NOPD looks to improve use of body cameras in wake of high-profile cases

8th December 2014   ·   0 Comments

Feds seek new judge for Danziger case

In the aftermath of a series of officer-involved killings in cities like Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland, Ohio and New York, President Barack Obama unveiled a new plan to distribute 50,000 body-worn cameras to local police departments, WWL-TV reported.

While there are currently 440 body cameras available for use by officers the New Orleans Police Department, efforts to get the equipment to work properly and to convince officers to keep the body cameras on during encounters with civilians have yielded mixed results.

The most glaring example of the NOPD’s ongoing struggles to take full advantage of body cameras came this summer when an officer turned off her camera before shooting a suspect in the head. The incident went unreported for two days and the officer later said she turned off the camera because her work shift was about to end.

Despite objections from the Landrieu administration and the NOPD’s top brass, the body cameras became part of the department’s reform efforts as part of its federally mandated 492-point consent decree.

NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison told WWL that a new policy that went into effect last week should improve usage and officers’ understanding of what is expected of them.

“At the beginning of the shift, every officer has to let the supervisor if they have a camera, if it’s functioning,” Harrison said. “Every single call for service, they have to document whether or not the camera was present, whether it was functioning and whether they used it, both body camera and vehicle camera.”

Harrison admitted last week that the initial introduction of body cameras was challenging.

“We have some training issues to work through to train those officers, and we’ve had some discipline that shows the officer did not violate policy as a citizen alleged, but we have some that shows the officer did,” he told WWL-TV.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand said he would like to get body cameras for his officers, but the fees associated with cloud storage and the infrastructure to manage and categorize the video make the program cost- prohibitive for many law enforcement agencies.

“Local governments and local police department are not going to be in a position to be able to afford a full utilization of body cams in the day to day operations of their organizations,” Sheriff Normand told WWL.

Normand said it would cost his department about $2 million a year, which is two percent of his budget.

“I’m curious whether or not the public has a desire to finance this,” he said. “It becomes a very costly solution, one in which, not only would require additional money, but additional manpower in order to manage it.”

New Orleans Independent Police Monitor Susan Hutson told WWL that body cameras are worth considering because they regulate behavior.

“We had them in other cities that I’ve been in,” Hutson said. “They will record shootings. They will record uses of force, misbehavior and proper behavior. They are definitely an independent witness.”

An additional 100 body cameras are expected to be deployed this week in New Orleans as protesters across the U.S. prepare to converge in Washington, DC on Dec. 13 for a planned March Against Police Brutality in the wake of the Ferguson and NYC grand jury decisions.

“Will it prevent a Ferguson? The body cameras don’t prevent anything. What it does is modify officer behavior, it modifies citizen behavior,” Harrison told WWL.

In many parts of the state, police body cameras have not been funded and deployed to the degree that they have been in New Orleans.

WWL-TV reported that the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s office has no immediate plans to utilize body cameras.

In St. Bernard Parish, Sheriff Jimmy Pohlmann says he is interested, but looking at the costs associated with utilizing body cameras.

The St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office has cameras in some cars and is studying body cameras.

In Plaquemines Parish, the Sheriff’s Office has five body cams and is looking to deploy additional cameras.

The Kenner Police Department doesn’t use them and no decision has been made on whether to consider cameras in the future.

The Louisiana State Police utilizes in-car cameras and recording devices worn by troopers

In other NOPD-related news, federal prosecutors are asking for a new judge to preside over future proceedings should the government decide to retry five New Orleans police officers in the Danziger Bridge shootings.

The post-Katrina, officer-involved shootings left four unarmed civilians wounded and two others —17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison — dead.

The New Orleans Advocate reported that the request was filed among other documents with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will decide whether to reinstate the officers’ convictions on 25 counts.

The government is seeking to remove U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt from the case. The judge threw out the convictions of the five officers in September of 2013 and ordered a new trial, citing allegations of “grotesque” prosecutorial misconduct in the case.

The convictions were overturned in the wake of an online posting scandal involving at least three federal prosecutors who reportedly posted comments on Nola.com about several active U.S. Department of Justice cases. The findings cost the three prosecutors their jobs and led to the resignation of former U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, the longest-serving U.S. attorney in U.S. history.

Former NOPD Sgts. Kenneth Bowen and Robert Gisevius and former officers Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso have remained in custody since 2010, when a grand jury indicted them.

Less than a week after Hurri­cane Katrina’s 2005 landfall and the levee breaches that plunged parts of the city into chaos, police shot and killed two unarmed people and wounded four others on the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans.

After hearing from five dozen witnesses and examining 400 pieces of evidence during a month-long trial, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso for opening fire on six unarmed people on the Danziger Bridge. The Sept. 4, 2005, shooting took the lives of 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison and injured four others.

The officers also were found guilty of scheming with a fifth defendant, former Sgt. Arthur “Archie” Kaufman, and others to engineer a cover-up to frame an innocent civilian for shooting at police.

The Danziger Bridge case and several others, including the officer-involved killing of Henry Glover, led to a federally mandated NOPD consent decree which includes a 492-point plan aimed at raising the embattled police department t federal standards for constitutional policing.

This article originally published in the December 8, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.