Sunday, July 29, 2012 1:27:06 AM
New Orleans Police, Mired in Scandal, Accept Plan for Overhaul
Lance Madison being arrested in September 2005 at the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans during which officers killed two people, including his brother. He was cleared of wrongdoing.
Alex Brandon/The Times-Picayune, via Associated Press
Mayor Mitch Landrieu, left, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. before announcing the consent decree on Tuesday.
Sean Gardner/Getty Images
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: July 24, 2012
NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans Police Department and the United States Department of Justice [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/j/justice_department/index.html ] announced a far-reaching agreement on Tuesday to overhaul the city’s scandal-ridden police force and improve safety in a city that has had little of it.
“Effective policing and constitutional policing go hand in hand,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said at an afternoon news conference with federal and local officials.
The 122-page agreement [ http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/404056-nopd-consent-decree.html ], known as a consent decree, states that “the ability of a police department to protect the community it serves is only as strong as the relationship it has with that community.” It calls for hundreds of new department policies governing the use of force, searches and seizures, arrests, interrogations, photographic lineups and more.
The agreement also deals with recruitment and training, performance evaluations and promotions, misconduct-complaint issues and even the lucrative off-duty work assignments that had become a potent source of corruption.
Over the years, the Justice Department has signed many such consent decrees with local law enforcement agencies over excesses in a single area, like an overuse of serious force or racial profiling. But the New Orleans agreement is notable for the broad array of issues it addresses; Mr. Holder called the agreement a “critical step forward” that could “serve as a reference point — and a potential model for success — in our future efforts.”
The agreement, which is subject to approval by a federal judge, has been long in coming. Days after taking office in 2010, Mayor Mitch Landrieu [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/mitch_landrieu/index.html ] announced that he was inviting the Justice Department to help clean up a law enforcement agency that had grown increasingly lawless, saying, “We have a systemic failure.”
The ensuing investigation involved hundreds of interviews with city and police officials, officers, community groups and experts on police work.
“We peeled the onion to its core,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at the news conference on Tuesday in Gallier Hall, the former city hall.
At least eight troubling episodes have been investigated separately by federal law enforcement officials, including a shooting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricane_katrina/index.html ] in 2005, when police officers killed two people and wounded four others at the city’s Danziger Bridge.
In March 2011, the Justice Department released the findings of a 10-month investigation that found dysfunction and corruption in nearly every facet of the department. The federal investigators found evidence of the use of excessive force on civilians, discrimination, a failure to investigate serious crimes and a startling lack of accountability.
The consent decree builds on that report and offers a path to change across the range of police activities. The section of the agreement concerning the use of force, for example, calls for policies and training in proper decision making to determine when force is appropriate and constitutional and when techniques that do not require force can be used.
When force is necessary, the agreement calls for officers to “de-escalate” as soon as possible to avoid a descent into brutality.
The Police Department has also agreed to put a reporting system in place to track incidents when force is used, and a review board to examine episodes in which serious use of force occurs. Officers interviewing suspects will be prohibited from using violence or threatening to harm the suspect or family members, and all interrogations involving suspected homicides and sexual assaults will be videotaped from start to finish.
Similarly detailed procedures are called for in reducing bias in police work and in conducting photographic lineups to avoid undue police influence in selecting suspects. The police have also agreed to avoid bias in crimes affecting women.
“In the old N.O.P.D., sexual assault victims were ignored,” Mr. Landrieu said.
The agreement also calls for continued independent monitoring and judicial oversight of the Police Department for several years to ensure that it is complying with the agreement.
On many fronts, “meaningful progress has already been made,” Mr. Holder said at the news conference. “Mayor Landrieu and Chief Serpas did not wait for our findings to begin the reform process.” Ronal W. Serpas was named superintendent of police by Mr. Landrieu in 2010.
The costs of these reforms will be paid by the city, according to the agreement. Mr. Landrieu estimated costs of $11 million each year for the next five years, and Mr. Holder suggested that some of the costs might ultimately be reduced through federal grants.
Mr. Landrieu urged the rows of police officers attending the news conference who were already working for a better department and who wanted to make it better still to stay. “Those of you who don’t,” he said, “please leave.”
Peter Scharf, a criminologist at Tulane University who has studied the 1,300-member department, said local officers feared that the new initiative “targets the police officers in New Orleans, not works with them,” and worried that it requires the city to “dismember” its Police Department in the midst of a murder epidemic.
Last year there were 200 murders in the city, Mr. Scharf noted, and “we’re on track to beat last year’s record.”
Officials who negotiated the agreement, however, argued that nothing was being dismantled, and said that past consent decrees in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh showed that policing generally improves as new practices are put in place.
The Police Department came under federal scrutiny in the 1990s, when the force was, in many ways, even worse than it is today. That investigation ended with two former officers on death row but resulted in no formal consent decree. The most egregious problems faded for a time, but ultimately came back.
For Marc H. Morial, the city’s mayor at the time of the 1990s investigation, the consent decree is a critical element of the new plan, since the community and its leaders “fell asleep at the wheel” and allowed things to slip. Mr. Morial, now the head of the National Urban League, said the consent decree served as a contract. “It will not depend on the leadership or good will of any particular mayor or any particular chief of police,” he said.
The city and the department will try to reach full compliance with the plan within four years, but the agreement could be extended far beyond that.
Mary E. Howell, a New Orleans lawyer who has represented victims of police abuse, called the agreement “a very good thing” and said federal scrutiny of civil rights violations in the city fell off sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks, when so many resources were devoted to security.
“We went for seven years in New Orleans with virtually no federal enforcement of civil rights law, and it killed us,” she said.
Anticorruption campaigns come and go in New Orleans, she said. “That seems to me to be the real challenge of this effort — doing something that sticks.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/us/plan-to-reform-new-orleans-police-department.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/us/plan-to-reform-new-orleans-police-department.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Lance Madison being arrested in September 2005 at the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans during which officers killed two people, including his brother. He was cleared of wrongdoing.
Alex Brandon/The Times-Picayune, via Associated Press
Mayor Mitch Landrieu, left, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. before announcing the consent decree on Tuesday.
Sean Gardner/Getty Images
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: July 24, 2012
NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans Police Department and the United States Department of Justice [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/j/justice_department/index.html ] announced a far-reaching agreement on Tuesday to overhaul the city’s scandal-ridden police force and improve safety in a city that has had little of it.
“Effective policing and constitutional policing go hand in hand,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said at an afternoon news conference with federal and local officials.
The 122-page agreement [ http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/404056-nopd-consent-decree.html ], known as a consent decree, states that “the ability of a police department to protect the community it serves is only as strong as the relationship it has with that community.” It calls for hundreds of new department policies governing the use of force, searches and seizures, arrests, interrogations, photographic lineups and more.
The agreement also deals with recruitment and training, performance evaluations and promotions, misconduct-complaint issues and even the lucrative off-duty work assignments that had become a potent source of corruption.
Over the years, the Justice Department has signed many such consent decrees with local law enforcement agencies over excesses in a single area, like an overuse of serious force or racial profiling. But the New Orleans agreement is notable for the broad array of issues it addresses; Mr. Holder called the agreement a “critical step forward” that could “serve as a reference point — and a potential model for success — in our future efforts.”
The agreement, which is subject to approval by a federal judge, has been long in coming. Days after taking office in 2010, Mayor Mitch Landrieu [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/mitch_landrieu/index.html ] announced that he was inviting the Justice Department to help clean up a law enforcement agency that had grown increasingly lawless, saying, “We have a systemic failure.”
The ensuing investigation involved hundreds of interviews with city and police officials, officers, community groups and experts on police work.
“We peeled the onion to its core,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at the news conference on Tuesday in Gallier Hall, the former city hall.
At least eight troubling episodes have been investigated separately by federal law enforcement officials, including a shooting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricane_katrina/index.html ] in 2005, when police officers killed two people and wounded four others at the city’s Danziger Bridge.
In March 2011, the Justice Department released the findings of a 10-month investigation that found dysfunction and corruption in nearly every facet of the department. The federal investigators found evidence of the use of excessive force on civilians, discrimination, a failure to investigate serious crimes and a startling lack of accountability.
The consent decree builds on that report and offers a path to change across the range of police activities. The section of the agreement concerning the use of force, for example, calls for policies and training in proper decision making to determine when force is appropriate and constitutional and when techniques that do not require force can be used.
When force is necessary, the agreement calls for officers to “de-escalate” as soon as possible to avoid a descent into brutality.
The Police Department has also agreed to put a reporting system in place to track incidents when force is used, and a review board to examine episodes in which serious use of force occurs. Officers interviewing suspects will be prohibited from using violence or threatening to harm the suspect or family members, and all interrogations involving suspected homicides and sexual assaults will be videotaped from start to finish.
Similarly detailed procedures are called for in reducing bias in police work and in conducting photographic lineups to avoid undue police influence in selecting suspects. The police have also agreed to avoid bias in crimes affecting women.
“In the old N.O.P.D., sexual assault victims were ignored,” Mr. Landrieu said.
The agreement also calls for continued independent monitoring and judicial oversight of the Police Department for several years to ensure that it is complying with the agreement.
On many fronts, “meaningful progress has already been made,” Mr. Holder said at the news conference. “Mayor Landrieu and Chief Serpas did not wait for our findings to begin the reform process.” Ronal W. Serpas was named superintendent of police by Mr. Landrieu in 2010.
The costs of these reforms will be paid by the city, according to the agreement. Mr. Landrieu estimated costs of $11 million each year for the next five years, and Mr. Holder suggested that some of the costs might ultimately be reduced through federal grants.
Mr. Landrieu urged the rows of police officers attending the news conference who were already working for a better department and who wanted to make it better still to stay. “Those of you who don’t,” he said, “please leave.”
Peter Scharf, a criminologist at Tulane University who has studied the 1,300-member department, said local officers feared that the new initiative “targets the police officers in New Orleans, not works with them,” and worried that it requires the city to “dismember” its Police Department in the midst of a murder epidemic.
Last year there were 200 murders in the city, Mr. Scharf noted, and “we’re on track to beat last year’s record.”
Officials who negotiated the agreement, however, argued that nothing was being dismantled, and said that past consent decrees in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh showed that policing generally improves as new practices are put in place.
The Police Department came under federal scrutiny in the 1990s, when the force was, in many ways, even worse than it is today. That investigation ended with two former officers on death row but resulted in no formal consent decree. The most egregious problems faded for a time, but ultimately came back.
For Marc H. Morial, the city’s mayor at the time of the 1990s investigation, the consent decree is a critical element of the new plan, since the community and its leaders “fell asleep at the wheel” and allowed things to slip. Mr. Morial, now the head of the National Urban League, said the consent decree served as a contract. “It will not depend on the leadership or good will of any particular mayor or any particular chief of police,” he said.
The city and the department will try to reach full compliance with the plan within four years, but the agreement could be extended far beyond that.
Mary E. Howell, a New Orleans lawyer who has represented victims of police abuse, called the agreement “a very good thing” and said federal scrutiny of civil rights violations in the city fell off sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks, when so many resources were devoted to security.
“We went for seven years in New Orleans with virtually no federal enforcement of civil rights law, and it killed us,” she said.
Anticorruption campaigns come and go in New Orleans, she said. “That seems to me to be the real challenge of this effort — doing something that sticks.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/us/plan-to-reform-new-orleans-police-department.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/us/plan-to-reform-new-orleans-police-department.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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upon the Right of Election, 1790
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