Pick your poison
13th February 2017 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
Black folks in New Orleans got a hard row to hoe these days.
On one hand, you got the mayor heaping praise on a New Orleans police department that is woefully inadequate and unable to boost its ranks or stem the tide of rising violent crime. Mind you, this is the same mayor who initially praised the federally mandated NOPD consent decree aimed at bringing the troubled police department up to federal standards for constitutional policing but later tried to get it tossed out by arguing the process was tainted by the involvement of several federal prosecutors involved in an online posting scandal, that the City of New Orleans could not afford to pay for NOPD and Orleans Parish Prison consent decrees and that the NOPD didn’t need a consent decree because it was already reforming itself.
On the flip side, you have state Attorney General Jeff Landry, who recently launched his own Violent Crime Task Force in New Orleans, something some believe is a thinly veiled attempt to gain public favor in southeast Louisiana as he prepares to launch a gubernatorial campaign.
What makes the situation even more troubling is Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s very public support for Landry’s New Orleans crime initiative in the wake of the City of New Orleans’ decision to slash the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office budget by $600,000. Also getting into the fray is current Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, who sided with the Landrieu administration when the City of New Orleans unveiled its own $40 million crime initiative.
Landry has since countered by making it clear that he plans to ask the U.S. Department of Justice to do away with any restrictions that prevent the NOPD from using “stop and frisk” tactics to get a handle on violent crime in the city.
Never mind that such a move would set the NOPD and the City of New Orleans back to where things stood when police saw nothing wrong with killing Henry Glover and burning his remains in an abandoned car on the Mississippi River levee and gunning down six unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans less than a week after Hurricane Katrina.
So much for progress.
Caught in the middle of brazen, violent criminals and trigger-happy, abusive cops are the hard-working, law-abiding people who call New Orleans home.
We deserve to live in a city where we don’t have to worry about being robbed, carjacked or murdered every time we leave home and in a city where local and state elected officials do everything in their power to protect our constitutional rights.
It is their sworn duty as elected officials to uphold the U.S. Constitution, not just for their biggest campaign contributors and those most likely to cast votes for them but for all segments of the populace.
Enough with the duplicitous foolishness, treachery and political chicanery.
Anyway, I got a few questions for my people. Here we go:
• Isn’t this as great a time as any to look closely at the votes state legislators and council members have cast thus far and the issues they’ve stood up for during their current terms in office so that we can make informed decisions about their political futures this October?
• Could you see yourself voting for a mayoral candidate who didn’t make a sound or do anything whatsoever to prevent the state-run Recovery School District from building a new high school for Black and poor children atop a toxic landfill that contains at least eight deadly metals?
• Will the way New Orleans City Councilmembers vote in April on whether to allow Entergy to build a new power plant in eastern New Orleans influence your decision to either re-elect them or elect them to some other political office?
• Would you trust a state legislator who paved the way for the state to takeover the New Orleans Public Schools and terminate thousands of Black administrators, educators, staff personnel and other employees to serve as mayor of New Orleans?
• Do you think that a state legislator who did everything in his power to get Algiers to secede from the rest of New Orleans has proven that he is committed to representing the interests of the Black masses in this majority-Black city?
• Who can you think of that can run for mayor with a proven record of representing the interests of all of the residents of this majority-Black city and an unwavering commitment to democracy, equity and justice?
• How many more days until we can finally get a new mayor and police chief?
• Now that some of the stories of how the Landrieu administration pressured and beguiled the loved ones of Raymond Robair, Henry Glover, James Brissette, Ronald Madison, Jose Holmes, Susan Bartholomew, Leon Bartholomew III and Leon Bartholomew IV to accept a measly $13.3 million settlement for the officer-involved killings, what do you think now of the current administration and the local local justice system?
• Now that the Danziger Bridge case has run its course, who thinks that the federal courts will see fit to release all court documents related to the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of prosecutorial misconduct by members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana?
• How long do you think it will be before President Trump signs an Executive Order that completely does away with the Judicial Branch of government?
This article originally published in the February 13, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
