NOPD woes extend beyond long wait times
9th November 2015 · 0 Comments
NOPD officers from each of the eight police districts told Nola.com earlier this month that the department is undermanned and lacks the focus it needs to improve public safety in New Orleans.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the officers expressed frustration with time-consuming changes mandated by the NOPD consent decree, which entered its third year of implementation this past August, and the “Blueprint for Safety” introduced last year to guide officers’ handling of domestic violence cases. The officers also talked about how slow responses to reported crimes can cause those crimes to disappear and how those “unfounded” crimes for which officers are unable to locate victims and/or witnesses can alter crime statistics and give residents the impression that the city is safer than it actually is.
While the officers agreed that boosting the NOPD’s ranks would definitely help to reduce response times, they said that getting the department’s numbers up will not happen overnight. Because increasing manpower is a long-term solution, the officers offered a list of recommendations aimed at lowering response times: Among them:
• Improved training for 9-1-1 dispatchers and ranking supervisors, which would help them to weed out inappropriate or less serious calls for police assistance.
“There needs to be a screening process where a dispatcher listens to it and says, ‘It doesn’t rise to the level of police,’” one of the officers told Nola.com/The Times Picayune. “It’s a civil matter, it’s not a police matter, or it’s just not something we handle at all. Cut those calls off from the beginning.’”
• Revise the “Blueprint for Safety” protocol to give police personnel more discretion in the way they handle domestic disturbances.
“They need to empower at least the supervisors, in some capacity, ro say ‘This doesn’t rise to the level of a domestic all,’” one of the officers suggested.
• Assign more detectives to domestic violence, which would free up patrol officers to respond to calls for assistance rather than mediate disputes.
“We have property-crimes detectives in every district,” one of the officers told Nola.com/The Times Picayune. “We have persons-crimes detectives in every district. But we have more domestic violence in every district than any other single incident. So why don’t we have domestic-violence detectives in every district?”
The officers also suggested that the NOPD hire and train civilian staff to investigate and write reports of property crime, stop investigating minor traffic accidents and press the City of New Orleans to enforce the city ordinance passed this summer that cleared the way to fine property owners for repeated false burglar alarms.
The officers advised victims of nonviolent property crimes to request that a complaint report be written.
“I would tell them, ‘Drive to the station and demand (on body camera)that a report be written,” one of the officers said. “The squeaky wheel tends to get the grease.”
“Stop being the silent majority,” another officer added. “You vote. You pay taxes. Tell your City Hall what you want from the police.”
Nola.com/The Times Picayune reported last week that two of the 32 NOPD recruits that began training on Wednesday, Oct. 27, quit on the first day.
“While our goal is for all recruits to finish the Training Academy, we anticipate that some recruits may not make it through,: NOPD spokesman Tyler Gamble said.
The NOPD is seeking to increase bonuses for veteran cops who attract a new recruit from $1,000 to $4,000. The change must be approved by the city’s Civil Service Commission and the New Orleans City Council.
“NOPD officers are the best ambassadors we have to encourage new applicants to join our team,” NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison said in a statement.
NOPD Capt. Michael Glasser, president of the Police Association of New Orleans, said last week that the department’s response times will likely get longer before they get shorter. “We are shrinking still,” he told Nola.com/The Times Picayune. “We’ve lost more officers this year than we’ve hired and trained. We don’t have enough people to work on the street to actually do what they need to do.”
The embattled department continues to lose officers faster than it can hire them and has lost 400 officers since Mayor Mitch Landrieu took office in 2010. While the mayor has said repeatedly that the NOPD needs 1,600 officers to keep the city safe, Glasser said last week that New Orleans needs 2,000 officers.
He said that 2,000 officers would be able to handle faster response times to calls for assistance as well as carry out the mandates of the federal consent decree.
“We’re getting crushed under our own weight,” Glasser said. “The rules are just crippling.”
The department currently has about 1,137 officers.
While NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison promised that response times will be shortened, Glasser said that anyone who expects that to happen in the near future is fooling themselves.
“They should expect this to continue, because the things that are driving it have not and will not change,” Glasser said.
As the NOPD works to boost its ranks, it will get help keeping the city safe from a number of other law enforcement agencies.
WWL reported last week that State Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, authored a bill in the last legislative session to create a new law enforcement management district in Orleans Parish. Act 262 requires New Orleans police and the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office to meet with representatives from the nearly dozen smaller police departments within the parish to better coordinate their resources.
“The university police, all those guys, they’re all state-commissioned law enforcement officers, not local, so really, without the state being the big stick to get them to the table, they may not necessarily want to be engaged, but now they’re being encouraged to be engaged,” Morrell told WWL.
The district is also aimed at getting the different departments to enter legal work agreements, like cooperative endeavor agreements or memoranda of understanding, so that the smaller departments can help out the NOPD when short-staffed department has a high backlog of calls for service.
The NOPD has already entered into an agreement with Tulane University to allow their police department to patrol beyond the boundaries of the Uptown campus. So far, Tulane’s police chief says it’s working well.
The City of New Orleans most recently used state troopers, deputy sheriffs and campus police from UNO and Tulane University to keep revelers safe during Mardi Gras, so there is a history of coordinating various law enforcement agencies to carry out a single mission.
Morrell said that campus police at area universities can help a great deal by expanding their patrol areas beyond the perimeters of these institutions, something Tulane campus police have already done.
“Adopt two or three blocks around UNO. Adopt two or three blocks around SUNO. Having them doing some proactive policing and maybe helping out with logistical work frees up our limited manpower to really respond to accelerated response,” Morrell told WWL.
The City of New Orleans released a statement last week that read, “Currently, Louisiana State Police troopers are assigned to assist NOPD in the French Quarter area, but are always available to assist in investigations and enforcement across the city. And there are agreements in place with HANO, Tulane University, Levee Board and Harbor Police to assist NOPD every day with proactive patrolling and responding to calls for service in areas around their developments or campus.
“We continue to look to expand the success of these patrols and look forward to working with the Orleans Parish Law Enforcement Management District to assist in fighting crime. These agreements allow the agencies to share information and assist in any way to make arrests, to solve and to prevent crimes and to keep our campus community safe.”
The first state-mandated meeting of the law enforcement management district is scheduled for late November.
This article originally published in the November 9, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
