Posted on 09/27/2005 12:17:49 PM PDT by RedBloodedAmerican
Live conference...
LOL
I think today Bush is saying... okay... here we are. What have you guys been up to??
And how long did it go on. 13.5 million dollars a year at $30,000 for each officer.
Thanks....this is sooo unreal..you couldn't make it up..have any of the cable news nets picked it up yet?
Not missing, payroll padded... they didn't exist (they only found 80), hence fake cops getting paid... a lot of them.
sorry this is so long, but it's worth it-
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=119&subsecID=213&contentID=2155
DLC | Blueprint Magazine | September 1, 2000
Fighting Crime and Corruption in New Orleans
By Peter Ross Range
Amid the hoopla about crime reduction in New York City, an equally impressive story has sometimes gone overlooked 1,200 miles to the south. In New Orleans, a city long known for its Big Easy lifestyle, a concerted effort at police reform and crime reduction over the past six years has achieved considerable success -- and spawned lessons for other cities.
Despite a reputation for corruption and laissez-faire policies, New Orleans has used smart politics, public-private partnerships, federal funds, and openness to outside help to create one of the leading reform stories of the 1990s. Labeled in the mid-1990s as "Murder Capital, U.S.A.," New Orleans now claims one of the fastest dropping crime rates in the nation despite a recent upsurge in murders. In addition, under the leadership of a new police superintendent imported from Washington, D.C., using methods borrowed from New York and personnel lent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) has dramatically reshaped and reformed itself from a vortex of vice to a tightly managed organization with a powerful Public Integrity Division. The result may be a model for the 2000s.
Between 1994 and 1999, the murder rate fell 63 percent, assaults dropped 60 percent, and armed robberies were down 49 percent. A recent quality of life survey conducted by the University of New Orleans found that local voters feel safer than at any time since 1986; the percentage of voters who believe that crime is decreasing has gone up in the past six years from 1 percent to 57 percent. Keys to the New Orleans Police Department turnaround were:
A crackdown on internal corruption (fueled in part by the U.S. attorney and the FBI) that led to nearly 200 dismissals and criminal charges, including two murder convictions of police officers;
Decentralization of personnel to neighborhoods, with increased responsibilities and accountability for district commanders;
Reintroduction of community policing with federal support, including substations in public housing projects;
Dramatic pay increases and stringent recruitment standards, including the hiring of 500 new officers to bring the department up to the minimum recommended strength of 1,700;
An infusion of federal funds and the strong engagement of the local business community to purchase new equipment, finance salary increases, and reduce the need for police officers to accept corruption-prone moonlighting jobs as private security;
Rigorous accountability procedures based on the COMSTAT reporting and tracking system developed by former New York Deputy Police Commissioner Jack Maple; the system drives accountability down the chain of command to the officer on the beat.
Before the turnaround, New Orleans was in a slow downward spiral and, in 1994, the city hit bottom. With 425 murders and equally alarming numbers in other crime categories, America's favorite Mardi Gras destination also earned the title of America's most violent city. Tourists were being scared away, new businesses were on hold, downtown construction was nearly at a standstill. Longtime residents were fleeing New Orleans for the suburbs. Things were so miserable that the city was tainted with the ultimate symbolic badge of dishonor, an exposi on "60 Minutes" by Mike Wallace.
The TV show, and other sobering statistics, shocked the city. Already, a young state senator named Marc Morial, son of the city's first black mayor (Dutch Morial, who served 1978-1986), had run for mayor on a law-and-order platform and won. Voters realized they needed a tough internal cleanup and some relief from the crime wave. While most of the criminals were black, so were most of the victims; New Orleans is 66 percent African-American.
"It was a little bit like Nixon to China," admits Morial in the spacious mayor's office with its portraits of Jackie Robinson and the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby. "When we introduced a tough curfew, people could see it as a white police force picking on black kids. But I could go into the churches and say, 'There's no reason for your babies to be out after 9 o'clock,' and the heads would nod."
The curfew -- which requires youths under 17 to be off the streets by 9 p.m. (11 p.m. on weekends) -- has been a success, reducing youth crime by 27 percent during the hours of enforcement. "All we were doing was using a structured curfew to reinstate the old community code from when I was growing up -- you had to be indoors, or at least on your porch, when the street lights came on."
Creating a curfew was easy compared to the other challenges Morial faced. Not only was New Orleans in the grip of a seemingly unmanageable crime spiral, but the forces of light -- the police department -- were in fact part of the darkness. Reports of police brutality and corruption were rampant, triggering a federal investigation. Police officers were implicated in protecting drug stashes and tipping drug lords off to impending raids or attacks by other narcotics gangs. Police officers moonlighting as security for bars and clubs often turned a blind eye to underage drinking and drug sales. Forty thousand arrest warrants were backed up in department files. Citizens were as afraid of the police as they were of the criminals and avoided filing complaints for fear of retaliation.
"By 1994 it was so bad that I was almost embarrassed, after 25 years on the job, to put on the uniform," says Capt. Michael Ellington, now commander of the 6th district.
One of Morial's first moves was to bring in an outsider to shake up the police department. Richard Pennington had been assistant police superintendent in Washington, D.C., where he had won high marks for instituting community policing in high-crime neighborhoods. As an outsider, "I didn't know anyone, and I didn't owe anyone," says Superintendent Pennington today.
Even with a mandate to clean up "inside crime" before attacking "outside crime," Pennington's job got harder right from the beginning. Within hours of the new superintendent's swearing in, a police officer who heard that a complaint had been filed against him had the complainant -- a woman -- executed in cold blood. A few months later, another police officer -- a woman -- participated in the robbery of a restaurant and killed three people by shooting them in the head, including her sometime police partner who was working that night as security in the restaurant. Both offending officers received death sentences, a searing symbol of how far the NOPD had sunk (one officer's sentence was changed to mandatory life but is on appeal).
Pennington's brief was clear and, with guidance from Jack Maple, now a crime-fighting consultant, he instituted sweeping reforms. First, the ineffectual internal investigation division was disbanded. In its place, a Public Integrity Division was created -- and moved out of police headquarters to an independent location that was designed to be more accessible to citizens. "Some people might be intimidated to come into headquarters to file a complaint and then find themselves in the same elevator with the cop they were complaining about," says Major Felix Loicano, whom Pennington chose to run Public Integrity.
In addition, Pennington dramatically decentralized police structures. Mayor Morial had already removed 100 police officers from desk jobs in city hall and the police headquarters onto the streets ("from seats to streets"); now the highly centralized detective division was dissolved and deployed to the eight district commanders. Assigned to each district and working elbow-to-elbow with uniformed officers, detectives are now often the second official to arrive on a crime scene; information is exchanged quickly. "Before, we answered a lot of calls for service but there was no follow-up," says Lt. Lonnie Swain, commander of the 7th district. "A lot of information got lost in the shuffle between here and downtown."
More important, moving the detectives to clearly defined districts where they have turf to protect has generated a sense of geographic pride not felt when all the detectives were based downtown and assigned to the whole city. "When you're based in the district, you take more responsibility for everything that happens there," says Swain.
The key to the new accountability is COMSTAT, an outcomes management system based, simply, on computerized statistics. Rather than providing a general summary of where crime is occurring, analysts in every district headquarters now generate computerized maps of every week's crimes -- various icons, or dots, on a large street map. Every Wednesday afternoon, district commanders convene their unit chiefs for a rapid-fire show-and-tell with the maps projected on a wall. Each officer knows he must have answers: the crime trends, the exact disposition of each investigation, patrol times and personnel deployment, who is out of jail and back on the streets. District commanders then use the maps -- Lonnie Swain wields a laser pointer -- to deploy their troops: "directed patrolling," it's called. "Joe, put your people in zone Q this week," said Swain one Wednesday afternoon when a cluster of armed robbery icons appeared in a certain neighborhood. These obvious, but not always practiced, tactics were introduced by Maple under the rubric "put cops on dots." So far, it has worked. "One week we flooded a zone that had shown a cluster of robberies, and after four days we caught the bad guys in the act," says Swain. "That led us to a house where they had stashed more than $100,000 worth of stolen goods."
COMSTAT reporting has to be precise because, on Friday mornings, each district commander travels to police headquarters for a similar grilling by Superintendent Pennington and three assistant superintendents. Any question -- about a crime, an investigation, the state of equipment, the exact deployment of forces -- that is not satisfactorily answered will be asked again the next Friday. "You know you're going to be held accountable," says Swain. In short, the pressure is on -- on everybody. And the system is unrelenting. "We haven't missed a COMSTAT meeting in three-and-a-half years," says commander Ellington.
While district commanders are proud of their COMSTAT record, Pennington sees the system as near-revolutionary. "It has made a world of difference. Before, a district commander couldn't really tell me about specific crimes. I would say, 'Where's it happening?' He would say, 'All over.' Now we know exactly what's going on and can put our officers where they are needed. It's like a football coach using x's and o's to tell his team what to do."
One way the accountability push succeeds is by giving frontline officers wider decisionmaking latitude. With an emphasis on problem-solving, not just arrests, officers are encouraged to cooperate with social service agencies when they find kids out after curfew. The idea is to look behind the surface violation for larger causes, such as drug use, family dysfunction, even housing problems, without pushing the issue all the way up the chain of command. "By giving them discretion and responsibility, you're giving the frontline officers ownership," says police spokesman Marlon Defillo. "They take pride in getting problems solved."
A big part of New Orleans's success was built on the public-private partnership created when the business community formed the New Orleans Police Foundation. With 24 board members from the top ranks of New Orleans business and an annual budget of $1.6 million, the foundation played a key role in persuading the city council to forgo an electricity rate cut and dedicate the surplus funds to an immediate and badly needed police salary increase. The foundation also helps recruit high-quality police candidates locally and from around the country, and has upgraded the local police academy. It serves as a meeting grounds for disparate players in the reform process: the mayor's office, the city council, the police department, and federal law enforcement. "In the beginning, they were hardly talking to each other," says foundation director Terry Ebbert.
By sponsoring an annual "Walk the Beat" 5-K run and picnic for the general public -- $15 gets you a T-shirt and an entry number -- the foundation also raises discretionary funds for each district and burnishes the department's public image. Where he once lamented that "we were housing a lot of criminals in uniform," Ebbert now boasts: "The economic development department of the city wears a blue uniform."
Federal participation in New Orleans crime reduction included both money and people. Block grants of more than $2 million bought state-of-the-art computerized dispatching equipment, in-car computers, and modern ballistics testing and helped put officers into public housing projects under the Community-Oriented Policing Squad (COPS) program. For the first time ever, NOPD issued its officers Glock pistols. Before, they had been responsible for buying their own sidearms."Without the 1994 Clinton crime bill, we couldn't have done it," says Mayor Morial. In addition, New Orleans became the first police department to invite -- and get -- two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into its ranks to help organize the Public Integrity unit, a rare example of intimate local-federal collaboration. "We changed the posture of the Justice Department and FBI from being on the sidelines to becoming partners," says Morial.
Not that everything is rosy in the Crescent City on the meandering Mississippi. By national standards, crime is still a major problem (with 34 murders per 100,000 residents, the murder rate is six times the national average and four times New York's). The first half of 2000 saw 120 murders, compared to 80 in the same period last year. Chief Pennington admits that while many battles have been won, the war has not. "There is still some corruption, some officers who think they can be involved in the drug trade and shakedowns, for instance." While such investigations continue, Pennington fears much of the success of the past six years could be undone by a single ugly incident such as those in recent years in New York. "It only takes one case to ruin your reputation," he says.
Still, New Orleans's young mayor rightly claims to have made huge strides in a city that once had a murder rate 15 times that of New York. And he did it with a comprehensive plan that ranged from summer recreation programs to police prosecutions and modern accountability, breaking the cycle of despair that often shrouded inner-city policing. "In the 1970s, people argued that crime was a sociological phenomenon and public policy couldn't impact it," says Morial. "But when you put all the pieces together, you can sell it to the people and they will support you. And we've done it the New Democrat way -- we haven't shirked law enforcement."
Nagin was put in to clean out the corruption, starting at the low end of the totem pole.
Much responsibility, very little power.
Insiders were doing all to keep the truth from him about the exact number of officers and where they were at any one time.
He was supposed to be concentrating on this problem when Katrina surprised them.
The GOVERNOR told him the FEDS would take care of everything, to keep him from digging too deep.
Add that to Rather insisting his lie was truth and I see that the media is disintegrating before our eyes.
Good thing for that website called Buckhead.
KKKKatie beautiful Katie, and Matt were talking TODAY about profile the "Heroes of Katrina" in particular, the NOPD. LMAO!
Oops. Drop a zero. (Use calculator next time.)
And if the coverup story is really true.... there are performance appraisals to fake, mileage statements, health and life insurance registrations etc... etc... Depending on how well they tried to cover it up.
>That picture is seared in my memory.
That may have played a part in this.
The NRA filed some sort of legal action in Federal Court in Louisiana to stop the confiscations.
Maybe someone decided to do a little digging on the backgrounds of the people who ordered the confiscations.
I wonder what ever happened to that lady. Then there was also the lawyer the media interviewed who vowed there would be gunfire if the NOPD tried to confiscate his firearms. I think his name was Dwyer or O'Dwyer.
Your #262......I love your sense of humor!
I sense Mayor Nagin's desperation in the photo of him watching the dude resign.
Somehow, down the road here somewhere, there's going to be a public shoot-out of some kind, like Ruby taking out Oswald . . . I just think that's where this is all going . . .
Hannity is saying that Nagin had met with Farrakan in a secret meeting.....
Hummmmmmm.... we might need FEMA TRUCKLOADS of popcorn.
The old joke, in NOLA, useed to be, when a citizen called up to report his house was being burglarized.."Don't bother with a description, just get his badge number.."
Why stop at the voter rolls? How about checking the welfare rolls. I'm willing to bet that the discrepancies found there would come close to Nagin's estimate of 10,000 dead.
"In the annals of history, no police department in the history of the world was asked to do what we (were) asked," Compass said with a mix of anger and pride.
Compass said that right.
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