Mayor says he warned about NOPD funding problems
11th May 2015 · 0 Comments
After a recent news story that showed emails from several years ago that warned of the current NOPD manpower shortage, the mayor decided last week to tell his side of the story to WWL. While the original story suggested that those warnings were routinely ignored by the administration, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu says that he had in fact warned the police superintendent of the NOPD’s dire financial straits.
Landrieu told WWL last week that the crisis came amid a cascade of competing budget wildfires that left him largely handcuffed.
In an exclusive one-on-one interview with WWL-TV, Landrieu defended his decisions to override then-NOPD Supt. Ronal Serpas and maintain an NOPD hiring freeze, portraying a city on the brink of bankruptcy.
“We found ourselves on an emergency room table gasping for breath,” Landrieu said in the interview.
Landrieu said he told Serpas about severe budget limitations even as he was offering him the job to return to his hometown police department following a national search.
“I brought him in,” Landrieu said, “and I was really clear with him. And I said, ‘Let me explain where you are coming to. This is not the New Orleans that you left. We’re in a cataclysmic downfall. Not only are you not going to have everything you need, you’re not going to have most of what you need.’ “
Once Serpas was sworn in as police chief, a series of emails between him and Landrieu’s top advisors shows increasing alarm over the dwindling number of officers.
Those emails were ultimately obtained by WWL in a public-records request.
When Serpas took the job, he inherited 1,540 cops. But after a two-year hiring freeze, plus unchecked attrition, troop strength decreased every year Landrieu has been in office. Manpower now stands at 1,144.
Last year, the NOPD added 76 new officers but lost 120 cops, which underscores the fact that the department continues to lose officers faster than it can replace them,
WWL reported that in some emails, Serpas’ warnings were very specific. He issued red flags about “critical vacancies” in the sex crimes unit, which was blasted in an Inspector General’s report last year showing a lack of follow-up in more than 1,000 sex crimes and child abuse complaints.
He warned about slower response times, which also was the subject of a critical Office of Inspector General report last year.
And in an email in January 2012, Serpas warned that he didn’t have the proper funding to adequately patrol the French Quarter, where 60 state troopers are now extending their tour of duty indefinitely to assist NOPD’s depleted forces.
“A staffing cut of this sort will also require that we come almost entirely a ‘reactive’ police department,” Serpas wrote when he saw his 2012 budget numbers.
In spite of the NOPD’s dwindling ranks, Landrieu pointed out that the NOPD budget increased every year, even while other departments were being cut. But city records show that the budget bumps didn’t even match rising pension and health care costs, leaving the number of officers shrinking.
Landrieu said enhancing the budget for NOPD — by far the largest department in the city — was no easy task given that the department’s overspending was one of the biggest contributors to the budget crunch.
“The truth of the matter is, at that particular time, the worst offending department was the police department. They were in fact, out of money. They had overspent their overtime. They had overspent their budget. They had zero money on October first. That was the state that we found ourselves in,” Landrieu said.
In some of his most candid comments since he was elected, Landrieu admitted there was no way out of the red except to endure painful belt-tightening.
“Going forward (was) going to take tremendous sacrifice. Sacrifice means things are going to take longer, they’re going to cost more, it’s going to hurt more, services are going to be reduced,” he said.
While nobody in City Hall was happy with the tight budgets, some of the emails raise questions about whether Landrieu’s top officials agreed with Serpas on the proper size of the department.
In one key email exchange in September 2011, Landrieu’s Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin, brushed off Serpas’ concerns, stating that even with another round of troop reductions, NOPD would be better staffed on a per-capita basis than most big-city police departments.
Landrieu recalled the “academic debate” over the appropriate size of the NOPD. But he said he that because of the city’s sprawling footprint and year-round tourist population, he ultimately settled on an “aspirational” troop strength of 1,600.
In the emails, Serpas stated that his data-crunching projected an ideal police force of 1,575.
The NOPD is far behind those numbers, but Landrieu stood behind his budget decisions.
“I was fully aware of Chief Serpas’ thoughts. He was operating at my direction, as do all of the other department heads, in terms of do the best you with the limited amount of money that you have,” he said. “And it was ultimately my decision that I made with great clarity. I wish we wouldn’t have had to make the decision. That’s like asking me, ‘Which one of your children do you want to lose in a difficult circumstance when there’s only one life vest?’ “
Landrieu put it another way, again in the form of a question.
“If I had to choose between what I did and keeping the kids out of the pools, so that I kept them off the street and kept them safe, or giving the firefighters what they needed to protect people’s houses from burning down, or for the budget?”
“I would have done the same thing.”
Landrieu said the city has taken concrete steps to try to build the force up to his stated goal of 1,600 officers. He cited the recent NOPD recruitment campaign, lifting the residency requirement for applicants, 400 new police cars, and a five percent raise for officers.
Strategies to boost the NOPD’s ranks have included relaxing the city’s residency rule that requires cops, firefighters and EMS workers to live in Orleans Parish, giving bonuses to veteran cops who successfully recruit new officers and eliminating city hiring rules that require police recruits to have completed 60 hours of college credit.
Despite the force decreasing through the first part of 2015, “we’re moving in the right direction,” Landrieu said. “Three years ago we weren’t hiring, we didn’t have a pay raise, we didn’t have any recruit classes. We now have the pipeline moving.”
Landrieu repeatedly cited the NOPD’s five recruit classes since he became mayor, and compared that to the two academy classes held by the Louisiana State Police over the same time period.
A close comparison actually highlights the tough task ahead for NOPD.
While the NOPD lost 393 officers since 2010, the State Police lost only 70. And while the two State Police academy classes added 104 troopers, the five NOPD classes added roughly the same number, 106.
One reason for the slow pace of hiring is a cap on academy class size of 32 recruits, a number dictated by the federal consent decree to ensure quality training and a sufficient ratio of instructors to recruits.
For the first time, Landrieu revealed his administration’s plan to deal with the cap: try to get it lifted.
“We’ll go to the federal judge and say, ‘Listen, we really have got to find a way to have bigger recruit classes,’” he said. “Will you let us do that? We’ll be asking the judge to let that happen.”
But even if U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan, who is presiding over the NOPD consent decree, lifts the cap, the city’s training facilities are limited. At present, the academy can only accommodate two classes simultaneously.
To address that problem, Landrieu said the city has been considering a variety of options.
“We have been now, for many, many months, looking for a new facility,” he said. “But again, when you say that, that costs a lot of money. Brand new facility for the police costs about $30 million. So we’re looking for other spaces to do it. That shouldn’t be that complicated.”
Landrieu said one final option to add police officers is to increase revenues for that specific purpose.
“And if we get to the point where we have to go to the public and ask them for more money, they’re going to have to decide whether they want to do it,” Landrieu said.
One thing Landrieu made clear in the interview is that he prefers to look forward rather than backward, a jab directed toward the critics —such as the police unions — who have questioned his decisions.
“We can argue until the cows come home, but once a decision is made, we’ve all got to get on the same team. That’s how the Saints win the Super Bowl. You don’t have the running back trying to tackle the quarterback. That’s what’s happening in this situation. That’s got to stop.”
WWL-TV sought comment from former Superintendent Ronal Serpas about his email warnings, but he declined comment.
This article originally published in the May 11, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
