Police cadets being poorly trained, new report says

After 16 months under a federally mandated consent decree aimed at implementing major reforms, the New Orleans Police Department continues its work to recruit and train new officers so that it might somehow reverse the trend of losing officers faster than it can replace them. While it has become clear that the undermanned department is committed to working hard to train new cadets to end the “blue hemorrhaging,” a new report by the NOPD consent-decree federal monitor contends that the new cadets may not be receiving adequate training. Washington, DC-based firm of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton said in a new report that the new officers are being poorly trained in areas like ethics and domestic violence, WWL-TV reported.

This past spring, Sheppard Mullin reported that the NOPD still has “a long way to go” to make the changes listed in the 492-point consent decree in order to become compliant with federal standards for constitutional policing.

The federal monitor has been critical in the past of the NOPD’s failure to properly use body and dashboard cameras and its difficulties with filing police reports. Both of those criticism were highlighted this past summer after a NOPD officer shot a suspect in the head just moments after turning off her body camera. The incident was not reported to the public for two days, leading to the resignation of former NOPD Supt. Ronal Serpas.

According to Sheppard Mullin’s latest report, part of the problem is that the training is teaching cadets to mimic old bad habits, stemming from inadequate lesson plans, poor teachers and weak leadership in the police academy.

Academy classes on ethics and domestic violence were cited in the report as being especially poor, WWL reported.

The federal monitors, appointed by U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan after a panel of Department of Justice and City of New Orleans representatives failed to select a monitor after several delays, found that the NOPD continues to fall short in other areas such as failure to follow NOPD policies on recording and investigating cases of use of force by police, failure to keep track of interrogations, failure to prevent rigging photo lineups and little progress to prevent deescalate potentially violent encounters with the mentally ill. The department is also out of compliance went it comes to crisis intervention, the report found

NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison acknowledged the problems and said that the police department is working to correct them/

Harrison added that the NOPD has hired a curriculum developer to update the lesson plans for cadets, and he plans a major overhaul of the training unit.

After initially praising the NOPD consent decree, the Landrieu administration spent more than a year trying to convince the federal courts to toss it out by arguing that an online posting scandal involving several federal prosecutors tainted the consent-decree negotiation process. Mayor Mitch Landrieu and then NOPD Supt. Ronal Serpas also argued 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 federally mandated consent decree because it had already begun to reform itself.

This article originally published in the December 29, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.