IG report is critical of NOPD

2nd June 2014   ·   0 Comments

Federal monitor says NOPD has ‘a long way to payday loans moberly missouri go’

As residents marked the arrival of summer with cookouts, picnics, parties and military tributes, violence erupted across New Orleans with 19 residents falling victim to gun violence and a stabbing. The violent spike, coming several months after it was reported that the city’s murder rate is down significantly. left four residents dead and 15 wounded.

Earlier this year it was reported that the city’s 2014 murder rate was on pace to reach a 30-year low. However, crime stats suggested that while fewer people were being killed in New Orleans in 2014, violent crime is rising steadily.

Among those shot over the holiday weekend was a pregnant 16-year-old in Algiers, a 25-year-old woman killed by her boyfriend in eastern New Orleans and a 15-year-old boy who died at his older brother’s graduation party in Gentilly Friday night.

WWL-TV reported that the 16-year-old knocked on an Algiers resident’s door Sunday night, May 25, and told him that she had been shot in the neck, chest and back by her boyfriend. She is in critical but stable condition and her baby, born two months early, is in stable condition.

Delores Jones, a 25-year-old security guard at the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board’s uptown facility, was shot in the head Friday morning, May 23, and pronounced dead at the scene. Police said 27-year-old Jermal Holmes was arrested in connection with the killing.

On Wednesday, police arrested Zachary Gibson, 19, and booked with second-degree murder in the shooting death of 15-year-old Tremmaine Robertson, who was visiting from Houston to attend his older brother’s gradation party. Seven others at the party were injured during the incident.

Gibson’s bail was set at $750,000.

The carnage showed no sign of slowing down after the four-day holiday weekend, with a 32-year-old man fatally shot Tuesday in eastern New Orleans.

In April, the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 to relax the city’s domicile rule that prohibited the hiring of applicants who do not reside in Orleans Parish, allowing for the recruitment and hiring of policemen, firemen and EMS workers who live in neighboring parishes.

The only opposition to the changes came from New Orleans City Councilman James Gray, who said he was concerned about how the move would affect the city’s property tax base.

A number of community activists and civil rights leaders opposed the changes because they were concerned about how bringing in additional policemen from mostly white parishes would affect efforts to bring constitutional policing to New Orleans and how it would lenders for cash loan allow residents of surrounding parishes to continue a long-held tradition of draining the City of New Orleans of already-scarce financial resources while doing very little to enrich the lives of tax-paying Orleans Parish residents.

“It hasn’t worked out well historically for the people of New Orleans, particularly in the Danzi­ger Bridge and Henry Glover cases,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly Wednesday.

The news only got worse for the NOPD last week as the Office of Inspector General issued a report that criticized the embattled department’s use of its personnel.

On Tuesday, Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux released a report that questioned the NOPD’s use of its available officers, concluding that the department does not have enough cops on the street to respond to calls for help. The 202-page report said the NOPD is top-heavy with too many high-ranking officers and not enough beat cops, which suggests that the department’s inability to get a handle on the city’s rising surge in violent crime may have as much to do with NOPD leadership as it does with the department’s manpower shortage.

Quatrevaux said residents’ calls for police assistance often yield no results because only about 250 of the department’s 1,000 officers are utilized to patrol various districts He noted that in some areas of the city residents have to wait about an hour for police to respond to calls for help.

Earlier this year, a number of residents told the New Orleans City Council about several instances, including a home invasion and an attempted sexual assault, for which cops never showed up or arrived several hours after residents called 911. One woman told council members that she had to call 911 and a police district station several times before she was able to speak with someone about someone trying to break into her home.

“NOPD does not have a sufficient number of officers assigned to answer calls for service,” Quatre­vaux wrote. “But we have officers assigned to non-law enforcement duties who could do this function.”

Quatrevaux said that the NOPD should focus its energy on properly utilizing its available personnel before bringing in new police recruits. While he said the NOPD’s top brass needs to reevaluate how its available manpower is being used, the IG disputed the widely held belief that with just below 1,200 officers in the department, the NOPD is struggling because it is undermanned.

“Many New Orleanians accept as an article of faith the assertion that the New Orleans Police bad credit loan solutions Depart­ment is understaffed,” Quatrevaux wrote in the report. “Yet the steady drumbeat for a larger police force and claims of a police force in ‘crisis’ continue in the absence of verifiable evidence documenting NOPD’s personnel and operational needs.”

“We should be exploring all possible options before we increase the troop strength of NOPD by 300 of­ficers,” Quatrevaux recommends in the report.

The IG said that officers assigned to desk duty could be reassigned to street patrols even if that means bringing in civilians to perform various office tasks currently being handled by law enforcement officers.

“Best practice suggests that officers currently assigned to desk duties, vehicle maintenance, and building maintenance service should be reassigned to patrol duty,” Quatrevaux said.

“There’s a shortage of officers in every component of the Police Department,” Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, told The New Orleans Advocate. “We’ve paused for five years and are behind the hiring curve. We need to forge ahead in that cause.”

“Most experts agree that it is self-defeating to orient a police department around responding to calls for service, because a department that focuses exclusively on response at the expense of proactive engagement will continually see higher and higher volumes of citizen requests for service,” NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas said in a statement released Wednesday..

“Only by attempting to address these complaints before they are voiced can a department effectively serve its community.

“Simply put, responding to calls for service means we are already late,” Serpas added.

In an interview with WWL-TV, Serpas said that the OIG report “ignores detectives.”

“The officer most likely to solve the rape of your child or your wife is gonna be a detective — not a call for (a) service officer. And this report ignores everything but calls for service, and that’s why I disagree with it, he said.”

“In contrast to the targeted and thoughtful civilianization approach contemplated by NOPD, the OIG’s proposal to reassign 102 sworn officers is reckless, ill-advised,” Serpas said in his prepared 12-page response to the OIG report..

“I am not willing to abandon community policing because it works,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a statement last week. “I’m not willing to cut the homicide unit or the gang unit or the domestic violence unit because they make our city safer. The people of this city have demanded more and better-trained officers, better response times, and community-oriented policing.”

The IG report comes while the NOPD is in the midst of implementation of fast payday loans tallahassee florida a federally mandated consent decree aimed at a wide swath of police abuses, inefficiencies and corruption that include addressing the use of excessive force, racial profiling, mismanagement of the department’s off-duty detail program and unconstitutional policing.

The mayor and police chief sought repeatedly the last two years to have the NOPD consent degree tossed out by a federal judge, arguing that the department does not need a consent decree because it was in the process of reforming itself.

Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, the federal NOPD consent-decree monitor selected in August 2013, issued a 126-page report Thursday that said progress in reforming the police department has been slow and that the NOPD has “a long way to go” to become compliant with constitutional policing standards.

“NOPD continues to make progress toward full implementation of the Consent Decree,” Sheppard Mullin said in the report. “But the NOPD still has a long way to go to come into full, effective and sustained compliance.”

Among the struggles listed in the report are the department’s failure thus far to develop an effective program for training new recruits and current officers; its failure to establish an effective and efficient Consent Decree Implementation Unit; and its failure to develop new policies and procedures that are both effective on the street and comply with the 492-point consent decree which outlines a wide range of necessary changes that include recruiting, use of force, interrogations, searches, community en­gagement, off-duty paid details and internal affairs investigations.

While the federal monitoring team said it is meeting regularly with the NOPD’s leadership, it added that “it is clear there nevertheless is widespread dissatisfaction with the overall performance of the NOPD.”

The shrinking police force will get a much-needed boost in 2015 from a class of 32 NOPD recruits that began its nine-month training Tuesday.

But with officers retiring and/or leaving the department to take positions with other law enforcement agencies, that may not be enough to adequately address what has been called the “blue hemorrhaging.”

“Who knows how many more officers will leave the department between now and the time these recruits graduate from the police academy?” Ramessu Merriamen Aha said. “Unless the NOPD finds a way to stop the ‘bleeding,’ it will be unable to do anything about the rising bloodshed on the streets of New Orleans. It’ll be too little, too late.”

Additional reporting by Louisiana Weekly editor Edmund W. Lewis.

This article originally published in the June 2, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.