Who's In Charge?

Friday night in Hartford. Officers investigating suspected illegal activity near 9 Fales Street. A struggle. An officer feels what he thinks is a gun in a waistband. The guy runs. The chase dies on Webster Court in Newington. Gunfire. Two cops down. The suspect dead on the pavement.

Hartford Officer Alex Diaz. Rocky Hill Officer Jon Escobar, shot in the arm and the face. Both out of the hospital Saturday — the only good sentence in this whole thing. Mayor Arunan Arulampalam put out the statement you put out when you don’t have another one: devastated, exchange of gunfire, grateful they’re stable. The Inspector General has the file. The dead man’s name still hasn’t been released. I’m not inventing one.

That’s Friday into Saturday. August 21 into 22. Right here. Not a cable chyron from somebody else’s city.

And the governor of this state — the same week the year is still sitting on a pile of bodies from the summer — has spent 2026 telling you Connecticut is getting safer. April 8, after DESPP put out the 2025 wrap: “This report shows Connecticut is getting safer, with crime down across the board.” June 22, same song: the data “reinforces the fact that Connecticut continues to be one of the safest states in the country.” Commissioner Ronnell Higgins went further. “Irrefutably,” he said.

I’m not going to pretend the spreadsheets are fake. Crimes against persons were down in 2025. Homicides from 90 to 70. Property crime dropped hard. First quarter of this year, DESPP says crimes against persons down 15 percent. Dr. Michael Mascari said they “outpaced” themselves. Fine. Read the chart. The statistics may be accurate statewide. But the slogan “Connecticut is getting safer” conceals how uneven, fragile, and geographically concentrated that progress is.

August 16, Wethersfield Avenue next to SoulBaila. Joseph Texidor, 32, of Newington, dead. Four others shot. No arrest had been announced as of August 22. August 4, Judson Avenue, New Haven. Chavis Goldson, 19. Lorenzo Foreman, 25. A 13-year-old girl in a nearby bedroom with a bullet that did not care about CompStat. Two weeks later, Derby Avenue, a 42-year-old man dead on the sidewalk by Berger Apartments. New Haven at eight homicides for the year. In July, Mayor Justin Elicker was out there with “crime go down 9.8 percent” and the fewest first-half homicides since 1988. He also said, “We are not celebrating.” Good. Don’t. That snapshot aged in a month.

August 9, P.T. Barnum, Bridgeport. Johnny L. Nesmith, 46, shot outside Building 21 after a reunion. Sixth homicide of the year when it happened. Person-of-interest photos. No arrest. July 5, East Main, Waterbury. Outside LA 42. Trey-Von Dunbar, 22. Zaniya Dawkins, 18. Two 17-year-olds charged with murder after police say they grabbed guns and fired into a crowd. Three million bond each. Kids. A nightclub. Two people who, police said, had no personal connection to the shooters.

You can average that into a statewide decline. You can also stand in a kitchen in Newington or the Hill or the East End and tell a mother the quarter looked great. I know which conversation I’m in on the radio.

Here’s what this really means. The safest-state line is a press-release truth. It is not a street truth. And the people selling it have had their hands on the wheel longer than they want you to remember.

Democrats have held the governor’s office since January 5, 2011. Malloy, then Lamont. Fifteen years and change. A Democratic trifecta the whole time. The House theirs since the 1986 elections. Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport. Same party. Same machine. Same talking points.

If the state is under control, they controlled it. If it isn’t, they owned the statute book while it got away from them. There is no third option where the man in the White House wrote your nightclub policy and your Trust Act.

Which is why the other half of the pitch is so revealing.

May 4, 2026. Capitol steps. Lamont signs Senate Bill 397. Senate 24-10, House 91-54 — almost perfect party-line. No masks on officers. Judicial warrants for arrests in schools, hospitals, houses of worship. Easier to sue federal agents in state court. The Inspector General reaching for lethal force by ICE. The Department of Justice had already called Connecticut a “sanctuary State” and sued. Tong said he’d be waiting, and Connecticut would win.

Lamont before the pen hit the paper: “Whatever race, color, creed, whatever background, wherever you were born, we know you. We love you. And you belong here in the great state of Connecticut.” He said he waited a year of Trump 2.0 because you don’t answer every provocation, then: “that’s why we have to do everything we can by law to protect people here in our state.”

Tong: “We are sovereign in this state, this is the sovereign state of Connecticut.” Bob Duff: the voters will hear in November that “we are taking back our country.” Blumenthal: “We are all Minneapolis.” Matt Ritter: Trump “decided to tear down those norms… It’s cruel, it’s unnecessary, and it’s wrong.”

That’s not a press secretary going off-script. That’s the governing class telling you, out loud, that they will use state power to keep federal immigration enforcement at arm’s length. They’ve been doing the smaller version since the Trust Act. The 2025 rewrite, Public Act 25-29, even created a private right of action so you can sue a department that calls ICE the wrong way. They added a list of extra crimes where local cops may honor a detainer. They did not become an immigration service. They made it legally dangerous to act like one.

Then July 13 on Sugar Hollow Road in Danbury.

Off-duty Bridgeport Officer Cooper “Coop” Whiteside, 38. Brittany Islami, 34. Head-on. Harley and a Jeep. 2:45 in the morning. Both dead at the scene. Whiteside had been a Bridgeport cop since July 2024. Volunteer firefighter. EMT. The kind of guy a city actually needs.

Melissa Ramirez, 27, of Stamford, charged July 24 with two counts of second-degree manslaughter, DUI, traveling unreasonably fast, failure to drive in the proper lane. According to the warrant, she was driving without a license and had a BAC of 0.14—nearly twice the legal limit. Whiteside and Islami are dead. The warrant also cites cannabis in her system, empty Corona, a THC vape, 63 miles an hour seconds before impact, 56 at impact, 45 posted. She pleaded not guilty and is due back in court August 31.

July 26, ICE lodges a detainer. DHS, to Fox: “Melissa Esperanza Ramirez-Romero is a criminal illegal alien with charges for Vehicular Manslaughter and DUI.” Counsel said she was born in Mexico and has “spent her whole life” in Connecticut.

I’m going to be precise, because the other side will not be if I am sloppy. I have not seen a newsroom document that Connecticut previously had this woman in a cell, got a detainer, and cut her loose. I have not seen a published prior removal order. If that paper exists, put it on the table. Until then I will not invent a movie ending. And I will not claim SB 397 or the Trust Act put her behind the wheel. That case does not prove a direct policy consequence. What it does show is why the administration’s immigration-enforcement priorities deserve scrutiny when an undocumented defendant stands accused in a fatal case.

Q1 2026, in that same DESPP data they love, DUI was one of the numbers that went up. Eight percent. They will tell you the state is safer and skip the line.

The folks listening know the move. When the streets are ugly, they read you a statewide percentage. When the books are ugly, they read you a president’s name.

November 2025, special session. Special Act 25-1. A $500 million Federal Cuts Response Fund, carved out of a $2.5 billion surplus, sold as a bridge because Washington might cut health and human services. December 18, Lamont’s own release: he is tapping the reserve “in response to recent federal funding delays and reductions that have been made by the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans.” Then more extensions and a third plan, same blame line. June 18, Lamont is talking about a $1,000-per-Medicaid-employee levy on big companies because, in his words, he is “trying to think of how I can provide some recurring revenues, not one-time things like we did with the Trump fund.”

They named the fund after the excuse.

Comptroller Sean Scanlon told CT Mirror the Medicaid problem is less overspending than “under budgeting.” DSS blew past the program by hundreds of millions. Connecticut still sits on a multi-hundred-million surplus and a $4 billion rainy-day fund. So which is it? A fiscal crisis inflicted by Donald Trump, or a government that under-budgets its own biggest program while asking for another term?

That’s their muscle memory. Every hard number in this state is either a triumph of smart-on-crime policy or a wound opened in Washington. Never a decision they voted for in the building with the gold dome.

Ryan Fazio said SB 397 would “constrict the ability of law enforcement to arrest or detain people who are not only in the country illegally, but also arrested or convicted of serious felonies.” State officials called that wrong. Vincent Candelora called the May signing “political theater in an election year.” You don’t have to join a campaign to hear the contradiction.

They want the sovereignty. Tong said the word. Capitol, Supreme Court, state laws. They want it when the target is ICE. They drop it when Medicaid comes in hot and the nightclub parking lot is a crime scene. Then the president “supersedes” them. Then they are victims of a man they also say they are resisting with every statute they can pass.

If he really runs Connecticut, why is Ned Lamont on a ballot for a third term? Cook has him favored. He told the cameras after the Elliott primary that the message doesn’t change: he’s the governor, they’ve been doing this seven and a half years, you know what they’re about. Fifteen years of his party. Eight of him. The Trust Act is theirs. The cities are theirs. The budget is theirs. The $500 million sticker that says Trump is theirs.

You cannot be the sovereign of Connecticut on May 4 and a bystander on August 22.

Diaz and Escobar are home. Whiteside and Islami are not. Texidor is not. Goldson and Foreman are not. Nesmith is not. Dunbar and Dawkins are not. The press release is still up.

Here’s the close, and I’m not dressing it up. If you built the rules, you own the results. If you spent a decade-plus writing the rules and the results keep arriving in body bags and bond papers, you don’t get to point at the White House and ask for your job back. You get to explain why the people who already had the power need more of it.