DOJ Orders New Orleans Police Reforms

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Seven years after a series of high-profile murder cases involving the New Orleans Police Department rocked the nation, the U.S. Department of Justice has taken strong steps to reform the troubled department.

A federally mandated plan to rid the NOPD of corruption, discrimination, widespread abuse and the frequent use of deadly force, will be imposed on the department for at least four years.

Flanked by federal officials and members of the administration of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice and the city of New Orleans had signed a consent decree to establish a plan that addresses allegations that the New Orleans police officers have engaged in a pattern of discriminatory and unconstitutional activity.

The agreement requires improved training, better supervision and new technology, including cameras in police cars.
“The people of this city should rest assured that together with the Department of Justice, we will fundamentally change the culture of the NOPD once and for all,” said Mayor Landrieu, who estimated the cost of implementing the changes at more than $11 million a year over the next four to five years.

“There can be no question that today’s action represents a critical step forward,” Holder said. “It reaffirms the Justice Department’s commitment to fair and vigorous law enforcement at every level.”

Landrieu and City Council President Jackie Clarkson predicted that the council would make the needed changes to the city's budget to pay for the plan. City officials also will apply for available federal grants to close any budget shortfalls.

At least one community activist challenged claims by the mayor and DOJ officials who suggested that the NOPD has already begun to implement changes. “That’s all song and dance, just political posturing,” said the Rev. Raymond Brown, a longtime community activist.

“None of the changes implemented so far after last year’s Justice Department report on the NOPD prevented widespread abuse of the department’s paid detail program or were enough to save the lives of Justin Sipp or Wendell Allen. We need real, sweeping changes, and I don’t know if this city, the NOPD or even the U.S. Department of Justice are committed to making that happen.” Police shot and killed Sipp during a gunfight, and police killed Allen while searching his home.

New Orleans police department scandals go back decades. In the 1990s, they included the severe beating of a suspect in a police officer’s death. The conviction of a police officer who arranged the murder of a victim of police brutality. A court also convicted a cop who shot to death a fellow officer and two others during a robbery.

Renewed attention fell on the department after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Spurred by family members of one of the victims of a grisly post-Katrina NOPD shooting that left two men dead and four others wounded, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division launched criminal probes focusing on police officers’ actions in the storm’s aftermath.

After the fatal shootings of James Brissette, 17, and Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old disabled man, on the Danziger Bridge, the victims’ families and members of the community sought justice in the local criminal justice system but found none. Jim Letten, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, showed little interest in prosecuting the cops accused of the  Danziger Bridge murders and other high-profile deadly shootings.

The city’s black leaders agree that the DOJ probe of the NOPD would not have happened if Dr. Romell Madison, the brother of Ronald Madison, and several others, had not been unrelenting in seeking help from Holder, the nation's first black attorney general.

The investigations resulted in charges against 20 officers, including five convicted last year of civil-rights violations in the deadly shootings of unarmed residents on an eastern New Orleans bridge less than a week after the storm’s landfall.

The officers convicted in the Danziger Bridge shootings were sentenced to prison terms of up to 65 years. Five others pleaded guilty to engaging in a cover-up plot that included a planted gun, phony witnesses and fabricated reports.

Among the agreement’s provisions:

•   All officers will be required to receive at least 24 hours of training on stops, searches and arrests; 40 hours of use-of-force training; and four hours of training on bias-free policing within a year of the agreement taking effect.

•   All interrogations involving suspected homicides or sexual assaults will be recorded in their entirety on video. The department also will be required to install video cameras and location devices in all patrol cars and other vehicles within two years.

•    The department will be required to restructure the system for paying officers for off-duty security details, develop a new report format for collecting data on all stops and searches and create a recruitment program to increase diversity among its officers.

•   The city and Justice Department will choose a court-supervised monitor to assess and report regularly on implementation of the requirements.

•   The city and police department can ask a judge to dissolve the agreement after four years, but only if they can show they have fully complied with its requirements for two years.

The Justice Department has reached similar agreements with police departments in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Oakland, Calif. But the New Orleans’ consent decree is billed as the most extensive of its kind and includes requirements that no other department has had to implement.

Last year, the Justice Depart­ment issued a scathing report that said New Orleans police officers have often used deadly force without justification, repeatedly made unconstitutional arrests and engaged in racial profiling. The report also found that the department has long failed to protect adequately New Orleans residents because of numerous shortcomings, including inadequate supervision.

Since the report’s release, the NOPD has been rocked by a number of scandals, including reports of racial profiling in the French Quarter during the Essence Music Festival, the release of an e-mail pressuring Mid-City officers to profile black residents or risk forfeiture of opportunities to earn overtime pay, abuse of the department’s off-duty detail program and at least two fatal shootings, one of which involved an unarmed 20-year-old man.

Rafael Goyeneche, a former cop and president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, said previous efforts to reform the NOPD lacked the teeth and the strong federal oversight of a consent decree. The city will have to spend millions of dollars to implement the reforms, paying for training, equipment and oversight costs, Goyeneche said.

“This is going to be a living document that will shape the future of not just the New Orleans Police Department but of the entire criminal justice system, probably for the next eight to 10 years,” he said. “This is not going to be an inexpensive item for the city to absorb.”

Mary Howell, a New Orleans attorney who has frequently represented victims of police abuse, cautioned that the consent decree will not be a permanent solution to the department’s longstanding problems.

“Consent decrees have lives of their own, too, and they end at a certain point,” she told The Associated Press. “Everything we do now needs to be geared toward the day when we no longer have that direct federal oversight.”


Associated Press reporters Cain Burdeau in New Orleans and Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report. Louisiana Weekly editor Edmund W. Lewis also contributed to this report.