NOPD takes heat for slow response times
2nd November 2015 · 0 Comments
The undermanned New Orleans Police Department is again being criticized for slow response times to calls for assistance. Not only are NOPD response times long, but records show that those response times have gotten progressively longer over the past three years.
An analysis of NOPD calls for assistance conducted by Nola.com/The Times Picayune and FOX 8 News found that the average wait for the police to dispatch an officer to the scene of a crime was 73 minutes, more than four times the average dispatch time of 15 minutes in 2011.
Data showed that the wait time was decidedly longer in certain parts of the city like eastern New Orleans, where the average wait exceeded two hours. The lowest wait time was 36 minutes in the 70131 zip code in Algiers.
The wait time was even worse for victims of nonviolent crimes. Burglary victims, for example, routinely wait more than four hours for police assistance. On the flip side, homicides and armed robberies usually get an officer dispatched in eight and 19 minutes respectively.
“I knew that when I accepted this position that response times were not where they should be (and) not nearly where we want them to be,” NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison told Nola.com last week. “It’s unacceptable.”
NOPD officials often blame the longer wait times on a historic, 40-year manpower shortage and changes and procedures the department must adhere to as part of the federally mandated NOPD consent decree aimed at bringing the department up to federal standards for constitutional policing.
Harrison said last week that longer response times have been an “unintended consequence” of implementing NOPD reforms including the mandate that officers spend more time on individual calls, that they clear a call before responding to another request for assistance and that they perform a detailed list of tasks before leaving the scene of a crime.
“As the consent decree gets implemented and more and more administrative burdens are added to a shrinking police department, you should expect it to get worse,” NOPD Captain Michael Glasser, president of the Police Association of New Orleans, told Nola.com.
Harrison said NOPD brass have been meeting with the consent decree’s federal monitor to see if the department could alter some of the requirements of the 492-point decree in order to reduce response times.
Another possible cause of the longer response times may be ongoing issues with low officer morale that surfaced several months ago after an open letter from a police union leader to New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu that accused the mayor of turning his back on the NOPD. The letter talked about the Landrieu administration’s creation of a new off-duty detail system, the use of other law enforcement agencies to perform tasks once assigned to NOPD officers, low pay and longer working hours.
“Those (response) times are not acceptable, but they are not a surprise,” Landrieu said on WWL Radio last week. “People are acting like it’s a surprise when we have a manpower shortage.”
Several months ago, a WWL story revealed that former NOPD Supt. Ronal Serpas had been warning top officials in the Landrieu administration for years about the current manpower shortage crisis but that those warnings were largely dismissed or ignored.
“If you recall, mismanagement of the NOPD and failure to improve public safety were issues raised by mayoral candidates Danatus King and former Judge Michael Bagneris last year,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly Thursday. “But those concerns were brushed aside and downplayed by the incumbent mayor — New Orleans voters re-elected him anyway.
“Now the failure to properly manage the NOPD, attract enough quality officers and get the job done have come back to haunt us all as we have to be fearful every time we step out of our homes and even as we sleep in what used to be the safety of our homes. That’s unacceptable, whether you live in Lakeview or eastern New Orleans.”
This article originally published in the November 2, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
