Retired major league baseball player and Hartford resident Doug Glanville has been appointed to the state panel that sets standards for police officers.
This comes two years after Glanville joined the national conversation on race and policing with an article he wrote, "I Was Racially Profiled In My Own Driveway."
Glanville’s article in The Atlantic told the story of the time he was shoveling snow at his Hartford home when a West Hartford police officer approached him.
A black man had recently been in a snow shoveling dispute. Glanville said the officer apparently assumed he was that man -- that the house wasn't his -- and asked him whether he was trying to make a few extra bucks.
WNPR spoke earlier this week with Glanville, who noted that his incident came before others: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore.
“So all these things sort of focused intensely on this relationship between law enforcement and these communities -- particularly of color, and so on -- that you start to see that these, I guess, micro aggressions is the word that describes -- these small things that can lead to bigger things, and why that was becoming exponentially problematic for our communities,” Glanville said.
“You have to really look at why these exchanges happen, when they happen, and really look at something where you can be ahead of preventatively addressing things that could certainly escalate,” he said.
To that end, Governor Dannel Malloy recently appointed Glanville to the Police Officer Standards and Training Council. It oversees, among other things, baseline training standards for police.
Glanville is now a writer and a baseball analyst. He said he appreciates the chance to play a role in policymaking. Last year, he worked to pass a bill that clarified the law around officers enforcing local ordinances outside of their jurisdiction.
“When you protest things, and you have legitimate reasons to point out issues, the next step -- you have to do the work, right?” he said. “You have to have somebody helping you if you can’t do it yourself to do the work and create things that are actually sustainable. And what’s sustainable for some period of time is policy and law.”
In a statement, Malloy’s spokesperson called Glanville a strong community voice with a relentless work ethic and a record of advocacy and service.
