Police reform in N.O. – the stuff of science fiction
15th June 2020 · 0 Comments
By Allen Johnson
Contributing Writer
Look at the videos on the New Orleans Police Department’s Facebook site, from June 8 through June 10, 2020.
If you didn’t know the city was still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, you might mistake NOPD Superintendent Shaun D. Ferguson for a keynote speaker to an unseen audience in a science fiction movie.
The Chief’s uniform is a crisp white shirt, navy blue pants and a matching, futuristic-looking “pandemic-blue” mask emblazoned with NOPD’s golden symbolic badge – the star and crescent.
Off-camera, reporters wearing colored cloth or hospital masks stand at least six-feet away from the Chief, the Centers for Disease Control’s recommended distance for avoiding infection by the deadly virus.
A 22-year veteran of the force and a proud native of the Lower Ninth Ward, Ferguson has served as Chief since January 2019. Eighteen months in, he has called a news conference to explain his department’s use of force June 3 at a march against police brutality in general and the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, in particular.
The NOPD deployed tear gas and rubber “stinger” balls at a largely peaceful night-time demonstration at the middle of the downtown bridge, over the Mississippi River.
In a move uncharacteristic of past NOPD chiefs, Ferguson defends his department’s officers and use of force – without sounding defensive.
“We continue to be the role model of ‘constitutional policing’ for the rest of the country,” Ferguson says June 8, invoking the phrase found in the court-supervised “NOPD Consent Decree, “the City’s renewable contract with the U.S. Department of Justice to reform the force.
“The consent decree, as far as I’m concerned, is behind us,” Ferguson says in the June 10 police video.
“The department of 1960 is not here and the department I joined in 1998 is not the same,” he says, adding: “We are better trained, better equipped and highly motivated.”
Bold in tone, the substance of the Chief’s remarks requires “unpacking.”
In 1960, the NOPD was nearly all-white when racial desegregation of public schools triggered rioting downtown by resistant whites, who broke store windows and hurled racial slurs or worse. If police deployed tear gas then, it’s a hidden footnote of history today.
By the end of 1998, Ferguson was a rookie under reform Chief Richard Pennington. The NOPD was on its way to becoming a majority-Black police force for a predominantly Black city – thanks in part to the euphemistically dubbed “Larry Williams Consent Decree.” Named for an NOPD intelligence officer and graduate of St. Augustine High School, that agreement between the City and the feds aimed for a racial balance in police promotions, job assignments, discipline, training and recruitment.
Today, the department is operating under the “NOPD Consent Decree,” another court-supervised plan to reform the NOPD and implement constitutional policing.
In 2012, the City and the DOJ signed the consent decree, which is aimed at avoiding an expensive lawsuit over a sweeping list of civil rights violations that the FBI and federal prosecutors found at NOPD, during the post-Katrina era of Police Chief Warren Riley.
The DOJ report deliberately excluded mention of ongoing federal prosecutions of some 20 officers, eventually found guilty of deadly police cover-ups, both before and after Hurricane Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005 – almost 15 years ago. At the time, Ferguson was a low-key investigator assigned to the Eighth Police District.
Today, Chief Ferguson’s task is satisfactory compliance with nearly 500 items in the NOPD Consent Decree. (City of New Orleans v. U.S. Department of Justice, Case 2:12-cv-01924, Document 565. Oct. 02, 2018)
Conditions for ending the agreement begin at item No. 491: “At all times, the City and NOPD shall bear the burden of demonstrating full and effective compliance with this Agreement. DOJ acknowledges the good faith of the City in trying to address measures that are needed to promote police integrity and ensure constitutional policing in New Orleans.”
The Trump Justice Department has the right to seek enforcement of the NOPD decree if DOJ “determines that the City has failed to fully comply with any provision of this agreement.”
If Ferguson and Mayor LaToya Cantrell want to terminate the agreement, DOJ will have 60 days after notification to object to the request. If DOJ does not object, U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan may grant the City’s request. If Trump’s DOJ does object, the judge must hold a hearing and “the burden “shall be on the City to demonstrate that it is in full and effective compliance with this agreement and has maintained such compliance for at least two years.”
Back at headquarters, Ferguson takes reporters’ questions about the police-protester clash on the Crescent City Connection. No one can remember the last time NOPD used tear gas against crowds, including the chief, who’s been on the force 22 years.
He insists the police deployment of tear gas is “standard” for other city police departments, while at the same time declaring seven years of reforms have put New Orleans “on the cutting edge of constitutional policing in America.”
Other questions cannot be answered because of an ongoing internal investigation, he says, including questions about: crowd size; the number of officers and protestors hurt; how many officers had tear gas launchers which are only authorized for the exclusive use of the Special Operations Division; why and when did police decide to use tear gas; and did the Chief’s subordinates “lie” to him regarding the firing of rubber balls as part of a police “cover-up.”
“I think it’s a bit premature to say it was a lie or a cover-up,” Ferguson says at the June 8 presser. “I definitely have some concerns about not being informed from the beginning.”
Answers will become available as the probe progresses, he says.
For now, he blames the confrontation on a few “agitators” who were “hellbent” on forcing a confrontation with police. After 30 minutes of negotiations with protest coordinators, the demonstrators allegedly refused NOPD’s historically unprecedented offer that officers clad in riot gear kneel down with COVID-masked protestors as they did, during the previous night’s protest.
Instead, the bridge altercation escalated, the Chief says.
A police-shot-and-narrated video shows protestors breaking through police lines. Hand-held canisters of tear gas are tossed or launched by police. Demonstrators throw some canisters back. One helmeted officer then instructs others on how to pull a pin on a canister before throwing, so the gas grenade cannot be picked up by protestors.
A violently coughing cop rushes back behind the line, away from the billowing cloud of tear gas. The police deployment raises questions at a subsequent City Council meeting, about the wisdom of such tactics, during an airborne virus pandemic.
Chief Ferguson tells reporters that officers on the front line did not wear gas masks. Police and demonstrators alike were injured by the dispersant. He says he would always prefer “dialogue,” but still wants tear gas, rubber balls and other less-than-lethal weapons in NOPD’s “toolbox.”
“(Tear gas) is a less-than-lethal tool compared to using a PR-24 [nightstick] or a baton to disperse the crowd. That is the tool we use. I’m confident in that tool. I like that tool. Many may feel differently, but I think it is much better than using a baton against someone.”
Another police video shows a live firing demonstration of the rubber balls at an NOPD training facility.
Sgt. Todd Morrell, a 30-year NOPD veteran with the Special Operations Division, says SOD training requires officers to walk in a room filled with tear gas and to experience the sting of rubber balls and projectiles fired from paintball guns.
“I have been shot with a real gun” Williams tells reporters, who show cops pictures of people with crater-like wounds on their backs, arms, legs and buttocks. “I’ve been shot with a paintball gun that was more indicative of what you were seeing.”
A rubber ball’s impact is less severe, Morrell says “It was like being hit by a back-handed tennis ball, and not by Serena Williams.”
Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the LSU School of Health Sciences in New Orleans, says, after studying cops and crime for 25 years here, he is “very close” to the police and an advisor to the mayor, He declines comment on NOPD’s use-of-force controversy, citing potential conflicts of interest. He can’t resist answering what has become a signature question: “What do we know? And what do we think we know?”
“The question here is this incident a ‘one off’ or do they really need more help and better control in terms of conduct by police? I don’t think we are doing a systematic review of police officers like we attempted to do at one time,” Scharf says. “How will these protests affect race relations..and the murder rate, which declined dramatically” to 120 total homicides in 2019 from the previous year.
The low number is heady wine for Scharf, who arrived here behind incoming Police Chief Richard Pennington in the fall of 1994, the year New Orleans nation-leading murder rate reached a staggering 427 homicides, a record that still stands.
By 1996, Pennington had fired or otherwise forced out scores of corrupt or brutal cops – with significant help from the feds, the business community and the public. He then unveiled a plan to cut the city’s staggering murder rate by half, which he did. within two years.
It was the stuff of science fiction – without any viruses.
This article originally published in the June 15, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
