The University of Connecticut has been on the defensive since the announcement at the start of the week that seven women filed a federal discrimination complaint against the school. President Susan Herbst said, "The suggestion that the University of Connecticut, as an institution, would somehow be indifferent to or dismissive of any report of sexual assault is astonishingly misguided and demonstrably untrue." Governor Dannel Malloy and Republican leaders in the state have called for hearings into the way the school is handling complaints. That and more in The Wheelhouse Digest.
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CALLS FOR A HEARING
Political leaders want to learn more about whether UConn is failing to investigate complaints of sexual assaults.
Criminal and academic proceedings should work in cooperation, said Republican leaders along with Governor Malloy on Thursday, as they called for hearings about UConn's handling of sexual assault complaints. Democrat House Speaker Brendan Sharkey said, "There is no reason why this effort needed to be partisan -– I'm happy to work with my Republican colleagues. Sexual assault on campus is too important an issue for political grandstanding."
Read more at The Connecticut Mirror.
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NEW CRIMINAL LINEUP PROCEDURE
A new law is in place in an attempt to remove potential police bias from the process.
Criminal lineups, like any human activity, are highly susceptible to bias. Sometimes they include several people who look similar to the suspect, and sometimes they may deliberately include people who don't. A new law is in place that requires criminals to be viewed one at a time, and so far, it seems to be working fairly smoothly.
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IS PUBLIC COMMENT JUST AN EMBELLISHMENT?
Questions arise about a recent Hartford meeting where more officials were present than residents.
Friday's Where We Live was all about civic engagement, which city and town officials would probably like to see increase in their neighborhoods. Or would they? At a recent Hartford meeting to discuss plans to connect the city's downtown with the adjacent area to the north, public comment was ostensibly welcome. But the method of alerting stakeholders, and the way issues were addressed during the meeting, made it seem as though plans under consideration are all a foregone conclusion.
