Media outlets picked up the story and largely showed white victims in the suburbs with minority suspects in Connecticut’s cities.
Local critics cried foul over the coverage, asking for context. Mel Medina is one of them.
If you were to take a quick look at Medina’s Twitter feed, you might think his full-time job was fact-checking the Connecticut GOP’s tweets.
Medina is actually the former policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut.
“My main issue is, I’m deeply concerned that children are being used as scapegoats for a larger goal of returning Connecticut back to an era of being tough on crime and restarting a mass incarceration machine,” said Medina.
Across the country, some crimes — including motor vehicle thefts — spiked during the pandemic, but the data don’t show that children are to blame for the rise, and vehicle thefts are now subsiding.
Mike Lawlor, who was Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s criminal justice adviser, now teaches at the University of New Haven.
