Legislation

Senate Bill 305 rolls back too many needed accountability provisions and re-expands opportunities for police searches not even two years after the police accountability bill was enacted. Accordingly, the ACLU-CT strongly opposes Senate Bill 305, and urges this Committee to oppose it as well.

Police and other criminal legal system actors are simply not the appropriate people to handle the public health needs of substance use disorders; they are not public health actors whose sole job is to connect people with the health services they need.

The ACLU-CT applauds many provisions of this bill and suggests changes to reduce the school to prison pipeline.

Deceptive interrogation tactics used by police are unconscionable, expensive, and most harm the people whom our state has made most vulnerable: people of color, youth, and people with mental or physical disabilities. S.B. 306 would take critical steps toward ending deceptive police interrogations.

S.B. 1093 would undo restrictions on stop and frisk created by the summer of 2020's police accountability bill and make body camera footage even less accessible to people and even more useful only for police.

Due process is the minimum standard of procedural fairness; it requires, at a minimum, notice and an opportunity to be heard by a neutral decisionmaker.

Highly militarized police units, like SWAT teams, turn communities into war zones. Neighborhoods are not battlegrounds and no arm of the government should be treating us like wartime enemies.

Today, there is widespread recognition that addiction is, fundamentally, an illness to be treated.

Connecticut must also divest from policing and reinvest in programs that build strong and safe communities.