By Julia LeDesma

The New Orleans Police Department has a notorious history of corruption. The department has a lengthy list of scandals that date back over decades, ranging from civilian beatings and shootings to lying about detail work.

Perhaps one of the most chaotic stretches of time for the department was the period immediately following Hurricane Katrina. The department had had issues brewing for some time leading up to the storm, but Katrina fully turned it on its head. “By the time we went into Katrina, the department had basically collapsed. Katrina didn’t cause the collapse, it exposed it,” said Mary Howell, a prominent New Orleans civil rights lawyer.

The NOPD quickly found themselves with their hands full with the power outages, flooding, and subsequent rescue attempts of the civilians who were stranded by the storm. The city was plagued by a general feeling of fear, creating a surefire breeding ground for reckless behavior. What followed were a series of police misconduct incidents, including several civilian shootings, several of which were covered up—or at least attempted to be. 

One of the more prominent cases was the shooting of Henry Glover and burning of his body. “The allegations were among the most egregious of any that I’d seen, both the killing and the burning, and a deep cover-up,” said Jared Fishman, the lead prosecutor on Glover’s case. “I think that case is very emblematic of the types of challenges and problems in policing generally, and as it relates to the difficulty of holding police accountable.

Glover was shot by officer David Warren while picking up loot from a strip mall with his best friend Bernard Calloway. Calloway had run home to alert Edward King, Glover’s brother, of the shooting, and the two flagged down a stranger who happened to be driving by, William Tanner, for help. Tanner let the three men into his car and drove them to the nearby Habans Elementary School, which had been made into a makeshift police station by the NOPD’s Special Operations Division, to seek medical attention. However, upon the arrival of Glover and his companions, Tanner and Glover’s brother and friend were handcuffed and then allegedly beat by the officers at the station, with no attention being paid to Glover in the back seat. By the time the beating had stopped, Glover had unfortunately bled to death in the backseat of the car. Officers then proceeded to drive Tanner’s car to the bottom of a nearby levee and light the car on fire with Glover’s body inside. The car was left there and discovered about a week after the storm.

Fishman’s book, Fire on the Levee: The Murder of Henry Glover and the Search for Justice after Hurricane Katrina, was published earlier this year and details his experience working on the case. His and his colleagues’ efforts were constantly hindered by the NOPD not wanting to reveal the full story.

“New Orleans was probably the least cooperative and most problematic of any police department I ever worked in,” Fishman recalled. “There were a lot of officers we knew who knew information that were lying. Because it was Katrina, a lot of the normal documentation that you would expect to find didn’t exist, and so it became even more important to have reliable officers who could tell us what happened. We found some, but it was the most obstructive department I’ve ever worked with at various different levels—from those who were directly related, to people who were not but were in positions of leadership.”

The shooter, David Warren, as well as 4 other officers (Gregory McRae, Robert Italiano, Travis McCabe, and Dwayne Scheuermann) were charged in connection with the incident—11 charges in total. Warren was charged with a civil rights violation (depriving Glover of his constitutional rights) and use of a firearm during a violent crime. 

Officers McRae and Scheuermann, the officers believed responsible for the beating at Habans Elementary and the burning of Glover’s body inside the car, had 5 charges stacked against them: a violation of the Fourth Amendment (for the beating at Habans Elementary), a civil rights violation (for depriving William Tanner of his constitutional right to property by burning his car), obstruction of justice (aiming to hide the evidence of Glover’s murder by burning the car), another civil rights violation (depriving Glover’s family of their right to find out what happened to Glover and receive financial compensation for the incident), and fire enhancement.

Officers Italiano and McCabe were indicted for involvement in the incident’s cover-up. Italiano was charged with intentionally giving the FBI false information. McCabe was charged with making false statements to the FBI and to the grand jury in an incident report. The two were also jointly charged with aiding and abetting each other.

After a long trial, Warren was found guilty on both counts, and McCabe was found guilty on all his charges as well. McRae was convicted of every charge involving the burning of Tanner’s car and Glover’s body (during the trial, he completely took the fall for Scheuermann regarding the burning and insisted that he acted alone, although Scheuermann was his senior officer and had gone with him in the car to the levee) but was acquitted on the charge related to the beating at Habans. Scheuermann and Italiano were acquitted of all charges.

While these initial results were actually quite impressive considering how difficult it was to successfully convict a police officer, the story unfortunately has an unsatisfactory ending: 3 years after his conviction, David Warren was granted a retrial and was ultimately found not guilty, resulting in him being acquitted of all charges and walking free. Warren has since expressed that he does not regret shooting Glover: “I still believe that the course of action that I took that day, and the actions that I took that day, were the proper actions.”

The Glover case was unfortunately not an outlying case of police misconduct for the NOPD, and following Katrina, things only continued to get worse for the department. In 2010, an intervention was staged in the form of the US Department of Justice being brought in to do an in-depth investigation. The investigation lasted 10 months and the findings were published in 2011. 

The executive summary  published by the Department of Justice reported 3 areas of “patterns and practices of unconstitutional conduct”. The first was frequent and unnecessary uses of force. The summary states, “Our review of officer-involved shootings within just the last two years revealed many instances in which NOPS officers used deadly force contrary to NOPD policy or law.” Additionally, there was a severe lack of investigation into these instances of force: “Even the most serious uses of force, such as officer-involved shootings and in-custody deaths, are investigated inadequately or not at all. NOPD’s mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects.”

The second reported area of misconduct was “a pattern of stops, searches, and arrests that violate the Fourth Amendment”. Officers were frequently observed engaging in detentions without reasonable suspicion and searches and arrests without probable cause. This was partly due to a lack of training provided by NOPD informing officers on the legal standards of stops, searches, and arrests. 

The final area of misconduct was discriminatory policing. Unfair policing based on race, ethnicity, and LGBT status was observed, particularly in regard to African American individuals. The summary stated: “Arrest data provided by the NOPD indicates that in 2009, the Department arrested 500 African-American males and 8 white males under the age of 17 for serious offenses…During this same period the Department arrested 65 African-American females and one white female in this same age group…Adjusting for population, these figures mean that the ratio of arrests rates for both African-American males to white males, and African-American females to white females, was nearly 16 to 1.” 84% of reported uses of force between January 2009 and May 2010 were directed towards African Americans; 27 instances of deadly force (in which an officer intentionally discharged their firearm) were recorded during this same time period, and all 27 of those instances were directed towards an African American subject.

Members of the LGBT community received unfair treatment as well, most notably transgender women. The summary states, “…transgender women complained that the NOPD officers improperly target and arrest them for prostitution, sometimes fabricating evidence of solicitation for compensation. Moreover, transgender residents reported that officers are likelier, because of their gender identity, to charge them under thee state’s “crimes against nature” statute—a statute whose history reflects anti-LGBT sentiment.”

Also included in the discriminatory practices section was a failure of proper investigations into sexual assault and domestic violence allegations. Several potential sexual assaults were found to have been misclassified, resulting in lack of proper investigation. Complaints that were pursued were done so in an unsatisfactory manner: “…we find that in situations where the Department pursues sexual assault complaints, the investigations are seriously deficient, marked by poor victim interviewing skills, missing or inadequate documentation, and minimal efforts to contact witnesses or interrogate suspects. The documentation we reviewed was replete with stereotypical assumptions and judgments about sex crimes and victims of sex crimes, including misguided commentary about the victims’ perceived credibility, sexual history, or delay in contacting the police,” the summary states.

The DOJ executive summary listed a series of “longstanding and entrenched practices” as factors that led to these patterns of misconduct. These practices included a lack of appropriate policy adoption and usage, inadequate recruitment, training, and supervision methods, inadequate investigation into misconduct and force usage, a faulty paid detail system, inadequate officer assistance and support services, a lack of community policing, and inadequate community oversight. 

On July 24^th, 2012, the city entered a consent decree with the NOPD and the Department of Justice, which laid out a series of tasks and goals aimed at implementing positive change within the department over the course of several years.

Now, here we are, 12 years after the publication of the DOJ findings and 11 years after entering the consent decree. The question now: what has changed? Has the NOPD fixed their problems and become a reliable force, or are they stuck in their ways? The short answer: there’s good news…and there’s bad news. The good news is the consent decree wasn’t all for nothing, and there have definitely been some positive changes made in the department in the past several years. 

The first step in the consent decree was to completely update the way training was done. “That was a huge undertaking, to totally overhaul the police academy,” recalled Mary Howell. “When [the DOJ] came in in 2011, they discovered some of the materials that officers were being trained on hadn’t been modified for like, 10 years, 15 years—a long time. And a lot of it was out of date—it was not appropriate training in terms of what they call ‘adult learning’. So, they changed both the way the training was done—there was a huge change in that—and also the content they were being trained on.”

Use of force review teams were also set up to review use of force by police. As mentioned in the DOJ executive summary, the NOPD had extremely high rates of unnecessary uses of force at the time of entrance into the consent decree. The use of force review teams were put into place to review whether instances of force use by police were reasonable and abiding by policy. This proved to be quite effective, and by January 2019 (considered to be the “high point” of the consent decree period), it had been 2 years without an officer-involved shooting.

Another important change was that NOPD policies were not publicly available previously, but now they can be found easily online. Internal auditing procedures have also been set up. 

However, as good as these changes are, it’s not to say that the department is completely fixed. As mentioned earlier, 2019 was the “high point” of the consent decree period, or the period in which the department had demonstrated the most progress. Unfortunately, in the years since then, there has been significant backsliding in certain areas. There are also other areas that have never been cleared that still need work.

The first problem is that there has been major slippage of progress in situations of domestic violence/rapes/sex crimes. The police department had previously been cleared in this area, meaning that they had met the terms of the consent decree. However, recent reports have provided some sobering updates in this area. In 2022, it was reported that the NOPD only cleared 1/20 sex crime cases—which averages to about a 5% clearance rate. In addition, there have been recent reports of the NOPD degrading calls of service regarding rapes and domestic violence so that they are no longer classified as emergencies.

“Too often, police would show up hours or sometimes days later in response to 911 calls, and of course by the time they get there, the victims are gone, they’re no longer sitting there waiting for the police to show up. And [the police] use a classification called gone on arrival—GOA—and then there’s been no follow-up in a number of cases,” explained Howell. “So, that has created a great deal of concern, because that was an area where [the NOPD] had basically been greenlighted that they had reached a level of compliance with the consent decree, and clearly there has been significant backsliding.”

Another area that still needs work is supervision of the department. This is an area the NOPD has yet to be cleared on, and one that is essential to ensure lasting success of the department. While the city has an independent police monitor, which was established after Katrina, they can only provide limited oversight due to a lack of capacity and staffing to perform active monitoring or investigations.

“One of the things we need to make sure on is that we have enhanced and expanded both the staffing and the ability of our existing organizations (independent police monitor’s office) to be able to step in and do the kind of monitoring that the federal court has been doing. That is essential,” said Howell.

The final—and possibly most important—change that needs to be made is that of the culture of the NOPD itself. “We didn’t get here overnight with these problems with the NOPD. They are chronic, they go back decades, they’re deep, and culture change is probably the most significant thing [that needs to change]—it’s the most difficult thing. And there’s still people within the department who resist and resent the consent decree and would be very happy to go back to the way things used to be,” said Howell. Indeed, for any reforms to become lasting, every officer must not only comply with the changes under the consent decree, but embrace them.