Emails show city leaders warned of NOPD manpower crisis for years

4th May 2015   ·   0 Comments

Despite being warned for several years by former NOPD superintendent about an impending police manpower shortage, The Landrieu administration repeatedly chose to ignore those warnings, WWL-TV reported last week.

Since New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu took office in 2010, the NOPD has lost about 500 officers, bringing its total number of officers to just above 1,100, a 40-year low. As the embattled department deals with a federally mandated consent decree and the fact that it continues to lose officers faster than it can replace them, the new report by WWL-TV suggests that the current NOPD manpower crisis could have been prevented or at least weakened if the Landrieu administration had listened to warnings from then NOPD Supt. Ronal Serpas and took measures to address them.

Although Landrieu introduced Serpas as “the Drew Brees of police chiefs” after naming him NOPD superintendent five years ago, WWL said that the emails it obtained through a public-records request show that the police chief was never really embraced by the Landrieu administration’s inner circle.

Some of the emails appear to support allegations made several months ago by Michael Glasser, president of the Police Association of New Orleans, who accused the mayor in an open letter of creating poor working conditions for NOPD officers by refusing to give the department what it needed to bolster its ranks and prevent additional officers from leaving the department.

In the fall of 2011, the Landrieu administration told Serpas that not only would the NOPD not receive funding to hire additional officers — it would also face personnel budget cuts.

“We should have to reduce (commissioned) personnel by 100 positions by January 1, 2012 to begin (the) year without deficit,” NOPD Deputy Superintendent and Budget Chief Stephanie Landry wrote Serpas in an email.

Later that day, in an email to Deputy Mayors Andy Kopplin and Col. Jerry Sneed, Serpas wrote, “A staffing cut of this sort will also require that we (be)come almost entirely a ‘reactive’ police department.”

A spokesman for the Mayor’s Office told WWL that the police department that he inherited in 2010 would have “literally run out of money in 90-120 days. That would have meant no paychecks for police. No public safety at all.”

Serpas tried repeatedly to come up with a strategy that would make it possible for the NOPD to begin to replenish its dwindling ranks, all of which were rejected by the Landrieu administration.

After sharing several ideas with the administration in September 2011, Serpas was told by Kopplin in an email, “Obviously the City’s finances at present make all of those suggestions impractical at present. As you may recall, the City may have had considerably more officers in May of 2010, but they were not budgeted then or in prior years. The City pretended to have a much less expensive police department which then regularly overshot its budget and we bailed it out with one-time federal money and raided its bank account until both of those disappeared.”

In the same Sept. 16, 2011 email to Serpas, Kopplin challenged the police chief’s observation that the NOPD was undermanned. “I can understand that in an ‘ideal’ situation, these are your recommended scenarios,” Kopplin wrote. “But wouldn’t they all put the City of New Orleans at a significantly higher per capita police force than anywhere else in the country?”

Long before last year’s scandal during which NOPD detectives in the Special Victims Unit failed to follow up on 87 percent of reports of sexual assault between 2011 and 2013, Serpas warned the Landrieu administration of “critical vacancies” and how they would negatively impact the sex crimes unit.

And before last summer’s bloody gun battle on Bourbon Street that claimed the life of a 21-year-old nursing student and wounded eight others and a rash of violent attacks in the French Quarter, Serpas similarly warned the administration of how a manpower shortage would make it difficult for the NOPD to adequately protect the French Quarter.

Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Com­mission, told WWL that the emails show that budgetary goals took precedence over law enforcement and public safety in New Orleans.

“The public safety issue that we’re seeing right now wasn’t created by the police department, it was created by the politicians that governed the police department,” Goyeneche told WWL. “When he (Serpas) makes these recommendations to you and you don’t listen to him, that’s not on the chief, that’s on the people who appoint the chief.”

“This is exactly what we’ve been saying, and at every turn we were ignored,” Glasser told WWL. “Now I see why. What this really tells me is not who was in favor of hiring and who wasn’t but that the destruction of this department has been deliberate. It has been calculated. It was predicted and it was deliberate and they now have exactly what they knew was going to come.”

Glasser said Serpas must share the blame for the dismal state of the NOPD. “People have to make choices,” Glasser said. “And apparently he (Serpas) made the choice to endure this for four years. And while I’m pleased to see that he did try, I’m unhappy at the fact that he was able to go along with it, and endure it, and watch this department deteriorate.”

Despite rejecting Serpas’ repeated requests for funding to hire additional officers, the mayor said he would authorize five NOPD recruit classes in order to hire 150 new officers after being taken to task on the NOPD manpower shortage by mayoral candidate and former Civil Court Judge Michael Bagneris.

Ultimately, the NOPD held two recruit classes last year and added 76 new officers but lost 120 veteran officers in 2014.

The Landrieu administration and NOPD have employed a number of strategies aimed at attracting more recruits including relaxing the residency rule that requires cops, firefighters and EMS workers to live in Orleans Parish, giving bonuses to veteran officers who successfully recruit new officers and doing away with the requirement that said recruits must have completed 60 hours of college credit.

Some police union leaders have cautioned that the removal of the education requirement — which was put in place by Serpas — might “dumb down” the department and civil rights and community leaders warned elected officials about the perils of a less-educated police force having the power of life and death over civilians.

With a series of violent attacks on residents’ minds and Mardi Gras looming, the Landrieu administration pieced together a security plan to boost public safety in the French Quarter that included retired NOPD officers, state troopers, sheriff’s deputies from several parishes and campus police from Tulane University and the University of New Orleans.

Although Mayor Landrieu did not speak to WWL last week, he did issue the following statement: “My administration’s top priority from Day One has been public safety, but when we took office, we faced a $100 million budget gap, no rainy day funds and a police department on the verge of bankruptcy. We made very tough decisions, including drastic spending cuts, furloughing every City employee, cutting City contracts and completely reorganizing how things were done at City Hall. Because of these sacrifices, we were one of the only major police departments in the nation that wasn’t laying off police officers after the recession — and still haven’t to this day.

“We all share the mutual desire to hire more officers, but the dire budget crisis we inherited kept us from doing so until we had the money. When we turned the budget around, we immediately began hiring new officers and completely overhauled the application process to improve it. These changes, plus a more active recruitment campaign, have tripled the number of applicants. Our goal is to have 1,600 officers on the force, and we are aggressively working toward that goal.”

Rafael Goyeneche said the mayor’s statement last week doesn’t match the tone of the emails obtained by WWL. ”What these documents expose is that flawed policies were put in place,” he told WWL. “They weren’t put in place by the police department — they were put in place by the politicians. And now these politicians have done a 180.”

Although Serpas declined a request for comment from WWL, the former superintendent did say that the “emails speak for themselves.”

“This is precisely why you need transparency in local, state and federal government,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly. “This administration has proven repeatedly that it can’t be trusted to adhere to the rules or to be forthcoming with all of the facts.

“Taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent and how and why the decisions that are being made at City Hall are being made.”

In other NOPD news, Bourbon Street businesses are stepping up to fund an off-duty police patrol system that will utilize up to five off-duty cops and is slated to begin June 1.

The Bourbon Street Patrol is the latest in a series of steps taken by city and business leaders to keep French Quarter residents, workers, businesses and visitors safe. Other efforts include businessman Sidney Torres’ creation of an App that people in the French Quarter can use to report criminal activity the use of funds donated by tourism industry officials to pay for extra protection from the Louisiana State Police.

Last year, the Landrieu administration announced the formation of a Civilian Patrol Unit to free up NOPD officers to address more serious crime issues, but French Quarter business owners rejected that idea and said the money would be better.

This article originally published in the May 4, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.