The top two leaders of Connecticut State Police will be stepping down in the middle of multiple investigations into whether troopers submitted bogus data on thousands of traffic stops that may have never happened, Gov. Ned Lamont said Wednesday.
State public safety Commissioner James Rovella and Col. Stavros Mellekas, commanding officer of state police, will be retiring, Lamont said at an unrelated news conference. A formal announcement came later in the day. The Democratic governor said Rovella and Mellekas were not being forced to leave.
Lamont said Rovella is retiring next month from state service and he will be nominating Ronnell A. Higgins, who is currently at Yale University, to succeed Commissioner Rovella immediately upon his retirement.
Higgins currently serves with Yale University as associate vice president for public safety and community engagement, a position he has held since June 2022.
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Lamont said Higgins will identify a successor to serve in Mellekas' role.
Commissioner Rovella has served as the head of DESPP throughout the duration of the Lamont administration, which began in January 2019.
The change in leadership comes at a time when U.S. Department of Justice investigators are looking into whether dozens of state troopers falsified information about traffic stops that were never made. There also is an independent investigation ordered by Lamont that is being led by a former federal prosecutor.
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Rovella said Wednesday his stepping down did not have to do with the investigation.
“We had a conversation, it was included, but it was not the driving force behind this,” he said.
The information in question was entered into a database that tracks the race and ethnicity of drivers stopped by police, under a Connecticut law aimed at preventing racial profiling.
Auditors said the alleged false data was more likely to identify motorists as white, which skewed the race and ethnicity data collected to compile statewide reports. The reports have shown nonetheless that Black and Hispanic drivers are pulled over at disproportionate rates compared with white motorists.
In August, the state police union voted no confidence in both Rovella and Mellekas, accusing them of not defending troopers against allegations involving the traffic stop data.
Rovella was confirmed by state lawmakers in February 2019 to serve as commissioner of the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, which oversees state police. He’s been in law enforcement for four decades, including as a homicide detective and the chief for Hartford police.
Mellekas joined the state police as a trooper in 1994 and worked his way up to become commanding officer in 2019. He previously worked as a police officer at the U.S. Capitol.
An audit released by University of Connecticut data analysts in June found a “high degree of confidence” that troopers submitted false information on citations for at least 25,966 traffic stops, and possibly more than 58,000 stops, that may have never happened from 2014 to 2021.
Auditors said information on those stops could not be found in the state's court system, which handles all traffic violations — leading to the conclusion that data was likely falsified.
Auditors said 130 troopers had “significant disparities” between the number of citations they sent to the court system and higher numbers entered into the race and ethnicity database. They said a total of 311 troopers had discrepancies in at least one of the years audited.
The data analysts, however, cautioned that they did not try to determine whether the records were intentionally falsified or were wrong due to carelessness or human error.
The Connecticut State Police Union has cautioned against making any conclusions about troopers’ conduct before the investigations are complete. It says more than two dozen troopers already have been cleared of wrongdoing in connection with the traffic citation data, and it expects more to be cleared.
Union officials have said many discrepancies found in the audit could be due to recordkeeping or data entry errors.
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