NOPD will not disclose murder victims’ rap sheets

6th February 2012   ·   0 Comments

New Orleans police will no longer add the arrest record for victims to their news releases, The Associated Press reported last week.

The old policy of adding a victim’s arrest record to each news release outlining a homicide stirred fierce opposition, with opponents saying it was cruel and divisive to the community.

On Wednesday, NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas said he still believes it is “necessary to share” the link between criminal behavior and the city’s murders, but acknowledged there were also good arguments against doing so.

“I believe it is necessary to share with the community the obvious and direct link between criminal behavior and the horrible acts of murder in our city,” Serpas said. “I have always said, however, that there are very good arguments to share and not share this public information.”

Serpas now plans to release monthly aggregate statistics on the number of homicide victims with a history of felony arrests, but without naming the victims.

Serpas’ announcement on Wednesday came shortly after investigative news website The Lens reported that the department wasn’t following its usual practice in releasing the victim’s record. Other news outlets followed suit. A search of a newspaper database showed more than 25 newspapers, as well as The Huffington Post and The Root websites, ran an Associated Press story the weekend after the Good Samaritan’s death, examining the controversial policy.

Critics said the practice was insensitive to the families of victims, and had the effect – intended or not—of blaming the victim.

The Lens reported that talk-show hosts, columnists and on-air TV editorialists ripped the NOPD policy. And state Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, drafted a bill to prevent the police from releasing such information. The practice was taking heat even before a would-be carjacker in Algiers killed Harry “Mike” Ainsworth, who turned out to have a record stretching back years for drug possession.

Also taking aim at the controversial practice were two members of the City Council who criticized Serpas when he appeared before the council’s Criminal Justice Committee on Jan. 18. Serpas told the committee that most homicides in the city were “Black males killing Black males,” and said releasing their arrest records helps the community have an informed discussion about homicides. Ainsworth was white.

Activist group Safe Streets/Strong Communities had recently launch­ed a petition calling for the practice to stop, and it had gathered 184 signatures before organizers closed it after the policy change.

“What Chief Serpas, Mitch Landrieu and others can’t seem to get is how unevenly stacked the deck is against young Black people in this city,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha told The Louisiana Weekly. “Black children are more often misdiagnosed and over penalized with suspensions and expulsions than their white counterparts and sent to juvenile detention centers while white youth who make mistakes are sent to boarding schools and receive extensive counseling.

“Once young Black people drop out of school or are forced out and wind up in juvenile detention centers, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to find jobs and begin developing a work ethic. The hardships they face as teenagers place them on the fast track to lives of crime because no one will hire them or give them a chance to build a future for themselves.

“To add insult to injury, the city’s final gift to those young Black men who end up dead on the streets of New Orleans is a character assassination that tells the citizenry of New Orleans that these Black murder victims who made mistakes in the past deserved it.”

Serpas said that after consulting with local clergy he decided to discontinue the practice. He said the department will now release an overview of the victims’ arrest records once a month without the person’s name.

Critics of the controversial practice were pleased that the NOPD tweaked its policy regarding murder victims, but said the police chief needs to go further.

“I hope this will signal a change in how they deal with victims and victim’s survivors,” said Baty Landis of the group Silence is Violence, which was formed to try to help lower the murder rate in New Orleans. “Hopefully they realize that demonizing the victim and hurting the families is not the way to engage the community in cooperating with police.”

The new release of victim arrest records will list the overall percentage of those with felony arrests, misdemeanor arrests, arrests for possession of a firearm, and the percentage that were unemployed. The same material will be released on suspects, Serpas said.

Police began adding arrest re­cords for both the suspects and victims when they announced a murder about a year ago. The action immediately stirred controversy, with many saying it added to the distress of mourning families.

Activist attorney Alison McCrary, who worked with Safe Streets/Strong Communities on the petition, told The Lens that she is grateful to Serpas for listening to the community and changing the policy. But she is not happy that Serpas plans to continue spending tax dollars doing statistical analysis on homicide victims.

“We need to look at the root cause of crime,” McCrary said. “And if we’re spending police dollars doing statistical analysis on data related to victims, those same resources can be spent on education and training opportunities, to address the root causes of the problem.”

Yvette Thierry, executive director of Safe Streets/Strong Com­munities, said the chief’s response is insufficient.

“We appreciate the effort but we just feel like it’s not enough,” Thierry told The Lens. “We really would just like the chief to do away with the policy examining victim’s arrest records altogether. If it’s important to know a victim’s arrest record, then let people do a public records request to find out about it. It doesn’t do anything for the city’s murder problem, releasing this information. It’s a distraction.”

The Rev. Raymond Brown, president of the New Orleans chapter of the New York-based National Action Network, told The Louisiana Weekly that most of the city’s elected officials and business leaders didn’t see a problem with this policy until it negatively impacted a white Algiers resident who lost his life when trying to intervene on behalf of a carjacking victim several weeks ago.

“Were it not for this white murder victim, it would be business as usual for the NOPD as far as this policy is concerned,” Rev. Brown told The Louisiana Weekly. “Once it backfired and placed a white murder victim in a negative light after the media ran stories about him being a hero, the policy had to be altered in some shape, form or fashion.

“This is a dangerous policy because it criminalizes and blames victims — some of whom have completely turned their lives around — for past mistakes and tells residents that they need not lose sleep over these kinds of murders because the victims got what they had coming to them,” Brown added.

State Sen. J.P. Morrell said Serpas spent more time crafting the press release about Ainsworth’s arrest record than the arrest records of other homicide victims.

“The press release for Mr. Ainsworth rehabilitated him,” Morrell told The Lens. “It said he had worked to be part of the community in the 8th District, but that same level of care did not go into the press releases on the other victims whose grieving families had to suffer the embarrassment of having their loved ones’ arrest records paraded publicly.”

Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Serpas acknowledge New Orleans’ per capita murder rate is 10 times the national average. In 2011, there were 199 murders in a city of 344,000, up from 175 in 2010.

Landrieu said he hopes to fight the crime surge with an emphasis on mental health, education and employment, as well as more patrols and targeting criminal hotspots.

“Getting this thing under control will also require that elected officials and the NOPD stop criminalizing and marginalizing Black people—it’s all connected,” Ram­essu Merriamen Aha told The Louisiana Weekly. “The mayor, police chief, business community and other elected officials need to understand the irreparable harm they do to Black children when they limit their chances at leading successful, productive lives by treating them like Public Enemy No. 1 from the time they are babies, mislabeling them in schools and preventing them from earning a livable wage to support themselves and their families.

“Nobody wants to talk about it,” he continued, “but blatant racism and discrimination are the essential ingredients to this gumbo we call ‘a culture of crime and violence’ in New Orleans. Address those realities and you’ll be well on your way to finding lasting solutions to the ‘culture of crime’ that threatens the future of Black people in New Orleans and, by extension, the population as a whole. We are all in this together, whether we wish to be or not”

This article was originally published in the February 6, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper