N.O. crime rises in all areas except murder, data shows

16th February 2015   ·   0 Comments

NOPD’s ‘aorta of corruption’ cash advance modesto still intact despite consent decree, report finds

As if the rash of armed robberies and violent attacks in the French Quarter in recent months weren’t enough to convince residents that New Orleans was a more dangerous city in 2014, new data reveals that crime is up in all areas except murder. The year-end crime statistics submitted Feb. 6 by the embattled New Orleans Police Department show that the city experienced double-digit growth in virtually every major crime category except homicide in 2014.

The biggest spikes in crime came in the categories of rape and armed robbery, which rose 39 and 37 respectively. Assaults rose 27 percent in 2014 while auto theft grew by 22 percent. Simple robberies grew by 14 percent last year, thefts rose 12 percent and burglaries rose by eight percent.

Murders fell by four percent in 2014, the lowest murder rate in 43 years. There were 156 murders in New Orleans in 2013 and 150 murders committed last year.

“While I am pleased to see murder down for a third consecutive year to a 43-year historic low, we are frustrated by an increase in some other crimes,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a February 6 statement.

“The final numbers in 2014 show a sustained and historic drop in murder across New Orleans,” NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison said in a statement released Feb. 6. “After three consecutive years of murder reduction, we know our focus on enforcement and prevention with the city’s compressive NOLA for Life plan is working.”

Rafael Goyeneche, executive director of he Metropolitan Crime Commission, told Nola.com/The Times-Picayune that one would be hard-pressed to find a resident who is shocked by the news that crime is up in New Orleans in all of the other categories.

“The public here has been hearing for months about the acute shortage of police manpower in the city. The rise in the reported crime, I think, is indicative that the criminal element also recognizes the weakness of the police department in its present state,” Goyeneche said.

With an increasing number of brazen armed robberies, carjackings and violent assaults, there is little time to celebrate registering six fewer murders in 2014.

“Is it disappointing? Yes,” Goyeneche told Nola.com. “But probably no group is more disappointed than the NOPD itself. And there is no doubt in my mind that they are doing the best that they can, with the resources they have. They just need more.”

The NOPD, which has been under a federally mandated consent decree aimed at raising the department to federal standards for constitutional policing since August 2013, continues to reel from negative publicity and self-inflicted missteps that include some officers’ refusal to use police-issued body cameras, resistance to changes to the off-duty detail system, a recent scandal alleging that detectives refused to follow up on sexual assault cases between 2011 and 2013, and an ongoing feud between police union leaders and the department’s top brass.

To exacerbate matters, the NOPD has been losing officers faster than it can replace them. Since New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu took office in 2010, the NOPD has lost close to 500 officers and currently only has about 1,100 officers in a city some say needs 1,600 officers to be safe.

The city has tried a number of strategies aimed at ending the “blue hemorrhaging” of officers including relaxing the residency rule that requires prospective cops, firefighters and EMS workers to live in Orleans Parish, offering bonuses to current officers for the successful recruitment and hiring of new police officers and, more recently, doing away with current education requirements for NOPD recruits.

Both the city’s Inspector General and Metropolitan Crime Commission executive director last year recommended that the NOPD better utilize its available manpower by hiring civilians to perform various office duties that would free up additional police officers to patrol the city’s streets,

The NOPD said in its recent press release that Harrison has reassigned 25 officers from administrative duties to street patrol and recruited more than 100 retired officers to volunteer their service. While those retired officers would not be directly top cash advance in HOU Texas compensated, the department said they would be eligible to participate in the NOPD’s off-duty detail system.

With the rash of armed robberies and violent attacks in the French Quarter, the NOPD has partnered with state troopers, sheriff’s deputies from Orleans and St. John the Baptist parishes and campus police from Tulane and the University of New Orleans to keep residents and visitors safe during Mardi Gras.

Police union leaders have accused the mayor of turning his back on the NOPD, citing little support from the Landrieu administration for substantive pay raises, use of other law enforcement agencies like the Louisiana State Police and Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office for additional police protection rather than allowing rank and file officers to earn overtime pay and the city’s efforts to make changes to and monitor the NOPD’s off-duty detail system.

A investigative report by WWL-TV last week raised serious questions about the department’s detail system, which the U.S. Department of Justice dubbed the “aorta of corruption” in a scathing 2011 report on the NOPD. The WWL report found that despite 18 months under a federally mandated consent decree, the detail system is still being controlled and abused by a small group of NOPD officers.

Despite what appear to be some major flaws in the NOPD’s off-duty, paid-detail system, the steps taken by the Landrieu administration to comply with the 492-point consent decree have earned high praise from the court-appointed federal monitors

However, an investigation by WWL-TV and The New Orleans Advocate found that a significant percentage of off-duty police detail work is not being handled by the Landrieu administration’s newly created office charged with that task, but is being managed by a trio of cops who assign off-duty details worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each year — usually to themselves.

The WWL/New Orleans Advocate investigation found that the officers who run the Special Events Unit of the NOPD — coordinating off-duty policing for weddings, second-line parades, road races and numerous other events big and small — are also its biggest beneficiaries.

The department’s detail system has been a bone of contention for several years with police union leaders criticizing the mayor’s efforts to oversee and overhaul the system and civil rights and grassroots community leaders saying that many of the NOPD’s officers appear to be more motivated by lucrative off-duty assignments rather than keeping the city’s residents safe.

WWL reported Tuesday that Sgt. Walter Powers Jr., who also serves as president of the local Fraternal Order of Police lodge, earned the most cash over the six-month period from May through October, according to data that the city turned over earlier this month in response to a November public records request.

Powers, a 36-year NOPD veteran, worked 168 of the 596 off-duty assignments his office coordinated in that span — more than one in four — and took home $20,325, increasing his regular salary and overtime pay by two-thirds.

On May 31 and again on October 4 and Oct. 25, Powers assigned himself to six different details in a single day, making $675, $650 and $850 on those days, according to the investigation.

Second and third on the list were the other two coordinators in the office: Sgt. Sabrina Richardson and Officer Christopher Avist. Each earned nearly $10,000 over the six-month period.

WWL reported that Powers, Richardson and Avist coordinate special events during their regular working hours, then frequently claim those assignments for themselves. They were part of a group of about a dozen officers who collectively claimed a third of the $306,000 that officers working those special events earned over the six-month period.

Critics told WWL that the data suggest that, at least for an office that handles about 10 percent of the off-duty police jobs in the city, a culture of favoritism and back-scratching remains.

“These reforms are going on, but this is still persisting under the direction of the Police Department, which is something that has to be an embarrassment to the department,” Rafael Goyeneche told WWL.

Goyeneche talked last week about the premium rates paid to the detail supervisors — often the get loans online now three special events coordinators — when they work the off-duty jobs.

“When you look at this and see that almost every detail that occurred over a six-month period of time, someone from that office is working it, and they’re paid in many instances at a higher rate than the other officers, then it doesn’t pass the smell test,” he said.

NOPD spokesman Tyler Gamble told WWL that NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison has reviewed the data and has directed the Compliance Bureau to set up new checks and balances to make sure the work is assigned fairly.

“Much like he’s done with other areas of the department, such as body-worn cameras, Chief Harri­son is committed to creating a system of accountability to make sure the department can track what work is being done and make sure it’s being done properly,” Gamble said. “Chief Harrison realizes that’s a problem, and he wants to address it.”

Powers’ attorney, Raymond Burkart III, says his client provides a service to the public under a system set up by the city and is challenging the inclusion of the detail system overhaul as part of the NOPD consent decree.

“That system is not created by Sgt. Powers,” Burkart said. “That system was created by City Hall. Sgt. Powers is an equal opportunity coordinator.”

Asked by WWL about the concentration of assignments on a handful of officers, Burkart said what’s missing in the data is the number of officers who actually raised their hands to work such details, and their track record.

“Are there people who that section knows can be relied on to do the job properly, to show up? You’re (darned) straight,” Burkart said. “It’s not politics. It’s historical track record, usually.”

The detail assignments issued by the Special Events section pay differently — often better — than the hourly scale for detail work under the city-run Office of Police Secondary Employment, which now coordinates the bulk of police detail work, WWL reported.

Police working an event under the Special Events Unit are paid $100 for an hourlong gig, with $50 more for each additional hour worked.

The OPSE now operates under a tiered, demand-based pay scale that city officials say has helped boost officer interest. Base pay there is lower than under Special Events, but it can rise significantly.

Sgt. Michael Glasser, president of the Police Association of New Orleans, called it a patently disjointed system.

“If everybody is treated the same, that’s fine,” he told WWL. “But everybody isn’t treated the same. All details are not equal.”

Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, said that it is unacceptable for cops and others who live outside of New Orleans to continue to “feed” on the city’s meager tax base while the average resident struggles to make ends meet.

“There’s no way to defend that mindset,” Aha told The Louisiana Weekly Wednesday. “New Orleans is a majority-Black city with a lot of poor and working-class people. The wealthiest residents use nonprofit organizations and tax shelters to avoid paying their fair share while the city’s annual budget is balanced on the backs of poor and working-class people.

“Those who continue to abuse the system to boost their take-home pay need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” Aha added.

The NOPD said late last week that Powers, Richardson and Avist will no longer be able to assign special-event off-duty details to themselves. They will, however, continue to assign special-event off-duty details to others, according to NOPD spokesman Tyler Gamble.

W.C. Johnson, a member of Com­munity United for Change and host of the local cable-access show “OurStory,” said Wednesday that Washington, DC-based Shep­pard Mullin has been derelict in its duties as the NOPD consent-decree federal monitor.

“It is most unfortunate that the people of New Orleans are forced to foot the bill for a process that should include people from New Orleans,” Johnson said. “The last quarter (report) has followed the same pitiful road that the previous three quarters have followed. The NOPD keeps falling further behind on the schedule the Department of Justice plotted with no definitive action on the part of the federal monitor. All we get from the monitor is that the monitor cannot force the city to make the changes.

“What the monitor fails to tell the people of New Orleans is the monitor has the ability to suggest to the court that sanctions are necessary to get the city to move in a more deliberate manner.,” Johnson continued. “At the rate the monitor is going, implementation of the NOPD consent decree will take 30 years. Something has to be done to get the monitor and the judge to see the severity of the NOPD dragging its feet on the entire idea of constitutional policing. The more leniency the court affords the NOPD, the greater the chance for noncompliance. Even the monitors have admitted that there is a certain frustration level having to continually go over the same areas month after month.”

Aha said that while news of the NOPD’s continued refusal to comply with the consent decree is frustrating, it is not surprising given the department’s history.

“This police department has been corrupt and abusive for as long as anybody can remember,” Aha told The Louisiana Weekly. “So much so that it doesn’t appear to know how to be anything but corrupt and abusive.

“We can’t afford to be naive enough to think that a federal judge, U.S. attorney or court document is going to be enough to overhaul this police department,” Aha continued. “Not when you have elected officials, judges, federal prosecutors and DOJ appointees backing the unconstitutional moves of the Landrieu administration and this police department.

“Black people in this city can’t even get a conviction for the cops who gunned down Henry Glover or the unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina,” he said. “These cops have been violating people’s constitutional rights and getting away with murder for so long that they actually don’t think they did anything wrong in these cases. That reality should tell us everything we need to know about the mindset and culture of the NOPD.”

Despite a closed-door arrangement that prompted New Orleans businessman Sidney Torres to pull a series of television commercials criticizing the Landrieu administration for the city’s growing crime problem, the Crescent City got a reminder Thursday night about how unsafe the city remains.

Two individuals were shot Thursday night during the Muses parade near the intersection of St. Charles Ave. and Erato Street. Both of the victims have died.

A longtime community activist said last week that the mayor should spend less time and energy covering up and distancing himself from the failures of his administration and more time directly addressing the city’s crime problem. As an example, he pointed to the fact that the mayor appeared to be more upset by the Torres commercials than he is by the growing crime problem.

“Despite the games he continues to play with carefully orchestrated press conferences and efforts to silence critics like Sidney Torres, this mayor needs to be held accountable for his handling of the police department and his selection of two police chiefs who were both clearly in over their heads,” the Rev. Raymond Brown, a community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly Monday. “Sidney Torres was right — the mayor needs to be held accountable. The community and grassroots leaders — those most affected by failed NOPD policies and practices — pleaded with the mayor to conduct a legitimate national search for a qualified, capable candidate who could bring this police department out of the Dark Ages. The mayor flat out refused to do so twice.

“The result is a more violent and dangerous city and a police department that is not only without competent leadership but also is no closer to providing constitutional leadership than it was before the NOPD consent decree,” Brown added.

Additional reporting by Louisiana Weekly editor Edmund W. Lewis.

This article originally published in the February 16, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.