NOPD manpower woes impacting local justice system

22nd December 2014   ·   0 Comments

The New Orleans Police Department’s highly publicized manpower shortage continues to impact day-to-day work and life in New Orleans as the Landrieu administration struggles to beef up the embattled department to about 1,600 officers.

Efforts to boost the NOPD’s numbers have included a vote by the New Orleans City Council this past spring to relax the city’s residency rule that requires new recruits to live in Orleans Parish and a recruitment program that pays current NOPD officers $1,000 who aid the department in identifying, training and hiring new police recruits.

It was reported earlier this year that the NOPD is losing officers faster than it can replace them. Although the NOPD is budgeted to hire 150 new officers in 2014, it has fallen far short of that goal and won’t graduate two new classes until early 2015. At last count, there were 1, 146 officers working for the department.

Earlier this year, French Quarter business owners told the Landrieu administration that it would prefer that the city use funds from a hotel tax to hire additional police officers rather than civilian patrol officers to work in the french Quarter.

There was more grim news for the NOPD last week.

New Orleans Municipal Court judges were forced to reset Monday’s docket after the NOPD transferred three of the four officers previously assigned to provide courtroom security, WWL-TV reported last week.

The NOPD transferred them and 19 other officers, who were largely serving in administrative positions, to patrol assignments.

Chief Judge Desiree Charbonnet said by law the city shall provide security at municipal court.

“The judges were forced to set people new court dates because if we cannot provide for security for the general public in the courtroom, then we can’t operate,” Charbonnet told WWL “The superintendent is responsible for providing order and security through a police officer in each section. So, if you’re taking them out, I’m assuming that you have made an arrangement for others.”

Mayor Mitch Landrieu said that residents have told City Hall that they wanted more cops on the beat.

“We looked all over the place,” Landrieu told WWL “We looked inside headquarters. We looked inside the courts. There’s an easier way to secure the courts with constables and sheriff’s deputies. We were in consultation with municipal court and we had an agreement from the judges. Turns out, they seemed to have changed their mind.”

Judge Charbonnet said NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison didn’t inform her that he was pulling the police officers out of her courtroom until late Friday afternoon, December 12.

“I was on board in an effort to participate and be helpful and do my part,” she explained to WWL. “But, that’s when I thought the Constable was coming.”

First City Court Constable Lambert Boissiere Jr told WWL-TV that his deputies are not trained for courtroom security.

“I’m not prepared to send officers to municipal court,” Boissiere said. “I don’t even know the scope of responsibilities over there. I’d have to get geared up.”

In the meantime, Chief Harrison is working with the Landrieu administration and the judges to come up with a short-term solution to reopen municipal court.

“As of right now, the city is prepared to pay for other members of the law enforcement community to provide some of that service, to the courts if in fact we need that,” Chief Harrison said.

Charbonnet told WWL that as a last resort, she may sue the Landrieu administration to order the police chief to show cause for why he’s not following the law and providing courtroom security.

“I don’t want to do that,” said Charbonnet said Monday.. “That’s the last thing I want to do. But, there’s a real public safety issue, right in those courtrooms.”

“It probably does have some risk involved with it, but with a shortage of police officers on the street, there is a risk to the public safety,” Harrison said. “I am addressing all of that at the same time.”

Of the 22 cops re-assigned, 15 officers were handling administrative duties at the NOPD, three officers were providing security support in municipal court, one officer was assigned to the Department of Sanitation and three officers were assigned to the district attorney’s office.

This past spring, Inspector Gen­eral Ed Quatrevaux and Metro­politan Crime Commission executive director Rafael Goyeneche both said that the NOPD could improve its performance by hiring civilians to perform various office tasks in order to free up additional officers to patrol the streets of New Orleans.

Quatrevaux challenged the widely accepted notion that the NOPD is suffering from a manpower shorting, arguing that the NOPD needs to better utilize its available personnel. Goyeneche disagreed with that assessment, saying that the NOPD’s ranks have reached a 30-year low in 2014.

Late Monday night, Judge Charbonnet told WWL that the court has reached an agreement with the NOPD to provide security for the court until a further deal can be reached.

On Wednesday WWL-TV reported that only a month after a scathing IG report forced the NOPD to reinvestigate hundreds of bungled rape cases, the department has decided to reassign most of the officers who once kept some of those cases afloat at the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.

IG Ed Quatrevaux reported in November that the NOPD failed to follow up on 86 percent of the calls it received reporting sexual assault between 2011 and 2013.

Chief Harrison reportedly tried to remove all of the NOPD officers previously assigned to the D.A.’s Major Offense Trial Division as he leads an undermanned police department that has been under a federal consent decree since August 2013. D.A. Leon Cannizzaro said he “basically begged” and convinced Harrison to let him keep two of the officers, but Cannizzaro told WWL that will still hurt the city’s efforts to improve how it handles sex crimes.

“It’s extremely important for us to have those members of the police department assigned to the district attorney’s office to assist us in cases like that,” Cannizzaro said. “Their loss is going to be greatly felt.”

A special investigative unit, led by Commander Paul Noel, is reinvestigating 271 cases that five former Special Victims Detectives never followed up on from 2011 through 2013.

The New Orleans Advocate reported Wednesday that the caseload has jumped to 320, as NOPD found and additional 49 rape cases that were mishandled in 2014, before being reassigned out of that section.

Loyola University Theater Professor Laura Hope, head of a group demanding better police work on sex crimes and child abuse, told WWL Wednesday that the NOPD is “putting a Band-Aid on an arterial bleed.”

“Sometimes it feels like the NOPD is playing one giant shell game with the citizens of New Orleans,” Hope said. “It’s like 3-card Monte, where have we moved the officers to this time? We say we’ve put more officers on the street, but we’ve moved them out of investigating violent crimes.”

Hope and fellow Loyola professor Erin Dupuis co-founded the group Voices of the Silenced and organized the Silent March for the 1,111 on December 13, a reference to the number of cases IG Ed Quatrevaux said the five former Special Victims detectives failed to investigate.

Hope and Dupuis said they planned to attend a City Council hearing Thursday to hear testimony from Harrison, Noel and Public Integrity Bureau Chief Arlinda Westbrook about the progress of fixing the sex crimes unit and reinvestigating the mishandled cases.

While it remains unclear when and if the police officers will return to the D.A.’s office, Cannizzaro told WWL Wednesday that he still hopes his depleted unit can pick up the cases NOPD failed to follow up on, as they have done in the past.

“I think it’s important that people know that if someone believes that a sex offense was not properly dealt with by the police department, then I encourage the victims to come forward to make contact with this office, to get in touch with us and we will do everything in our power to look into that case,” Cannizzaro said.

One of the officers who was removed from the D.A.’s office recently is Darren Brazley, who is on desk duty pending the results of an internal investigation into his actions in an unrelated matter, NOPD spokesman Tyler Gamble told WWL.

The NOPD’s top brass found itself on the receiving end of a stern lecture from the City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee Thursday, WWL reported.

During his presentation that briefed the committee on the department’s handling of the probe of sexual assault cases that fell through the cracks, Chief Harrison said his team had learned the lessons of past failures.

“The traditional wisdom of fixing a problem in the past was usually moving the problem out and transferring the problem. twenty first-century leadership says we don’t transfer problems, we fix problems,” Harrison said.

While the committee listened intently to Harrison’s presentation, the hearing’s tone changed quickly as council members began to grill the NOPD officials about holding those responsible for the e failures outlined in the IG report accountable.

“Has anyone been terminated due to this? Have any heads rolled due to this? Because otherwise you’re just transferring the problem, and I have a serious problem with that,” Council-woman LaToya Cantrell, clad in a red Mrs. Claus outfit, asked.

Harrison told Cantrell that Civil Service rules require a full internal probe by investigators before any disciplinary action could be taken against the five detectives whose casework was analyzed by IG Quatrevaux. He noted that all five have been placed on desk duty and that the detectives and their supervisors have been moved out of the Special Victims Section, pending the internal probe.

Councilwoman Susan Guidry, chair of the Criminal justice Committee, said something could be done more quickly to deal with the supervisors, who she said should no longer be supervising any cops in any section or unit.

“The two I know of are still in a supervisory capacity,” Harrison said.

“Well, we need to get to that as quickly as possible because what we’re doing is perpetuating the culture,” Guidry replied.

This article originally published in the December 22, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.