Staffing at the New Orleans Police Department is so short that it takes an average of 2½ hours to respond to a 911 call, a recent analysis found. Another report chronicled the department’s low closure rate for sex crimes investigations and noted that detectives in the division are handling more than three times the recommended case load.
Things are so bad that Mayor LaToya Cantrell says the city should be freed of its federal civil rights consent decree because it inhibits recruitment and retention, but the judge overseeing the case instead sees the staffing woes as a threat to previously accomplished reforms.
And at a community meeting Thursday, Cantrell actually floated the idea that the city might not be able to stage a safe Carnival season, although she later backtracked.
That meeting was held the same day we learned from reporter Sam Karlin that the NOPD has a policy mandating that officers file reports on allegations of abortion — even though city officials and District Attorney Jason Williams have said they won’t pursue charges based on the controversial new state ban on the procedure.
Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said Friday that the intent of the policy is to document complaints, not launch investigations. But it also reads like a sop to the Republican state politicians who are demanding that local officials enforce a law that many New Orleanians find abhorrent, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has reversed its half-century-old decision giving women the right to make their own reproductive decisions and allowing physicians to treat them. Louisiana’s trigger law does not include criminal penalties for women who get abortions, but it targets doctors with the threat of long prison sentences.
Why New Orleans cops would at least pay lip service to hunting down health care workers when they could be patrolling the streets, responding to carjackings and investigating assaults was clear to anyone following another meeting Thursday, this one in Baton Rouge.
The scene was the State Bond Commission, and the floor belonged to Attorney General Jeff Landry, a culture warrior and likely gubernatorial candidate who once more pushed to delay approval of a $39 million line of credit for the city’s Sewerage & Water Board, which is trying to build an electrical substation to replace the breakdown-prone turbines that power the city’s water, sewer and drainage systems.
Landry’s reasoning had nothing to do with the perennially struggling S&WB, or with the commission’s proper role of ensuring that projects like the one planned are sound. His complaint was with city leaders who say they won’t enforce the abortion law. And New Orleans lobbyist Paul Rainwater’s promise that “the Police Department has put a process in place to investigate what you would consider illegal abortions” did nothing to lower the temperature.
“This is not the first time that the city has thumbed its nose at either the laws of the state or the laws of this nation,” Landry said, before amassing just enough votes to defer the proposal 7-6, in effect doing some nose-thumbing himself.
Or let’s just call it what it really was: grandstanding.
There are at least three potential governors, all Republican, on the Bond Commission, including state Treasurer John Schroder, who leads the panel. After a similar vote last month, he called Landry’s maneuver a “hollow gesture” that interjects “unrelated political issues into what should be a process focused on solely on the validity of the application.”
Point well taken, although Schroder’s not the best messenger here, as he has in the past shown no such reluctance to inject Second Amendment politics into the commission’s choice of banks to refinance state debt. Also, he decided not to vote on the measure last week, after having criticized but ultimately backed Landry’s stance during the prior meeting.
Among those who voted with Landry this time was a representative of Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, another gubernatorial hopeful and the one most likely try to peel off some New Orleans Democrats. This vote won’t help him on that front, any more than Schroder’s contortions will give him credibility with true believers on either side.
NOPD’s policy is just as useless. It won’t make abortion rights supporters happy and it won’t satisfy those who want prosecutions. It won’t deter anyone looking to use the city as a political foil.
And it most certainly won’t make the streets safer.