Hartford Police Department

One of the organizations that organize and sponsor these trainings is the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). JINSA is a think tank that advocates for US-Israeli security cooperation, increased domestic military spending, and military aid to Israel, and has board members with close ties to US defense contractors. JINSA launched its Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP) shortly after 9/11, and since 2002 has run annual trips to Israel for US federal, state, and local law enforcement. Over 11,000 additional American law enforcement officials have attended LEEP conferences nationwide, which bring in Israeli security officials as experts.

The Police Department of Hartford, Connecticut, is among the departments that have sent delegates to Israel. Ursula Wiebusch serves as a Detective in the Hartford Police Department. Detective Wiebusch attended a training in Israel with JINSA as a delegate of the LEEP program. Detective Wiebusch handle the department’s public record requests. A FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request was routed to her unit regarding drone use over the community by the police, in which the request is rejected because “no documents within the Hartford Police Department [are] responsive to any portion of your request.”

She was named in two separate complaints that the department FOIA unit violated FOIA requests. One of the complaints was dismissed.  The second complaint, reviewed by Connecticutt’s Freedom Information Commission, which administers and enforced FOIA requests, found that Detective Wiebusch violated disclosure provisions by failing to comply with the complainants records request. The Commission refused the request by the complainant to assess a civil penalty for the violations.

The Hartford Police Department was profiled in an ACLU report about “the national trend of criminalizing […] children, through increased reliance on zero-tolerance school discipline, school-based arrests, disciplinary alternative schools, and secure detention.” The report was critical of the city of Hartford’s high suspension rates, school-based policing and school-based arrests. The ACLU research found that policing schools in Hartford impacted people of color at disproportionate rates, including potentially students living with disabilities. The Connecticut School Board of Education refuses to release data on students arrested with disabilities. According to the ACLU, data collection and reporting on school-based arrests are not adequate.

Children are far more likely to be arrested at school today than they were a generation ago […] very young students are being arrested at school. For example, in Hartford, during the two years for which data are available, 86 primary-grade students experienced school-based arrest. A majority of these were seventh or eighth graders, but 25 were in grades four through six,and 13 were in grade three or below. – ACLU