Council focuses on NOPD staffing and pay raises
10th November 2014 · 0 Comments
With a dwindling police force and the Louisiana state troopers preparing to end their four-month stay in New Orleans, NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison went before the City Council on Oct. 31 to discuss the budget proposed for his department in 2015, FOX 8 News reported.
“Year to date, we’ve lost 103 officers and have hired a total of 51 recruits and six re-instatements,” Harrison told the council.
At last count, there were 1,144 officers on the rolls, and the department hopes to raise that number to 1,204 by the end of next year.
FOX 8 News reported that the nearly $130 million budget that Mayor Mitch Landrieu wants the council to approve for the NOPD includes money for a five percent pay raise for police officers, but spokesmen from the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Association of New Orleans also attended the meeting and told the council that it needs to go further to boost officer morale, end the “blue hemorrhaging” and attract new police recruits. They asked the council to approve the 20 percent pay hike that the city’s Civil Service Commission has recommended.
“Officers aren’t coming here and officers are leaving because they can’t afford to work here any longer, it’s that simple,” PANO spokesman Eric Hessler told the council.
“Ten percent in 2015, five percent in 2016, and five percent, that would be a start,” FOP spokesman Jim Gallagher said.
“The pay raise is not just about officers wanting more money, they want more officers, and the way to do that is with a more robust pay raise,” Simon Hargrove, a member of the Black Organization of Police, told the council.
Councilwoman Stacy Head said pension costs account for a significant part of the budget.
“If benefits are increased to a point where it overburdens the city’s fisc [fiscal picture], it will, in fact, impact our ability to pay the men and women more money today,” she said.
Harrison said he will hire a consultant in 2015 to assess the department’s resources, including staffing and personnel, and make recommendations about how the NOPD could more efficiently and effectively utilize those resources. He also said that he’d like to expand community policing in an effort to improve the NOPD’s relationship with the community it serves.
“Relationships have been tarnished, but we’re in the process of fixing that,” Harrison told FOX 8. “We want to change the culture of the police department. …Community engagement and community policing is not the absence of enforcement – and we want to be clear about that with the officers and clear about that with the community — not the absence of enforcement, but the approach is not tough on the people, it’s tough on the problem.”
The New Orleans City Council must approve a balanced city budget by Dec.2, 2014.
As they sought additional funds for pay raises, it also began to deal with the scheduled departure of the Louisiana State Police, which agreed to provide the City of New Orleans with additional support in the wake of a French Quarter shooting this summer that claimed the life of one woman and left nine others wounded.
They were initially scheduled to end their deployment in New Orleans after Labor Day weekend but agreed to extend their stay through the end of October after the bloody Bourbon Street shooting in late June.
The extra support provided by state troopers allowed an undermanned [police department to focus on getting a handle on violent crime.
Earlier this year, the New Orleans City Council agreed to relax the residency rule in order to allow the City to recruit cops, firefighters and EMS workers from neighboring parishes. More recently, CNO officials have been granted permission by the state AG to give current NOPD officers $1,000 to successfully recruit new officers.
Although money was budgeted to add 150 officers to the NOPD’s shrinking force, the department is reportedly losing officers faster than it can replace them.
The Landrieu administration has also launched a program that would recruit and train civilians to patrol the French Quarter, again, a move that would allow NOPD officers to tackle more serious situations.
That program, which had planned to utilize $2.5 million in hotel taxes to hire and train civilian patrol officers, was shot down by French Quarter business owners who thought that money might be better spent hiring actual NOPD officers.
In their final pre-shift meeting in the Quarter, State Police Col. Mike Edmonson told his troopers, “I want to be just as aggressive, I want to be just as proactive. I want to make sure that we’re asking the same questions.”
Edmonson spoke with pride earlier this month about the law enforcement agency’s performance in New Orleans over the past four months.
“We have over 3,800 calls for service,” Edmonson told FOX 8. “That means 3,800 times that we went and serviced a call….the city of New Orleans did not have to.”
During their latest deployment in New Orleans, state police say they removed 56 illegal weapons and $2 million worth of drugs from the streets. They also gained the respect of residents and business owners.
“It’s a security thing,” resident Doreen Ketchens told FOX 8. “it feels good, you feel empowered so yeah, I’m gonna miss them.”
“It’s a sad day to see the state troopers leave,” Huey Farrell, manager of Bourbon Heat nightclub, said last week. “They’ve been a great asset to everybody here on Bourbon Street and in the French Quarter all summer long.”
Col. Edmonson talked last week about the LSP’s efforts to support the undermanned NOPD and keep residents and tourists safe over the summer months. An additional 100 state troopers were deployed to New Orleans over the last four months/
“The original plan was to be here about a month,” he told FOX 8 “We wanted to work with the City of New Orleans so they could actually figure out who committed that murder, so we came here and we extended it another month and we extended it another month and the bottom line is, we can’t just keep extending it.”
Edmonson said LSP concerns about manpower and its own budget made it necessary for the law enforcement agency to pull its additional troopers out of the city.
Ironically, the month of October ended with a Halloween night stabbing on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter.
Residents are understandably concerned about a rash of recent incidents in the French Quarter over the past few weeks. One of those incidents involved a brutal assault and attempted robbery on a man as people watched and several cars drove by. another involved a violent hate crime that targeted a same-sex couple walking through the French Quarter. Both incidents were caught on videotape.
“You hate to see them go but you do realize that at some point they would have had to leave and get back to their normal routine,” resident Monique Haynes told The Louisiana Weekly. “We’re grateful for the extra help but also understand that all things eventually have to come to an end.
The reason the LSP deployment ended this month is a shortage of manpower and budgetary concerns. Edmonson says there are more NOPD officers on staff than troopers that patrol the entire state.
Even before the additional 100 officers were sent to New Orleans, Louisiana Gov. Piyush Jindal said that the Louisiana State Police were stretched thin and had other obligations that made it difficult to commit to assigning extra personnel to help out in the city.
Edmonson said that while the additional 100 state troopers would be assigned other duties that would take them out of New Orleans, the state troopers will maintain a presence in the Crescent City, with about 44 of those working out of Kenner-based Troop B continuing to provide public safety to the New Orleans area.
The LSP superintended added that additional state troopers would be assigned to New Orleans to cover major events like the Bayou Classic, Christmas holidays and the local bowl games.
This article originally published in the November 10, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
