March 17, 2011
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
NEW ORLEANS — Justice Department officials on Thursday released the findings of a 10-month investigation into this city’s Police Department, revealing a force that is profoundly and alarmingly troubled and setting in motion a process for its wholesale reform.
The report describes in chilling detail a department that is severely dysfunctional on every level: one that regularly uses excessive force on civilians, frequently fails to investigate serious crimes and has a deeply inadequate, in many cases nonexistent, system of accountability.
Using the report as a guideline, federal and local officials will now enter into negotiations leading to a consent decree, a blueprint for systemic reform that will be enforced by a federal judge.
“There is nobody in this room that is surprised by the general tenor and the tone of what this report has to say,” said Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, at a news conference attended by city and federal officials.
But, added Mr. Landrieu, who publicly invited federal intervention in the Police Department just days after his inauguration in May, “I look forward to a very spirited partnership and one that actually transforms this Police Department into one of the best in the country.”
The city’s police chief, Ronal Serpas, said he fully embraced the report and would be going over its findings with senior leadership later in the day.
While the report describes an appalling array of abuses and bad practices, it does not address in detail any of the nine or more federal criminal investigations into the department. These inquiries have already led to the convictions of three police officers, one for fatally shooting an unarmed civilian and another for burning the body.
Justice Department officials chose to exclude the information gleaned in the criminal inquiries to keep a wall between those investigations and the larger civil investigation into the practices of the department. But there were more than enough problems left to uncover.
While other departments generally have problems in specific areas, like the use of excessive force, “New Orleans has every issue that has existed in our practice to date, and a few that we hadn’t encountered,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
The report reveals that the department has not found a policy violation in any officer-involved shooting for the last six years, though federal officials who reviewed the records found that violations had clearly occurred. The department’s canine unit was so badly mismanaged — the dogs were so aggressive they frequently attacked their handlers — that federal officials encouraged the department to suspend it last year even though the investigation was still under way.
The report details a record of discriminatory policing, with a ratio of arrests of blacks to whites standing at nearly 16 to 1. Calls for police assistance by non-English speakers often went unanswered.
The report also found that the police “systemically misclassified possible sexual assaults, resulting in a sweeping failure to properly investigate many potential cases of rape, attempted rape and other sex crimes.”
The problems described in the report go beyond policy failings, depicting a culture of dysfunction that reaches all facets of the department. The recruitment program is described as anemic, training as “severely deficient in nearly every respect,” and supervision as poor or in some cases nonexistent.
The department has attracted this level of scrutiny before. As bad as it appears now, the police force was far more troubled in the mid-1990s. Two officers from that era are now on death row, and the number of murders in the city at the time soared above 400.
Federal agents conducted a similar investigation of the department, but there was less cooperation by local officials and, crucially, there was no consent decree.
While the department improved for a time, the structural problems remained and festered, as Thursday’s report makes clear.
This time, there will be federal court oversight, and there is already widespread consensus that systemic police reform is needed. Confidence in the department is so low that prosecutors have trouble finding juries, as so many prospective jurors declare that they would not put any trust in the testimony of a New Orleans police officer.
The robust citizen engagement that has been a significant factor in the city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina has also changed the dynamic, officials said. While the New Orleans police force may be troubled to a rare degree, federal officials also described the city’s appetite for systemic reform as unprecedented.
Federal officials said the team of agents assigned to investigate the department worked with police leadership as well as rank-and-file officers. Investigators also reached out to community leaders to a degree that they had not previously done.
Still, officials acknowledge that changing the department’s entrenched culture will be hard and will take years. Though Mr. Serpas, who was an officer during the reform efforts in the 1990s, has already begun addressing many of the concerns, news reports of police abuses during the Mardi Gras season have come out in the past few weeks, and the number of homicides is still stubbornly high.
“I’m not naïve about the hard work that lies ahead,” Mr. Perez said, adding that he was still optimistic. “I’m certain that we’re in a qualitatively different position than we were 10 years ago.”
Community advocates viewed the day’s announcement with a mix of hope and skepticism. Some groups had been trying to draw attention to police abuse in the city for years before their complaints were noticed by law enforcement.
“Nobody believed anything we said,” said Norris Henderson, a founder of a group for former prisoners called Voice of the Ex-Offender. He said he was encouraged that community groups were so involved in the federal inquiry, but was concerned about the level of involvement going forward.
“Will we be a part of the conversation?” he asked. “Just going to the quote-unquote criminal justice folks, well, y’all the folks responsible for this damn problem.”
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