When Detective Karli Travis of the Middletown Police Dept. in Connecticut went to check out a noise complaint on August 12, she soon found herself fighting for her life and panic-shooting her firearm at 52-year-old Winston Tate, who charged at her wielding a hammer.
But she shouldn’t have been in that situation at all. Tate, a disturbed veteran of the war in Iraq, has a criminal history dating back to 1995 including two prior arrests for assaulting a police officer in 2017 and 2020. Despite this, Tate was released back onto the street on probation after only serving a year. This was most due to policies enacted in the state to institutionalize people with mental health issues without any services to help them outside of prison.
Tate was clearly mentally ill. According to Fox News, previous interactions with police proved Tate to be “manic” as he displayed “uncooperative behavior.”
Nothing was done, and Travis, a woman half the size of Tate, nearly died as she was bludgeoned with a hammer as she attempted to fire her weapon at him. Her panicked screams and Tate’s aggressive shouting are haunting.
The bodycam footage was released to the public and you can watch it below. Be warned, the footage is disturbing.
Female police officer attacked with a hammer by 57-year-old Winston Tate who was on probation for attacking another officer in 2020.
He survived so he might do it again as Connecticut is another pro-criminal, easy on crime leftist cesspool. pic.twitter.com/tPGKwPRdwQ
— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) August 16, 2023
Despite Travis hitting Tate with several rounds, Tate managed to survive and even appear in court under his own power. He was charged with first-degree assault, second-degree assault, assault on public safety personnel, and interfering with police. Despite Tate having no financial ability to bail himself out, Judge Elizabeth Leaming raised his bail from $500,000 to $850,000 to help ensure he doesn’t walk free again.
Upon the judge’s ruling, Tate reportedly attempted to strip his prison garb off himself.
Travis also survived but required stitches and sports multiple bruises. Reports say she’s resting comfortably at home and is expected to fully recover according to the Hartford Courant.
According to the Connecticut Sentencing Commission, over 95 percent of those incarcerated in Connecticut have a history of either mental illness or substance abuse. Nearly a quarter of the prison population suffers a combination of the two.
Despite this, Democrat-controlled Connecticut proudly sports criminal justice reforms that instituted years ago that allow the mentally ill to roam free, even being released from prison, but with no safety nets or help for them after the fact.
“I’m reminded of deinstitutionalization from mental health institutions years ago, where we are undoing the failures of the past but not replacing them with more effective strategies that can keep the community safer in a more effective way,” said Democrat Mayor Ben Florsheim according to the Stamford Advocate.
“We can’t make new laws without follow-up on good programming,” said Middletown Police Chief Erik Costa. “We have to believe that everything that we do in government is for the best outcome for our citizens to be safer. I think we are seeing that is definitely a hurdle … across our state.”
Democrat’s soft-on-crime policies continue to prove to be dangerous to everyone, be they a normal citizen, a police officer, or even the mentally ill. Tate should not have been on the street to begin with, yet Connecticut passed reforms that effectively keep people out of prison, reducing their inmate population drastically.
While criminal justice reforms aren’t necessarily a bad thing, reforms created to simply make a state look better when it comes to its incarceration rates only serve to endanger everyone, especially when these policies aren’t followed up with services for people like Tate. While he shouldn’t have been out of prison to begin with, the least the state could do is ensure that this clearly troubled man could get the necessary help he needs.
Yet, we continue to see this serious lack of common sense from Democrat politicians. In fact, according to a 2021 article from NPR, Connecticut Democrats outright refused to admit that it even had a crime problem while Republicans were providing data proving that there is a problem and it’s growing:
Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, ticked off the statistics on the boards behind him — 2021 figures, to date, he compiled from city police department reports and compared to the previous year. A 61% increase in murders in Hartford. A 37.5% increase in New Haven. And in Waterbury, a 28.6% uptick in homicides and 23% increase in car thefts.
“It calls for a response. We shouldn’t be playing this numbers game, ‘Well, I think it went down, or it went up,’” Kelly said after Senate Republicans released their own response for dealing with crime, a three-part plan focusing on reforms to the juvenile and adult justice systems, creating job opportunities and making changes to Section 8 housing and rolling back what they see as overreaches in a landmark police accountability bill passed in the summer following the murder of George Floyd.
But there is a problem and Connecticut isn’t the only state experiencing it. Stories like Travis’s are too common, and the vast majority aren’t caught on camera.
This is the Democrat Party’s America.
