‘Significant work’ remains on NOPD consent decree
14th August 2017 · 0 Comments
City, NOPD hope to be done by 2020
In August 2013, the City of New Orleans and the New Orleans Police Department began implementing a federally mandated, 492-point consent decree aimed at overhauling the troubled law enforcement agency and bringing it up to federal standards for constitutional policing. The consent decree came in the wake of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation of several police killings in New Orleans and a subsequent DOJ report in 2011 that said the NOPD was rife with corruption and abuse.
Four years after the NOPD began implementing the consent decree, U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan said that the department has made “tremendous progress” but also said that “significant work” remains to be done before the consent decree has been completed. Morgan made the remarks in a signed order on August 4 that extended the City of New Orleans’ contract with the consent-decree federal monitor, Washington, DC-based Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton.
The contract extension means that the NOPD consent decree will continue to be implemented for at least three more years, despite a memo from Attorney General Jeff Sessions earlier this year that said the Department of Justice would review the use of federal consent decrees to reform local law enforcement agencies.
Judge Morgan must rule that the NOPD is in full compliance with the 492-point consent decree before it can end. Once the judge finds that the NOPD is fully compliant with federal standards for constitutional policing, the department would still have to face a two-year period of “sustained monitoring.”
After initially praising the goals of the NOPD consent decree, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu tried to do away with it by arguing that the City could not afford to pay for NOPD and Orleans Parish Prison consent decrees. He later tried to have it tossed out by arguing that the consent-decree negotiation process was tainted by the involvement of several federal prosecutors who were forced to resign after it was learned that they had posted comments online about several active Department of Justice cases. The online posting scandal led to the overturning of the convictions of five NOPD officers in the Danziger Bridge case, which left two unarmed civilians dead and four others wounded less than a week after Hurricane Katrina.
After the Landrieu administration failed to convince the federal courts to do away with the NOPD consent decree because of the online posting scandal, the mayor tried to have the consent decree tossed by saying that the NOPD no longer needed a consent decree because it had already begun the process of reforming itself.
Over the past four years, there have been some hiccups in the implementation of the NOPD consent decree, including an incident during which a female officer turned off her body camera just before shooting a suspect in the head. The incident went unreported for several days and ended up costing NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas his job. The NOPD also received criticism after it was learned that investigators had failed to follow up on a significant number of complaints of sexual assault, after key evidence in the fatal shooting of a NOPD officer was discarded by another officer and after the NOPD allowed a significant number of recruits to continue in the hiring process without addressing a number of red flags that included drug use and criminal charges.
Despite those setbacks, the Landrieu administration said the signed order on Aug. 4 by Judge Morgan marked the “beginning of the end” of the department’s “transformation under the most extensive, comprehensive federal consent decree in the nation.”
In her two-page order, Judge Morgan said that NOPD Supt. Michael Harrison and the department “are working diligently to meet the Mayor’s goal of bringing the Police Department into full compliance by May 2018.”
However, she added that “[s]ignificant work by the department and the significant ongoing technical assistance by the monitoring team and the Department of Justice, will be needed to reach this goal.”
Morgan said that the federal monitor found “significant improvement in almost every area of the consent decree, including policies, training, supervision, custodial interrogations, sexual assault and domestic violence investigations, uses of force, use-of-force reporting and use-of-force investigations.”
The NOPD consent decree resulted from a DOJ probe of several officer-involved killings including the Danziger Bridge shooting, the fatal shooting of Henry Glover on the West Bank less than a week after Hurricane Katrina and the police killing of Raymond Robair, a Tremé handyman, shortly before Hurricane Katrina.
Glover, 31. was shot by NOPD Officer David Warren in the parking lot of a West Bank strip mall less than a week after Katrina. He was later taken by a good Samaritan to an elementary school in Algiers that was being used by police for medical assistance but his remains were later found in a burned-out car on the Mississippi River levee.
Raymond Robair was beaten by police and dropped off at a downtown hospital where he died.
Last December, the City of New Orleans announced a $13.3 million settlement with 17 victims and survivors of the Danziger, Glover and Robair cases.
It was initially estimated that the NOPD consent decree would cost the City of New Orleans $55 million over five years, but the consent-decree contract extension means that the City will have to find additional funds to pay for the ongoing implementation of the federally mandated decree.
Despite those additional costs, Landrieu called the extension of the contract a “significant milestone.”
“I am proud of the work our NOPD leadership has done to transform the department and to remake the police force into a 21st-century institution,” Landrieu said in a statement. “While sometimes painful and expensive, this process has been important in re-establishing trust between police and community, which will make us safer.”
This article originally published in the August 14, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
