Former New Haven Police Chief Nicholas Pastore, a product of the pre-Urban Renewal Hill neighborhood who implemented groundbreaking reforms decades before America embraced them as conventional wisdom, died Tuesday at the age of 87.
He died of natural causes, according to Kay Codish, a close friend and former director of Pastore’s revamoed New Haven police training academy.
A complicated, larger-than-life figure, Pastore was mourned as a trailblazer whose ideas continue to guide how New Haven addresses criminal justice.
“He was the father of community policing,” current Chief Karl Jacobson said, noting that neighborhood-level and community-partnering policies Pastore pioneered in the 1990s continue to this day as a foundation of New Haven policing…