Connecticut Mayor’s Answer To Latino Harassment: Eat Tacos

You can excuse a deer for staring into oncoming headlights, it’s a victim of circumstance. You can even justify the fish in a barrel, they didn’t choose to be there. But when East Haven, Connecticut, Mayor Joseph Maturo looked surprised and wide-eyed into a TV camera and flailed at a reporter’s questions, it was all his own doing.

When WPIX reporter Mario Diaz asked Maturo what he planned to do about the charges of police harassment against Latinos in his town, the Mayor responded he “might have some tacos when I go home.” Diaz jumped on the response;  the wide-eyed flailing followed.

The context is something NewsTaco has reported on:  a U.S. Justice Department investigation found instances of harassment and discrimination against Latino residents among New Haven’s police force. CNN reported that in a letter written to Mayor Maturo, Assistant Attorney General Thomas J. Perez wrote:

We find that EHPD engages in discriminatory policing against Latinos, including but not limited to targeting Latinos for discriminatory traffic enforcement, treating Latino drivers more harshly than non-Latino drivers after a traffic stop, and intentionally and woefully failing to design and implement internal systems of control that would identify, track, and prevent such misconduct.

TPM reported that his week the Justice Department charged 4 East Haven police offers:

with conspiring to violate and violating the civil rights of Latino residents of the city. One officer allegedly said he “likes” harassing people who “have drifted into this county on rafts made of chicken wings.”

So Diaz marched over to the Mayor’s office to have a chat, and to be honest, as clueless as Maturo’s answer was, his squirming, high-pitched and cracking voice are hard to watch and hear. And the more he tried to defend his answer, the deeper a hole he dug. He went on a down-spiraling diatribe about eating spaghetti because he’s Italian, or Latino food in the Latino community. Then he played the hapless victim of a word-mincing , idea-twisting media. He never got the question’s intent, which may reveal the DOJ  investigation’s point.

His idea about how to help his police department’s alleged harassment victims is to eat tacos. I will grant this: I’ve always believed that a good taco can heal just about anything — but in this instance it’s ridiculous. The allegations of police harassment are easy to see when viewed with the lens of the Mayor’s ignorance. It’s not a stretch to understand how it could have happened. The Mayor told Diaz that he:

“didn’t think (the discrimination and harassment) is a systemic problem in our community.”

Connecticut Governor Daniel P. Malloy framed the issue best. In a written statement Malloy said:

“The comments by East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo are repugnant. They represent either a horrible lack of judgment or worse, an underlying insensitivity to our Latino community that is unacceptable. Being tired is no excuse. He owes an apology to the community, and more importantly, he needs to show what he’s going to do to repair the damage he’s done. And he needs to do it today.”

Maturo has since apologized for what he after-the-fact called “stupid.” He blamed the stupidity on stress.