahead of his time. He appointed the first openly gay female civilian director of the New Haven Police Academy, Kay D. Codish, and shifted police education from a military-style program to a classroom setting. He also hired and promoted women within the department and diversified the ranks, creating a new ethos in the way police interacted with the community.

“For Nick, every encounter between police and the public was an opportunity for growth and understanding, not just a transactional experience. He understood that the role of a police chief went beyond leading the department. It was about developing policies, procedures, and processes that always centered on serving the people. Nick released a transformative vision of policing from which the principles of modern community policing have grown — not just in New Haven, but across the state and the country. We have lost a visionary, and we are deeply grateful to him and his family for the ways he improved our lives through his wisdom and passion for community policing.”

Every revolutionary needs tending and updating. Over the years New Haven’s commitment to the concept has waxed and waned; at times advocates of paramilitary-style policing have gained the upper hand in the department with the help of politicians. 

But, however loosely ​“community policing” is defined, the city at large has demanded its preservation. When a labor-backed majority took over the Board of Alders in 2011, their platform specifically called for a return to walking beats and Pastore-style policing; the mayor immediately hired a Pastore mentee back to town to run the NHPD and reignite initiatives like the Yale Child Study partnership while crafting a new violence-intervention project with the feds called Project Longevity; resumed high violence rates again plummeted. A decade later a new mayor sought permanently to place an East-Haven military-style chief back in charge, but the community rebelled; now a deep connection to working with the community rather than against it has become the official mission once more, with new iterations of Pastore-like projects like a non-cop crisis response team called COMPASS.

Pastore himself remained below the radar, holding court at a family-run ​“CARER” auto repair shop on Middletown Avenue but avoiding public notice. His appetite for public controversy had long waned. His argument about how to police a city had won. He sometimes referred to episodes in life he hadn’t discussed with others, actions of which some of his friends might disapprove. This week he took to his grave more secrets, more enemies and devoted followers, than perhaps any law enforcement chief other than the FBI’s Hoover, at least in these parts. His vision remained in full public view: A commitment to a community that solves its toughest problems together — however messy and imperfect and tiring and sometimes contradictory the quest — has survived.

Tributes in Nick Pastore’s memory may be made to Life Haven, the emergency housing and case management shelter for homeless women and their children in Fair Haven, info@newreach,org, 203 – 776-6280.

A version of the second section of the above article (“The Neighborhood”) originally appeared in the book Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer (2006, Basic Books).