Changes need to be made with NOPD, the courts, and the DA’s office.

For NOPD:
It starts with repealing the consent decree which requires NOPD officers to be residents of Orleans Parish as well as places all manner if ridiculous paper work and pursuit requirements on officers that makes actual arrests and criminal pursuits extremely difficult. This would also enable a return to stop & frisk.

The next issue would be a thorough investigation into OT and pension fraud. In BR as well as with state police, there is rampant over-billing for OT hours that could not physically have been worked by the officers. This is used as a means of giving pay raises without actual raising official pay. In addition, OT pay is used to calculate retirement pensions, so fraud doesn’t just rob the taxpayers for the pay period when the fraud occurred, but for many decades after. I would launch a wholesale investigation to root out OT fraud in the NOPD as well as in all of Orleans Parish government.

Once we have identified the OT fraud, put a stop to it, and punished those who have retired by either eliminating or severely reducing their pensions, I would use those freed up funds to raise base pay and training requirements significantly.

This pay raise, combined with a larger area from which the department could recruit officers, should result in more and higher quality new hires into the department. I would put these new hires to work on 3 projects:
1. Driving homeless encampments and panhandlers (not to be confused with street performers) out of the warehouse district, CBD, marigny, and french quarter
2. Cracking down on “minor” offenses like vandalism, shoplifting, petty theft, atvs on public streets, etc
3. Improving response times for 911 calls

These changes, combined with eliminating speed and redlight cameras, are designed to be ones that are highly visible to the average citizen as a way to pitch a dedicated millage increase or rededication to fund NOPD. This effort would be part of a larger initiative to remove enforcement based revenues (civil asset forfeiture, brake tag tickets, mip’s, dui’s, speed cameras, etc) from going to fund policing activities and replacing those revenues with dedicated millages. The idea is to discourage police from focusing on activities that raise revenues for the department rather than protect the public.

Now, flush with more officers, a more stable source of revenue, less paper work, fewer criminals on the streets because they were picked up for lesser offenses sooner, and less incentive for focusing on victimless crimes (speeding and brake tags), they can start investigating violent crime more aggressively.

I’ll post later on changes that would be needed to the courts and DA’s offices.

This post was edited on 8/2/21 at 3:05 pm