French Quarter safety plan unveiled
23rd February 2015 · 0 Comments
With Mardi Gras 2015 in the city’s rearview mirror and things getting back to the new normal, a local businessman who is fed up with the city’s growing crime problem has come up with a game plan to improve public safety, FOX 8 News reported last week.
Less than two weeks after a story broke alleging widespread abuse of the NOPD’s off-duty paid-detail system despite the department being under a federal consent decree aimed at overhauling the department, former SDT Waste Management owner Sidney Torres, a French Quarter resident, unveiled a plan to use off-duty cops to patrol the Vieux Carré. Torres, who made national news when he launched a series of commercials lambasting the Landrieu administration for failing to adequately address the city’s growing crime problem, is reportedly working with the French Quarter Security Task Force to improve public safety.
Ryan Misuro told FOX 8 News that he walks eight blocks home every night from his job at Roux Royale on Royal Street. “I don’t carry mace, I just make sure not to walk with my headphones on, and I try not to carry a lot of money around with me,” Misuro said.
Like many of the city’s residents who knew that crime conditions had worsened over the past year, Misuro is looking for any effort that will allow him to feel a little safer as he goes to and from work. He may be closer to seeing a little light at the end of the tunnel if Torres and the French Quarter Security Task Force have their way.
Beginning in March, three additional cops will be available to walk the streets of the French Quarter and make the walk to and from work safer for employees and residents like Misuro, thanks to Torres.
After Torres’ first commercial aired, Mayor Mitch Landrieu challenged the businessman to come up with a plan to make the French Quarter safer if he thought it was an easy task.
Business owners and residents appear to be grateful for Torres’ efforts to improve public safety in the area.
“He is the guy who gave us the sprout to really put this French Quarter patrol in place,” Bob Simms, with the French Quarter Security Task Force told FOX 8 about Torres.
After his French Quarter home was burglarized and a neighborhood bar near his mother’s home was robbed at gunpoint, Torres took on the city’s escalating crime problem and has not backed down.
After airing several commercials and launching a website for residents and business owners fed up with the rise in violent crime, Torres reached out to the French Quarter Security Task Force with an idea. FOX 9 reported last week that Torres wants to mimic the plan to hire off-duty NOPD officers to patrol Bourbon Street, and expand it to cover the entire Quarter. Torres isn’t just footing the bill for the initial phase, he also developed a special smart phone app for the public’s use.
Simms explained to FOX 8 how it works:“The first thing you do is you hit report crime, it’s gonna ask you where you are, you pick the street you’re on, you pick the cross street you’re on, and then you put in the type of thing you might be seeing.”
Simms said users can add a picture or just a short description. “That will go directly to the people on patrol,” he explained.
FOX 8 reported that the three off duty officers will travel around on Polaris vehicles, equipped with blue lights, NOPD decals and sirens.
“So people are going to know the cops are around? Good, can’t be enough of those guys,” Misuro told FOX 8..
While some lauded Torres and the Task Force for actively seeking solutions to the problem of rising violent crime in the French Quarter, others warned that the plan should not be viewed as a cure-all or long-term solution.
“We just need to make sure that we recognize that these are band aid efforts and we really need to keep our eye on the ball which is to renew the manpower to adequate staffing in the police department,” Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Donovan Livaccari told FOX 8.
Livaccari praises the private sector for stepping up while NOPD recruitment efforts are underway because he believes it’ll take years to get staffing levels back up to where they once were.
The French Quarter security patrols will begin March 15. According to Bob Simms, Sidney Torres is paying for the effort through May, then, funding is up in the air.
The separate Bourbon Street patrols will begin in early April.
New Orleans will get additional help from the Louisiana State Police through the month of May as the Landrieu administration seeks additional sources of funding to keep state troopers in New Orleans throughout the year. Tourism officials have indicated that they will contribute financially to efforts to keep state troopers in the Crescent City year-round.
Although the New Orleans Police Department currently has about 1,100 officers, some estimate that at least 1,600 officers are needed to keep New Orleans safe.
The effort to keep New Orleans safe during Mardi Gras included support from 150 state troopers, retired NOPD officers, Orleans and St. John the Baptist sheriff’s deputies, and campus police from Tulane University and the University of New Orleans.
Others efforts to boost the NOPD’s ranks include a decision by the New Orleans City Council last year to relax the city’s residency rule, which requires cops, firefighters and EMS workers to live in Orleans Parish, and the use of bonuses to encourage veteran officers to actively recruit new cops.
The recent Civil Service Commission decision to eliminate the requirement that NOPD recruits have completed 60 hours of college education is also expected to boost the NOPD’s ranks. The NOPD recruited nearly 100 applicants reaching out to the department just days after the CSC decision.
Despite optimism from the NOPD’s top brass and the Landrieu administration, some have expressed concurs about the removal of the college education requirement will “dumb down” the department or lead to ineffective and unconstitutional policing.
“Requiring less education for any profession has never yielded positive results,” W.C. Johnson, a member of Community United for Change and host of the local cable-access show “OurStory,” told The Louisiana Weekly. “It’s dangerous, irresponsible and desperate to lower standards for law enforcement officers who have the power of life and death over civilians.
“If we learned nothing else from last year’s massive protests across the nation, we should have learned that.”
In other NOPD news, a number of experts are raising concerns about what they describe as disturbing trend in the city’s murder rate despite recent reports that it has reached a historic, 43-year low.
WWL News reported that a series of recent eastern New Orleans may signal a serious problem for the NOPD and community-wide efforts to address Black-on-Black violence.
Last Wednesday night’s deadly double shooting on Lakeview Court in New Orleans East was the 22nd murder of the year. Only 12 homicides had been committed in New Orleans by the this time last year.
“You have such a disregard for human life,” SUNO criminologist Dr. John Penny told WWL. “That is frightening to me.”
The recent shooting of a young woman standing at the bus stop on Canal St. and Rampart and a double homicide on St. Charles Ave. during the recent Muses parade justify that fear.
As an exclamation point, two people were shot and injured at a party in eastern New Orleans Mardi Gras night.
“It’s not about the amount of law enforcement people,” Penny told WWL. “It’s social conditions, it’s cultural. People don’t know how to settle their arguments.”
Experts told WWL that during the winter and bitter cold weather, crime goes down, and in the summer it tends to go up, which is why the current murder rate is even more alarming.
“As the warm months come, unless we build up the police department and build up prevention efforts, which I applaud, this could be an ugly year,” Dr. Peter Scharf, a criminologist at LSU School of Public Health, told WWL.
“I would hope it’s abated and won’t spill over into the summer because that could mean a spike in crime, a spike in killing, a spike in conflict,” Penny said.
It is not just the weather that could affect an already dismal number, the criminologists told WWL.
“The other thing is that you have a build up of unclassifieds, deaths that are not classified, as murders and also justifiable homicides, so if those flip to the murder side it makes it worse,” Scharf said.
The city released a statement saying its NOLA for Life strategy helped the city’s murder rate reach a historic 43-year low last year. City officials also say they are confident the strategy will continue to reduce murder in 2015.
“The mayor continues to shove NOLA for Life down the throats of residents while tacitly supporting educational apartheid and blatant discrimination by the white business community and those who control the public bidding process,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly. “The Landrieu administration has its hand in every facet of Black life in this city and is hellbent on keeping Black people dependent on the white business community for their livelihood and survival.
“He rewards loyal Negroes who are willing to do his bidding and blackballs independent-thinking Blacks to prevent them from creating greater opportunities fork people of color in business and government.”
“What you see is what you germ” the Rev. Raymond Brown, a longtime community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly. “The City of New Orleans continues to offer very little in the way of quality public education and economic opportunity to Black males, ensuring that many of these young brothers turn to lives of crime and violence to survive. For the government to systematically deprive Black males of a educational and economic opportunities while claiming that it wants to use NOLA for Life to save Black men and boys is sinister and criminal.”
Additional reporting by Louisiana Weekly editor Edmund W. Lewis.
This article originally published in the February 23, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
