State police: Woman facing charges after filing false racial profiling complaint
Wethersfield — A Mansfield woman is facing charges after state police say she falsely claimed she was a victim of racial profiling that led to a May traffic stop in which she received a ticket.
Minati Roychoudhuri was charged Tuesday with one count of making a false statement to police in the second-degree, according to state police. Roychoudhuri was released on a $1,000 non-surety bond and has a court date of Aug. 14 in Hartford Superior Court on the charge.
State police said Roychoudhuri's arrest stems from a daytime traffic stop on Route 5/15 in Wethersfield on May 9 when Roychoudhuri was issued an infraction for an unsafe lane change. After receiving the infraction ticket, state police said, Roychoudhuri wrote a complaint letter to state police Commissioner Dora Schriro "alleging she was stopped and issued the infraction based upon the illegal practice of racial profiling."
Roychoudhuri's complaint triggered a state police internal affairs investigation against the trooper who stopped her. Trooper First Class Kelly Grant said that the investigation concluded that Roychoudhuri's statement about what occurred during the stop did not match with a video recording captured on the trooper's dashboard camera.
Grant said that complaints against troopers are not uncommon, but for one to lead to criminal charges was rare.
"Every now and then people do make a complaint, more so because they are angry because they received a ticket," Grant said. "In this case she persisted and insisted that the trooper did all these things and made all these comments, not realizing that there was a dashboard cam."
Grant said the internal investigation cleared the trooper.
Roychoudhuri is an associate professor at Capital Community College, according to the college's website. A message left on her home answering machine was not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.
A yearlong study of police traffic stops in Connecticut released in April identified 10 police departments and two state police barracks – including Troop H in Hartford, where the trooper who stopped Roychoudhuri was based - where there appeared to be racial disparities in who gets pulled over.
The state-mandated study, described as the first of its kind in the nation, stopped short of flatly confirming claims that racial profiling is occurring in Connecticut.
But the authors recommended additional reviews of traffic stops to see if individual officers or local policies may be responsible for data that indicate blacks and Hispanics were being stopped more frequently than whites.
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