NOPD hires more officers than it loses in 2016
3rd January 2017 · 0 Comments
As the severely undermanned NOPD continues to try to bolster its ranks with new officers, the fourth and final recruit class of 2016 began its training Wednesday.
WWL News reported that the 10 recruits of class 179 were joined by a prior class Wednesday morning when NOPD Superintendent Michael Harris addressed the new team.
“We want to thank you for being here,” Harrison said.
Harrison said the department, which has been under a federally mandated consent decree aimed at overhauling it from top to bottom, is facing challenges to bring in new people.
“Finding the brightest candidates who want to be police officers, with the way how the country is right now with anti-policing, there are so many who are second guessing who want to be a part of this profession,” Harrison told WWL.
Harrison said this is the first year the department has hired more officers than it lost; 114 were added after they lost about 100 through attrition.
The Landrieu administration has said the NOPD needs about 1,600 officers to keep the city safe. The department, which has lost about 400 officers to retirement, termination and defections since New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu took office in 2010, currently has about 1,150 officers.
In recent years, the City of New Orleans and the NOPD have used a number of strategies to offset its undermanned police force including the deployment of Louisiana state troopers to New Orleans, the creation of a civilian force to help out with minor problems in the French Quarter, and the use of local sheriff’s deputies, retired NOPD officers and campus police from UNO and Tulane University to bolster the NOPD’s ranks during special events like Mardi Gras.
The City has also convinced the New Orleans City Council to relax the residency rule that requires cops, firefighters and EMS workers to live in Orleans Parish and the Civil Service Commission to do away with the requirement that new police recruits have completed 60 hours of college credit. Finally, the City and NOPD have given bonuses to veteran officers for successfully recruiting new officers.
While the NOPD remains below its manpower goals, Harrison said incentives such as pay raises could help attract future recruits.
“We work very hard recruiting, we have one of the most robust recruiting processes in America,” Harrison said.
WWL reported that some of the new recruits are from out of state.
“This class I believe, close to half are from out of state who moved in the city because they found interest in the city,” Harrison explained.
Class 179 is expected to graduate in the summer of 2017.
In other NOPD news, the Civil Service Commission recently rejected a request from the Police Association of New Orleans to secure pay raises for all NOPD detectives. Nola.com reported that the New Orleans Police Department backed the Civil Service Commission’s decision on Dec. 19.
PANO sought the across-the-board pay raise for NOPD detectives after the Commission gave a pay raise to detectives in the special victims section, but NOPD and CSC officials said that pay raise was intended to recruit detectives to the troubled, understaffed unit after a scathing Inspector General report exposed serious problems in the unit’s handling of complaints of sexual assault.
PANO president and NOPD Capt. Michael Glasser told Nola.com that while he requested pay raises for all NOPD detectives, homicide detectives in particular deserve a bump in pay. The number of homicide detectives has dropped from 29 in 2014 to 20 this year.
“I think that would help stop the bleeding,” Glasser said.
Glasser said that while the NOPD is having some success bringing in new recruits, the number of skilled and experienced detectives in the homicide unit continues to shrink.
“It’s trending in a bad direction,” Glasser told Nola.com. “I’m trying to stop this before it becomes a critical mass.”
This article originally published in the January 2, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
