NOPD makes adjustments to hiring practices
27th February 2017 · 0 Comments
Just weeks after the NOPD federal consent decree monitor reported major problems in the police department’s hiring practices, including allowing questionable applicants to move forward in the hiring process, the lead monitor says the NOPD has taken “smart, targeted” steps to improve its vetting process for potential recruits.
Jonathan Aronie, the lead monitor with the Washington, DC-based firm of Sheppard, Mullin, Hampton & Richter, said last week that the NOPD heeded the findings of the federal monitor report that sharply criticized the department’s background check process that routinely ignored a number of “risk indicators” that should have prevented certain applicants from moving forward in the hiring process.
After auditing the severely undermanned police department’s 2016 recruits, the federal monitor identified nearly five dozen candidates whose “risk indicators” should have raised red flags for those charged with weeding out potentially unqualified recruits. The red flags discovered during the background checks that were ignored included domestic abuse, drug use, problems with lie-detector tests and previous arrests. One recruit was allowed to move forward in the hiring process despite a note in his professional record that advised NOPD recruits “Do not hire.”
As a result of its findings, Sheppard Mullin said in the Jan. 19 report that the NOPD “may be accepting candidates into the academy who should not be NOPD police officers.”
The report came on the heels of news that the number of murders and gun shootings both rose in 2016 and that the new year was off to a violent start with some 47 shootings over the first 17 days of the new year.
Perhaps feeling the pressure of those media reports and the public’s response, NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison responded to the federal monitor’s criticism of the department for possibly ignoring “risk indicators” in five dozen cases by telling reporters, “We’re not hiring saints or angels — we’re hiring human beings.”
During a Feb. 16 public hearing in federal court, held to update U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan on the 492-point consent decree aimed at overhauling the troubled police department, NOPD Deputy Chief of Compliance Danny Murphy told Morgan that the department had made “documentation errors” but that it had also started crafting a corrective plan “before the report came out” and was already implementing the improvements.
Nola.com reported that Chief Harrison said that the day the report was released the NOPD had already reviewed its recruit files and determined that every hired recruit “should be here.”
Jonathan Aronie told Judge Morgan on Feb. 16 that the police department had addressed most of Sheppard Mullin’s concerns about its hiring practices.
Among the changes noted by Aronie was the creation of another layer of review in the hiring process and the review of a candidate by others in the NOPD who are not directly involved in the hiring process.
“We’re confident with the approach they’re taking,” Aronie added.
The NOPD is reportedly also hiring a recruiting director and three civilian background investigators.
Former NOPD Deputy Chief of Staff Jonathan Wisbey, who resigned a day before the federal monitor report was released, was in charge of the hiring process during the time period scrutinized in the report. Prior to joining the NOPD, Wisbey worked as a member of the Landrieu administration.
NOPD Capt. Michael Glasser, a police union leader, recently accused the Landrieu administration of moving Wisbey over to the NOPD in an effort to gain more control of the police department.
Deputy Chief Murphy told Judge Morgan that the department’s quick move to rectify problems in the recruiting process demonstrates a theme of “NOPD building self-monitoring capacity” aimed at implementing sustainable reforms.
The federally mandated consent decree, coming on the heels of a scathing U.S. Department of Justice reported that said the NOPD was rife with corruption and abuse, began in August 2013. It was the end-result of a DOJ probe of several officer-involved killings including the Danziger Bridge shootings during which two unarmed civilians were killed by police and four others were wounded, and the Henry Glover case, during which the victim was shot by an officer and his remains were later found in a burned-out car on the Mississippi River levee. Both of these incidents occurred less than a week after Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans.
Although New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu initially praised the NOPD consent decree, he later sought to have it thrown out, arguing that the decree’s negotiation process had been tainted by the involvement of several federal prosecutors involved in an online posting scandal during which they commented on Nola.com about several active U.S. Department of Justice cases.
Landrieu would subsequently argue in federal court that the City of New Orleans could not afford to pay for two federal consent decrees — one for the NOPD and the other for Orleans Parish Prison. Finally, Landrieu would unsuccessfully argue that the NOPD no longer needed a federal consent decree because it had begun reforming itself.
In federal court on Feb. 16, Emily Gunston, an attorney for the DOJ, said she was pleased with the progress the department has made and credited the NOPD’s top brass for the changes.
“It really feels like we are dealing with a completely different police department,” she said.
In other NOPD-related news, several local police unions took a s stand last week against efforts to convince the Civil Service Commission to give the police department’s upper-level managers more autonomy and power to implement changes.
Representatives from the Fraternal Order of Police, {Police Association of New Orleans and the Black Organization of Police said last week that NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison’s pitch to the CSC to accomplish that goal by removing civil service protections from 16 commander positions would politicize the positions, undermine the department’s rank structure and further erode officers’ morale.
Specifically, the NOPD is asking the CSC to make the jobs of 16 commanders unclassified positions, which would prevent those in the leadership posts from exercising certain due process rights in the event that they are terminated pro disciplined.
The change would allow those in the 16 commander positions to oversee majors, captains, sergeants and lieutenants. Harrison said the change is needed because some high-ranking NOPD officers have “refused to follow instructions” from a lower-ranked commander.
NOPD Lt. Keith Joseph, head of the Black Organization of Police, told the CSC last Monday that the proposed changes would reduce opportunities for high-ranking members of the department to serve in the leadership roles in favor of lower-ranked “hand-picked” officers.
Joseph said that because high-ranking officers don’t have a chance to move forward in that scenario, “morale is down.”
Nola.com reported that the proposed change would undermine the importance of competitive testing, which has historically been used by officers to move up though the NOPD ranks.
Harrison dismissed that argument, telling the CSC, “While some people have a high aptitude and do well on tests… it doesn’t flesh out in performance.”
While NOPD Major Ray Burkhart told the CSC that the department should encourage those it sees as leaders to use testing to advance into leadership positions, Harrison argued that the department’s old way of doing things helped to create “a culture that had us being the worse department” and a law enforcement agency that committed civil rights abuses and saw nothing wrong with unconstitutional policing.
While he conceded that the NOPD has evolved and implemented some positive changes since the start of the federally mandated consent decree in August 2013, Capt. Michael Glasser pointed to a spike in violent crime this year and an “out-of-control murder rate” as evidence that the NOPD still has a long way to go before it can call itself “successful.”
Nola.com reported that the Civil Service Commission is expected to revisit the issue at its next meeting.
This article originally published in the February 27, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
