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10/13/2020 02:30 PMJoe LaPorta is a Republican running for the 12th District State Senate seat, representing six towns along the shoreline. An engineer by trade, LaPorta is challenging incumbent Democrat Christine Cohen, who took the seat in a special election back in 2018.
A relative political newcomer, LaPorta has been a member of the Republican Town Committee in Madison since 2017 and currently works in field operations for Eversource.
Though LaPorta admitted that the ongoing pandemic is rightfully the center of everyone’s attention during this election season, he said that part of his candidacy is envisioning what the state will look like when it returns to “business as usual, in some way, shape, or form.”
Post-Pandemic
“My concern is when we go back to that, how are we going to make ourselves a stronger Connecticut?” LaPorta said. “So that when we have a future incident like this, we are better able to withstand and address it.”
A seismic shift in the way people work, whether fully or partly remote, is an opportunity to create efficiencies and cost savings particularly in government, LaPorta said. Combined with how government programs and agencies struggled to address the huge influx of people seeking services like unemployment or small business loans, LaPorta said he thinks Connecticut is ripe for a rethinking of those functions.
“We are fortunate right now that we’re getting a lot of people that are moving here from New York,” LaPorta said. “I think that’s great. But I think we also need to think about now is the future of work, [which] I think is going to change.”
LaPorta all these factors together present an “opportunity,” and that lawmakers could make Connecticut a destination for both business and residency if they work to make the state “just a little bit cheaper” to live in.
Police Accountability
One of the issues that has caused some of the most fiery and emotional responses from voters on the shoreline is the recent push to reform policing, culminating in a police accountability bill passed late this summer.
In response to conversations about abuse by law enforcement and racial justice around the country, that bill enacted a series of reforms, adding more oversight to police departments and made changes to qualified immunity, which protects officers from legal liability if they violate people’s constitutional or statutory rights.
LaPorta has consistently said he opposes the bill, and added that he does not perceive a structural or systemic problem with policing in the state.
Increased training for officers, a part of the bill, is something LaPorta said he would support generally, though of requirements for implicit bias training included in the bill—training that seeks to “recognize and mitigate” officers’ unconscious biases against “a particular segment of the population”—LaPorta said he wanted to do more research on before he endorsed.
“If it’s training you basically on how you process information and how you process your thoughts and things like that, it’s something that I would be open to,” LaPorta said.
Overall, LaPorta said he wanted law enforcement to have “a seat at the table” and allow officers to offer ideas for what “they could reasonably do to improve themselves,” while also still listening to other stakeholders with concerns about policing.
“That’s the issue I think right now is we hastily rushed through this bill which has some...glaring faults, and I think the pushback not only from our officers from our towns calls [that] to question,” LaPorta said.
If change does need to be made, LaPorta said it would be essentially impossible without the “buy-in” of those affected- namely, officers themselves.
Advocates for reform have pointed out how rarely police suffer consequences for shootings or reckless behavior, either shielded by use of force laws or cleared by internal investigations. Police have contended that it is untenable and counter-productive to second guess decisions made in high pressure situations, and that over-regulating will put people at risk.
Officers who have killed Black people in the state in recent years—notably State Trooper Brian North, who shot and killed 19 year-old Mubarack Soulemane this year, and Bridgeport officer James Boulay, who killed 15 year-old Jayson Negron in 2017—have not been fired or charged with crimes.
LaPorta, who recently attended a special use of force training for lawmakers with Madison police, said he thought that there were already plenty of mechanisms to hold “bad apples” accountable, and said that individuals, not the police as a whole, should be prosecuted for bad behavior.
Regionalization
Another subject that has sparked controversy on the shoreline is regionalization. The state has a handful of times discussed some sort of “forced regionalization,” which LaPorta said he would never support.
“I’m a big advocate for local control. I think the closer that decisions are made to the point where the services are rendered, the better,” he said.
Education, another area rife with inequalities, is something LaPorta said he saw the potential for some regionalizing initiatives in the 12th District—again, as long as decisions come from the local level. He cited “success stories” of charter schools and school choice initiatives, which he said could potentially address the lack of resources in a city like New Haven and simultaneously help districts like Clinton and Madison, which have seen declining enrollment in recent years.
But no one should force towns into these initiatives, he said, even if they were demonstrably cheaper or more efficient.
“At the end of the day, maybe Madison decides that they want to spend more money on their schools,” he said. “And Madison should have that right.”
School choice specifically has become more important during the pandemic, LaPorta said, with every district offering different schedules or formats between hybrid, in-person, and remote learning. Being able to find the kind of school that fits a family’s needs the best will always be important, even beyond the current, unique circumstances that schools are in, LaPorta said.
“I think the solution is, we need to give parents the opportunity to leave failing school districts and bring their kid somewhere [else],” he said.
As a broad concept, LaPorta said regionalization, like many other issues facing the state, is a matter of efficiency. Outside of schools, he said he saw there were opportunities for towns in the 12th District to do that, and that people would be well-served by things like resource and equipment sharing between towns.
But he emphasized again that even these smaller decisions should originate at the town level.
“I think that applies to everything,” LaPorta said. “If I have an issue, I walk across the street and I can talk to [a local official]. That’s awesome, that’s great, and I think people in Connecticut want to keep that.”