Survey finds nearly 60 percent of residents dissatisfied with NOPD

11th May 2015   ·   0 Comments

The majority payday loans for bad credit of the city’s residents have very little confidence in the New Orleans Police Depart­ment, according to a survey conducted late last year by the NOPD’s consent-decree federal monitor, Washington, DC-based Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton.

In addition to being dissatisfied with the way officers in the embattled police department do their jobs, more than half of the 500 respondents told Sheppard Mullin that the police department, which has been under a federally mandated consent decree since August 2013 is ineffectual against crime. The survey results were included in the federal monitor’s most recent quarterly report.

The 492-point NOPD consent decree was imposed by the U.S. Department of Justice after a series of high-profile post-Katrina trials involving nearly two dozen New Orleans officers and a scathing DOJ report that said the police department was rife with corruption and abuse. It is designed to bring the department into compliance with federal standards for constitutional policing.

The recent survey results likely came as no surprise to rank-and-file officers who told Sheppard Mullin in a 2014 survey of 400 officers that more than half of them would be dissatisfied with the performance of police if they lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled.

Ninety percent of the officers also told Sheppard Mullin in the survey that civilians didn’t understand the problems and challenges they face on the job.

Tantamount among those problems and challenges has been a steadily shrinking police force that continues to lose officers faster than it can replace them. Since 2010, the NOPD has lost about 500 cops, a major case of what cops call “blue hemorrhaging.”

It currently has about 1,100 officers, a 40-year low, in a city that elected officials say needs about 1,600 officers to provide adequate protection for the entire city.

In 2014, the NOPD added 76 police officers but lost 120 officers.

A series of scandals that have pla­gued the embattled police department over the past year are believed to have played a role in the high disapproval rating, including a scandal involving the Special Victims Section during which five NOPD detectives failed to follow up on 87 percent of the calls reporting sexual assaults cash in a flash check advance between 2011 and 2013, another scandal involving ongoing abuse of the NOPD’s off-duty detail system by several high-ranking officers and an incident during which an officer turned off her body camera before shooting a suspect in the head. The shooting was not made public for two days and former NOPD Supt. Ronal Serpas announced his retirement days later.

Adding insult to injury, WWL reported recently that emails show that former Supt. Serpas had warned Landrieu administration officials for years about the current manpower shortage crisis but had been routinely ignored.

While Sheppard Mullin reported widespread public disapproval of the NOPD, the federal monitor has endured its fair share of public scrutiny and criticism of its monitoring and assessment of implementation of the federally mandated NOPD consent decree. The firm, selected by U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan after a 10-member panel of DOJ and CNO officials failed to agree on a federal monitor and asked the judge for several delays in doing so.

The process was further complicated by several court proceedings by the Landrieu administration that argued that the consent-decree negotiation process was tainted by the involvement of several prosecutors involved in an online posting scandal involving several active DOJ cases, that the City of New Orleans could not afford to pay for both NOPD and OPP consent decrees and that the NOPD did not need a consent decree because it had already begun the process of reforming itself.

Civil rights organizations, justice advocates and grassroots community activists argued that Sheppard Mullin has handled the NOPD with “kid gloves” and that when the firm has identified problems with the process it has failed to utilize the power and authority it has been given by the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure that the federally mandated consent decree is fully implemented.

W.C. Johnson, a member of Community United for Change and host of the local cable-access show “OurStory,” said after nearly three years of implementation of the consent decree and as the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, very little progress has been made in bringing constitutional policing or racial justice to New Orleans.

He added that the Henry Glover and Danziger Bridge cases, as well as the murder conviction of Roger LaCaze show that there is nothing equal about justice in New Orleans

“It is most significant — not only to New Orleans but to America — that after 10 years of the judicial process, all those who were found guilty are finding ways to get another bite at the apple of justice and have those convictions overturned,” Johnson told The Louisiana Weekly. As one example, Rogers LaCaze, sits on Death Row awaiting a ruling on his appeal after 20 years of trying to bring to light the evidence the criminal justice system purposefully hid from the defense. In half that time, white and politically connected persons have had appeals heard and either acquitted or awaiting a new trail. But Roger LaCaze has no justice from the system that stands in the threshold of American democracy and guarantees equal justice for all. This hurts everyone in America.”

Johnson added that Black residents in Orleans must bear part of the blame for not standing up for equal protection under the law the way Blacks have in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, Md.

“‘No justice, no peace’ is not relevant anymore, at least in New Orleans, because the people of New Orleans will not stand up and take a stand. Baltimore has made New Orleans look like children among wise men,” he said.

In other crime-related news, city leaders are pushing ahead with a plan to raise $2 million a year to fund policing in the French Quarter.

The Associated Press reported that the funds would be generated by a quarter-cent sales tax the city would levy in the French Quarter. City officials say the extra sales tax would mostly be paid by tourists. The new revenue would be used to pay to keep 45 state troopers assigned to the French Quarter on a long-term basis.

On Thursday the New Orleans City Council voted to put the tax proposal up for an Oct. 24 election. The 4,000 residents of the French Quarter will decide the fate of the tax plan.

This article originally published in the May 11, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.