NOPD reportedly getting a handle on excessive force
15th May 2017 · 0 Comments
Seven years after a scathing U.S. Department of Justice report found that NOPD officers “routinely use unnecessary and unreasonable force” while carrying out their duties, Sheppard, Mullin, Hampton & Richter, the Washington, DC-based firm tapped to serve as federal monitor for the department’s consent decree, said the NOPD is making marked improvements in that area.
After implementation of the federally mandated consent decree which began in August 2013, the federal monitor reported that the NOPD is making “significant progress in reducing excessive uses of force and in fully investigating potential improper uses of force.”
According to the federal monitor’s most recent report, released May 5, the NOPD has reduced the total number of use-of-force incidents from 126 in 2015 to 102 in 2016.The federal monitors said that the latest available numbers give them “greater confidence in the integrity” of the NOPD.
While the report praised the progress the NOPD has made with regard to reducing its use-of-force incidents, the federal monitor pointed out that key details of the NOPD’s 2016 use-of-force reports were missing and that poor tactics used by officers in several incidents made it necessary for the officers to use excessive force.
The 492-point, federally mandated NOPD consent decree followed an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that found that the police department was rife with corruption and abuse.
The DOJ investigation was set in motion by several high-profile, officer-involved killings that included the fatal shooting of Henry Glover, the Danziger Bridge Massacre and the fatal beating of Raymond Robair.
In December 2016, the City of New Orleans reached a $13.3 million settlement with relatives and survivors of the Danziger Bridge Massacre and the killings of Henry Glover and Raymond Robair.
Since implementation of the NOPD consent decree began in August 2013, the NOPD has created a Use of Force Review Board, began using body-worn cameras and worked to reduce its response times to civilian calls for assistance.
The NOPD’s efforts to turn things around have been hampered by the fact that until this past year, the department has been losing officers to defections, retirement, prosecution and termination faster than it could replace them.
With a rash of armed robberies and a sharp rise in gun violence and homicides in 2017, the NOPD recently unveiled a $40 million crime initiative that will increase overtime pay, bring more lighting and cameras to the French Quarter and increase camera surveillance in trouble spot areas across the city.
The federal monitor reported that in 30 use-of-force incidents in 2016, more than 98 percent of the officers involved submitted a statement as required compared to 93.2 percent in 2015. The monitor also reported that in 93.3 percent of those cases, the officers’ use of excessive force was recorded on body cameras.
The monitor also highlighted areas where the NOPD still needs to improve. The report said some officers continue to provide very few details in their use-of-force reports and that 60 percent of the use-of-force reports failed to indicate whether the person arrested was injured.
While that figure is unacceptable, it is an improvement from the 72 percent of use-of-force reports that failed in this regard in 2015.
Despite the areas where the NOPD still needs to make improvements, the federal monitor acknowledged the progress that has been made.
“While the monitoring team believes in holding the NOPD and its officers to a very high standard, we do not believe any police department should be held to impossibly high standards of perfection,” the report said. “Police officers are human and are bound to make mistakes. What we all should expect, however, is that when mistakes are made, they are openly identified, honestly evaluated and meaningfully remedied.”◊
