New NOPD unit takes aim at gun violence

After witnessing a rise in the number of murders committed in 2016 and a steep uptick in gun violence this year, the NOPD is taking steps to turn things around. Just weeks after unveiling a new $40 million plan to address the city’s crime problem in the French Quarter and throughout the city, NOPD officials announced last week the creation of a new unit aimed at addressing the rise in gun violence.

At a press conference Monday, NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison told reporters that the new unit — which currently consists of eight officers and one sergeant — will focus on those who carry and use illegal guns.

“We’re going to take the fight to the bad guys instead of waiting for the bad guys,” Harrison promised.

If desperate times call for desperate measures, the 110 people wounded by gunfire in New Orleans through March 5 — an 86 percent increase over the same period last year — certainly warrant a different approach to getting a handle on gun violence.

According to Nola.com/The Times-Picayune, homicides involving gunfire have reached 32 thus far in 2017, twice the 16 fatal shootings during the same period last year.

Nonfatal shootings involving gunfire rose almost seven percent in 2016, compared to 2015 and homicides involving guns rose nearly five percent to 156 last year.

The numbers show that the NOPD has struggled to get perpetrators of fatal and nonfatal shootings off the street in 2016, with investigators getting an arrest or identification of a nonfatal shooting suspect in just 14 percent of the cases last year and investigators making an arrest or ID-ing a suspect in 22 percent of fatal shootings.

Chief Harrison said the new unit is an effort to get a handle on gun violence, similar to its TIGER (Tactical Intelligence Gathering and Enforcement Response) unit which took a major bite out of armed robberies last year. NOPD data show that armed robberies decreased by nine percent in 2016.

Harrison said the new unit will work closely with street-gang investigators to identify “high-risk individuals” committing gun violence and carrying illegal firearms.

“The primary mission is to go out, gather intelligence and then go and build criminal cases against people who are committing acts of violence,” Harrison said.

Harrison said that the new unit had been in the works for some time but that the department had to wait until a group of NOPD recruits completed their field training to fully staff it so that doing so would not create staffing problems at any of the city’s eight NOPD districts.

“We didn’t want to strip officers from other parts of the city,” Harrison explained.

This article originally published in the March 13, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.