By Brenna Kielkopf

In the past few years, the NOPD has become notorious for their slow response times or lack thereof.  While the average response time in 2020 was 83.5 minutes per call, that number has climbed to a whopping 133.7 minutes per call in 2023.

Gee (who gave only his first name) moved from Houston to New Orleans in 2014.  He made his Instagram account, NOLACrimeUpdates, last year.  “I’ve just recently come to notice this,” he says regarding the NOPD’s response times.  “I don’t know how long they’ve been dealing with these issues, I’m not originally from here.”  

“I was hearing a lot of stories with people who got their cars broken into, shootings, you know.” So he began to spread awareness: “I created the page initially to update about what’s going on; mainly posting old videos of bank robberies and stuff like that” he says, “The page started blowing up, and eventually I started posting about people who lost their lives to gun violence…Little tributes to them and all that.”  Within a year of creating his account, Gee gained sixty-two thousand followers.  

He was living in New Orleans East when he made a call to the NOPD: “I had two armed gunmen come to my door.  One had an assault rifle and one had a pistol.  I called NOPD and it took about 6 hours for them to show up.”  This is a familiar occurrence in New Orleans: as of 2023, the average response time stands at 138.6 minutes.  But that time will be longer if a call is deprioritized.   The NOPD’s Professional Standards and Accountability Bureau (PSAB) has raised concerns regarding an increase in call deprioritization, particularly in domestic violence (DV) cases and in certain districts, including the 7th– New Orleans East.

“Usually those are supposed to be priority calls” he says, “But the NOPD has a staffing shortage right now.  And it seems like there’s a lack of morale in the police department.  I don’t think they have the motivation to actually do work or do their job.  I don’t know what it is, I can’t really figure that out.”  

In May 2023, Asia Davis, a woman living in New Orleans East, was killed.  “With the Davis case,” he says, “her mother said that she called several times, and they showed up 15 hours later.  It was two times she called the police and they showed up the next day, after 12-15 hours”.  Both were domestic abuse calls.  Davis’s boyfriend had been a threat for months, and it seems that the NOPD didn’t pay attention.  “I’ve been traumatized just by what’s happening in the department, this whole ordeal” says Gee.

He thinks that there could be an issue with the investigations themselves: “It’s not just the patrol officers, it’s also on the part of the detective dept as well.”

Val Cupit has been a member of the Lakeview neighborhood crime watch since 1989.  “I was a stay at home mother, so as a hobby” She says, “I was raising two children, I was concerned about their safety.  It got my interest.”  

Cupit has worked closely with the police during her time with the crime watch.  “I saw it happen”, she says, “I saw everything implode.  They had internal affairs.  Which was put up and centralized.  Internal affairs, at the time, was supposed to investigate police wrongdoing.  You were supposed to have the cream of the crop, the ones that would pass the security checks, supervise that department.  But it changed.  As police officers made friends with people, they started to have a hard time disciplining the people they worked with.   You know, the people who had their back, who took a bullet for them! Okay?  They’d say, ‘I have to write a guy up who saved my life?’ That’d keep them up at night.”

This, she claims, led to bigger problems in the NOPD: “Before, everybody rode the boat in the same direction. But we had started losing it when, I wanna say, we had the Len Davis situation.”  Len Davis was a NOPD police officer who was charged with the murder Kim Groves in 1994.  Groves had filed a brutality complaint against him.  Cupit thinks that there was a deterioration of morality in the department: “Internal divisions gave him the name of the person that gave them the complaint on him”.  Davis was also convicted of running a cocaine protection racket with nine other police officers.  Corruption at this time was brought to light when Marc Moriale brought in Richard Pennington from Washington D.C to oversee the NOPD.

Cupit is concerned that the consent decree (a part of which reformed the police detail system) prompted a large number of officers to resign– this has not been corroborated by government officials.  She says, “The police details are now through the office of secondary employment.  I used to be able to call people and ask them to work for Lakeview private patrol.  I paid police to come and walk the streets and count the cracks in the cement.  And I would pay them directly.  But after that consent decree, I’d have to go to the office.  That took a while to set up, and the police started leaving because the pay was so low without those details.”  Cupit feels less secure since the new detail protocol was implemented.  Prior to the consent decree felt more secure in Lakeview.  She says, “you had any problems, you told the police, and those problems were gone.”  It should be noted that in the past 30 days officers spent 330 hours handling incidents in the 3rd District– which includes Lakeview.  By comparison, officers spent a total of 34 hours handling incidents in the 7th District.  

The consent decree, approved by the court in January 2013, followed an investigation into NOPD civil rights violations and other misconduct.  It had the aim of fair and unbiased policing in New Orleans.  It is unclear if the consent decree was directly connected to NOPD understaffing, as Cupit claims.  In June 2010 (shortly after the investigation began) the NOPD had 1,491 commissioned officers.  By January 2013 that number had dropped to 1,255 officers, and by December 2014 there were only 1,061.  While the department hasn’t recovered since 2013, there was another steep decline between 2021 and 2023.  As of December 2023 the NOPD stands at 904 officers.  In January 2021 there were 1,142 commissioned officers.  

There have been 10,413 incidents of domestic disturbances called about in 2023.  The average response time is 175.1 minutes for these calls.  That’s higher than average– and significantly higher than the response time for carjackings which, surprisingly, stands at 14.3 minutes per call.  Calls about disturbances which include fights, protests, disorderly conduct, and loitering, are responded to by a patrol officer in an average of 120.3 minutes; nearly an hour faster than an officer would respond to a report of domestic violence.  Jefferson Parish, while just down the road, has considerably faster response times at just 4 minutes as an average response time to an emergency call.

Allegations have been made by multiple sources that the NOPD communications department is deprioritizing more calls than is necessary, “911 communications division is a separate entity” says Cupit, “I’m starting to put 911 in the same category as the sewerage and water board.”  

In October 2023, there was a house fire that took the lives of three young children– the fire allegedly set by their father, who had a history of domestic violence against his ex-wife, their mother.  The mother made a call to 911 at 11:54 am, and police didn’t arrive on the scene until 12:20 pm.  The units were dispatched at 12:15.  

When asked about the allegations of deprioritizing domestic violence calls, NOPD public affairs declined to interview due to an active investigation into the issue.  However, they did release a report regarding the deprioritization of calls on October 27, 2023.  It states, “…residents in some districts may end up waiting for a police response for much longer than residents in other districts”.  Specifically, they mention the 7th District, New Orleans East, where Gee was living at the time of his call regarding the two men with firearms: “Our audits show [for example] that response times, and thus GOAs, are significantly higher in the 7th District as compared to other districts.”  GOA stands for “gone on arrival”– if this is the case for the suspect in question, police cannot fill out a report.  This could lead to further, potentially more serious, crimes.  

This is especially true in DV cases.  The report addresses this: “The Monitoring Team and PSAB also noticed a high number of deprioritizations in the area of Sexual Assault (SA), Domestic Violence (DV), and Rape calls, often associated with the unavailability of an officer to take the call and a resulting GOA”.  The department cites understaffing as a cause for deprioritization, and expresses the hope that reforms will take place soon: “Currently, as noted in this report, NOPD’s response time data are flawed due to the deprioritizing of calls because no officer is available. We look forward to working with the NOPD to implement its corrective action plan and the recommendations outlined in this Report.”

In the 2024 proposed budget hearings, council members discussed raising the starting pay for Orleans Parish Communications District (OCPD) officers– these are the 911 calltakers.  The current starting pay is $15.54 an hour– less than a lifeguard’s starting pay, which stands at $18– councilmember Lesli Harris pointed out. In response to this, City Council plans to redirect a decent amount of funding towards higher OCPD pay, “we are providing roughly a 30 percent increase in OCP wages” Says Moreno during the December 1st city council meeting.

Karl Fassold, interim executive director of Orleans Parish Communications District (OCPD) spoke on the issue at the city council budget hearing saying,  “Realistically, we’re not going to get full staffing until, possibly, the end of this year”.  His concern, he says, is that people training to work as OCPD officers often bail once their training period has finished, due to underpay and stress from the nature of the job: “I don’t know how much of an increase we’re going to get when we raise the starting pay, we’ll find out”

Councilmembers also expressed concern that the downgrading or “deprioritization” of 911 calls contributed to a lack of adequate response from the NOPD.  Calls can be “downgraded” based on whether the perpetrator is still present at the scene, and how much time has passed since the crime was committed.  During the 2024 proposed budget hearings councilmember Morrell asked of this downgrading policy: “If the person shot at you and missed, and you call 911 and they go, ‘well he isn’t there anymore’ that doesn’t mean that the person is not lying in wait to shoot again.  How does that downgrading work?”

Fassold responded, “We do not downgrade.  We do assign initial priorities to a call based on the incident type” the only time that the OCPD designates a call as having a certain level of importance, Fassold says, is when the call is first made.  However, there are issues with this, “There’s a difference in a code two of people walking down the street pulling door handles and shots fired” He says.  Currently, the system by which the OCPD classifies emergency calls is being overhauled.  As of the December 1st, City Council meeting, the reimplimentation of the old codes as well as a program which dispatches social workers to the scene of DV and SA calls.  Fassold said during the proposed budget hearing, “That suggestion for change was just approved by the consent decree monitor, the DOA, NOPD et cetera.  I wish I could say we would have it done tomorrow.  But we won’t.”  

Councilmember Oliver Thomas said, “If they are bleeding out on a corner on Martin Luther King, and the call time is a ten minute difference from the person who made the call in the Tulane University district, that’s the problem with 911.  So, my question is, how do we deal with cultural and racial sensitivity based on where people live? How do you train your folk to know that if someone is shot on the lakefront and someone is shot in a central city or in the East or in the 9th ward, that this sense of urgency is the same?”

Fassold maintained that the upcoming overhaul of call designation would solve the issue, saying, “I firmly believe in my heart that this will resolve the issues.  The problem is not with priority dispatch and the protocols.  The problem was in the mapping of discriminate codes to incident types, when there weren’t enough, they weren’t discreet enough, they weren’t discriminating between those details and subtleties.”

As of the council meeting on December first, council members are hopeful for the changes taking place with the NOPD and OCPD.  The proposed budget changes will be implemented in 2024.