The New Orleans Police Department and the United States Department of Justice on Tuesday are expected to announce a sweeping agreement to reform the city’s scandal-ridden police force.
The agreement, known as a consent decree, is nothing short of a top-to-bottom plan to overhaul a department that has withstood a number of previous efforts to overcome systemic problems of police violence and corruption.
The plan is scheduled to be announced at a news conference here late Tuesday afternoon and calls for new policies to govern the use of force by the police, for searches and seizures, arrests, interrogations and photographic lineups. It deals with recruiting 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 over excesses in a single area, like excessive use of force or racial profiling. But the New Orleans agreement is notable for the broad array of issues it addresses.
The New Orleans agreement, which must be approved by a federal judge, has been long in coming. In 2010, the incoming mayor, Mitch Landrieu, invited the Justice Department to help clean a law enforcement agency that had grown increasingly lawless, saying, “We have a systematic failure.” The ensuing investigation involved hundreds of interviews with city and police officials, officers, community groups and experts on police work.
At least eight episodes have been investigated separately by federal law enforcement officials, including a shooting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 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.
According to law officials familiar with the plan, 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 will also put in place a reporting system 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 his family, 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 past the department was accused of mishandling and playing down reports of sexual assault and domestic violence. The agreement also calls for continued independent monitoring and judicial oversight of the police department for several years to ensure that the department is complying with the agreement.
The costs of these reforms will be paid by the city, according to the agreement.
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.
The city and department will attempt to reach full compliance within four years, but the agreement could be extended far beyond that. NYT
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