Aug. 17—I am no prude.
And I understand that language around a police station might get a little bawdy, even raunchy, at times. Officers are not baking cakes for church suppers.
Still, this is 2022, and we've all come to expect decent language and behavior in the workplace. Even police officers should be assured that they won't be regularly exposed to sexual language that makes them uncomfortable, and certainly they should not be asked by a superior about what kind of sexual acts they practice.
And yet, incredibly, that's exactly what New London officer Jeffrey Kalolo claims happened to him, over a period many months, in the spring, summer and fall of 2019, when then police Capt. Brian Wright, now the chief, would allegedly harass him with lewd descriptions of homosexual sex while they were alone together in a shift commander's office.
Kalolo alleges the chief would ask him very graphic questions about sexual acts, with lewd anatomical descriptions of gay intercourse. He also claims Wright asked him a series of specific questions about whether he liked to engage in those acts and also used hand gestures to describe the imagined sex.
Furthermore, Kalolo says in a lawsuit he filed in July against the city, and also in an earlier complaint he filed with the city, that he frequently told Wright he felt "uncomfortable" with the conversation "in the hopes the unwanted and inappropriate remarks and gestures would stop."
The new Superior Court lawsuit is the first time the allegations of Chief Wright's "persistent sexualized remarks and overtures" have surfaced publicly.
The city, in suspending the police chief in the fall, after Kalolo's first complaint was filed, and then in reinstating him, after a review of the matter by a private attorney, has refused to say exactly what Wright was accused of.
Copies of the original complaint against him and a written executive summary of an oral report by the private attorney were both so heavily redacted it was impossible to follow the narratives of what they said.
Complaints by The Day over the redactions are pending before the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission.
Kalolo's attorney, Bryan Fiengo, of the New London law firm Suisman, Shapiro, Wool, Brennan, Gray & Greenberg, told me the police chief's persistent remarks to his client were "supremely offensive."
Officer Kalolo will necessarily, as part of his lawsuit, have to make his allegations about the harassment under oath, in depositions or testimony.