Checkered Past Comes Full Circle

Maybe you saw this in the paper on Friday:

The City of New Orleans must release to The Times-Picayune police department records of 10 officers, including Superintendent Warren Riley, related to any misconduct investigations or complaints, a judge ruled this morning.

"They're entitled to these records," Civil District Court Judge Robin Giarrusso said after a hearing in her courtroom. "Public records are public records are public records, and the citizens of this city have a right to know what's in them."

Yes, the public needs to know that it can trust the public integrity bureau. Given the NOPD's horrendous relationship with the public at present and by historic reputation, one would think that if the NOPD had nothing to hide, they'd be anxious to open up to the media about how they do business.

But as the article continues, we learn that it's not just the media that's been spurned by NOPD record keepers:

NOPD advocate groups tried to block another person's request for 16 decades' worth of police complaint records, suing the city and arguing in court Friday that the officers are entitled to a "right to privacy" that goes back to the framing of the U.S. Constitution. Their attorneys suggested at the hearing that they would appeal Giarrusso's ruling to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal.

The newspaper intervened in an effort to allow the city to answer McCarthy's request.

Other parties, including the Orleans Parish Public Defenders, were also asking for the NOPD Public Integrity Bureau records. One woman had asked the city for every Public Integrity Bureau file dating to 1992.

So it doesn't seem to be Riley's reactionary stance to the "Times Pick-on-you," it's actually long standing NOPD policy. What might it be specifically about the public integrity bureau?

Again, the T-P's Gwen Filosa provides some historical context:

In 1954, the New Orleans police department created an "internal affairs" division, Mince said, but in 1995 then-Police Superintendent Richard Pennington abolished it.

"He said, 'We're going to have a public integrity bureau," she said. "He recognized the need to restore public trust in the New Orleans Police Department."

Riley in 2002 was part of a task force charged by Mayor Marc Morial to review law enforcement's performance, Mince added. The task force members agreed that "an educated and informed citizenry" was key to following the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

But there is A LOT more to it than what was included in yesterday's paper.

You have to remember what precipitated Pennington's move, or really what even brought Pennington into town in the first place. A few months ago, I happened to be digging into a little bit of NOPD history and became very much fixated on what was going on in the early '90's. Certainly these are not good times at the NOPD but what was going on before Pennington joined the force was mind-boggling. We're talking about some Wild West bullsh!t going on - from the rank and file all the way up to the top of the force.

Using Lexis-Nexis, I came across a 60 Minutes transcript from the fall of 1994 that gets at some of what was going on at the time. At that time, Joseph Orticke was police superintendent and the Department of Justice had just named the NOPD worst in the nation for police brutality. Without excerpting large segments of that transcript, Mike Wallace profiled several visionary crime fighters who deserve some description:

• Former NOPD officer Michael Thames was imprisoned for skimming from illegal gambling, drug, and prostitution rackets to the tune of $100,000 per year. When asked about the Rodney King beating in L.A., Thames responded that he didn't know what the big deal was because that was "kiddie-land" compared to New Orleans.
• Dr. Frank Minyard, New Orleans coroner (to this day - more on him some other time) defended his office against charges that it fudged an autopsy of Adolph Archie who wounded after killing a cop only to be intercepted by a mob of police officers on the steps of Charity Hospital, taken to a police station, and beaten to death while in custody.
• Antoine Saacks was a 28 year veteran of the force and the NOPD's second-in-command under Orticke before getting fired a week before 60 Minutes got to town. On a salary of $50,000 per year, Saacks boasted millions of dollars in assets related to number of schemes including a vice-squad extortion racket in the French Quarter, exacting 'fees' for permitting officers to moonlight as private security in the film industry, and by setting up an operation to capitalize on video poker by connecting Vegas firms to a mafia-connected Bourbon St. landlord named Frank Caracci.

In 1994, the Clinton Administration granted the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice new powers to take over troubled local police forces with poor track records on civil liberties, brutality, and racism. Only a handful of police forces were ever taken over but a certain degree of the law's effectiveness is derived from police policy adjustments made under threat of takeover. Given some of the issues illuminated above, certainly the NOPD was an early candidate for receivership takeover. Mayor Morial's decision to search outside the city for a new police chief in '94 resulted partially from this downward pressure out of Washington D.C. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the man he picked, Richard Pennington, was plucked from D.C.'s force.

After police pay was frozen for some time in 1982, starting salaries for NOPD officers was still so low when Pennington came in that they had to be doubled. Internal affairs was liquidated and the officers were dispersed. Pennington then created the public integrity bureau, moved it outside of precinct HQ and added FBI agents to its staff.

Chief Pennington's adjustments weren't a cure all by any stretch, as issues with brutality and corruption continued to plague the force to the point that the Department of Justice opened up an official investigation into New Orleans in 1996 to monitor the reform efforts.

The general consensus of the city seems to be that the Pennington era of the NOPD was a success. Significant progressive reforms were instituted that made a pretty noticeable dent in the city's crime stats and in public perception of safety.

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It is crucial to understand the context behind the decision to scrap internal affairs for the public integrity bureau.

Though those changes may have come regardless, the most direct catalyst was the murder of Kim Groves, which occurred just six hours after Pennington was sworn in.

Groves was murdered as a result of an execution order from NOPD Officer Len Davis, who was tipped off from within internal affairs after Groves filed a report that she had witnessed Davis senselessly beating a teen aged suspect.

At the time Davis ordered Groves' death, he was also one target in a wide-ranging federal drug investigation. Officer Davis was apparently one of at least 15-20 officers helping to guard cocaine warehouses run by undercover federal agents. Groves' killing ultimately short-circuited the drug case, as only ten officers ended up being charged. (At least according to the July 13, 1996 Washington Post article that helped me guide the narrative of this case.)

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So let's get back to Superintendent Warren Riley's defensive protection of records related to internal affairs and the Public Integrity Bureau. What was Warren Riley doing back in the early '90s?

Well, he was at Internal Affairs, assigned there in 1991 after several years between the maligned Narcotics and Vice squads.

In late 1997, Riley was suspended for three days without pay after an investigation of an incident that occurred in the months after the Groves killing and two weeks before he had been reassigned out of the new public integrity division that Pennington was creating.

Riley was on duty on February 17th, 1995, when Sharon Robinson came forward to report that she feared for her life because she'd just ended things with her then-boyfriend, NOPD Officer Victor Gant who had a long history of physically abusing her and had repeatedly threatened to kill her in the event that she left him.

Officer Riley did not file a report or open an investigation.

Months later, on April 27th, 1995, after Riley had been transferred to the 6th District, Officer Gant approached Riley to discuss Robinson's coming forward to Riley, for which she had apparently confessed. Gant told Riley that the couple's issues had been resolved.

Sharon Robinson's body was found drowned in a swamp days later.

Here's a 1995 article from UK Independent that profiled Officer Victor Gant after he was named a suspect:

The target of the hunt is a serial killer who, investigators believe, has struck at least 24 times. The FBI think that Gant may be the killer but they don't have enough evidence for an arrest. So Gant sits at his desk, suspended from patrol duty. If you have his telephone number, you can call him and hear his Louisiana drawl: "I can't really discuss the case, you'll have to talk with my lawyer."

Gant became a suspect after Karen Ivester was found strangled. Her body was dumped in the swamp about half a mile from Interstate 55, just 30 minutes from the French Quarter of New Orleans. As local police combed the scene they found a second corpse, another young woman. Sharon Robinson had been drowned. She was still dressed in her work clothes, a uniform from the Harrah's Casino in New Orleans. Before death, her head had been shaved. In life, Robinson and Ivester had been best friends.

Police inquiries at the casino revealed that Robinson had left work on 29 April this year at 3am accompanied by Gant, a 33-year-old officer who was once her boyfriend. The New Orleans Police Department immediately named Gant as a suspect. Then the FBI announced that the man who killed Robinson and Ivester had also claimed 22 other victims.

Twenty-one of the killer's victims had ties to prostitution, Ivester included. Nineteen were known prostitutes, including one man. There were two other male victims and there is evidence to suggest they were also prostitutes. According to NOPD sources, each body carried some distinctive marks that matched through all 24 deaths.

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Gant used to patrol in Treme and Algiers. Several residents say a group of New Orleans police officers has operated a string of prostitutes in the area for years. Some say they've seen brutal beatings and threats of murder and a few have claimed Gant was an associate of one suspect group which allegedly ruled through intimidation.

On a recent Friday night the bars along Treme's Claibourne Avenue were busy and outside each one there was a small clutch of women working the street. Many are scared, some are aggressive and few were willing to speak. When they do, they insist on anonymity.

"The police and the politicians don't really care about us," said one. "It took over a dozen deaths before those motherfuckers lifted a finger to find the killer. I knew two of the three girls who died but I wouldn't tell the police about it. I'd be the next one dead if I did." The woman then went further. "I saw the girl called Peach just a couple of days before she was murdered. The thing is, some of the cops were running the girls around here, they were pimping. Some people say Peach got out of line."

"Peach" was the name used by Karen Ivester. According to FBI investigators, Gant had told some acquaintances that he disliked Karen Ivester because she had persuaded her friend not to join her in prostitution. Local papers report that the Treme prostitutes have been victims of an intimidation campaign by a group of rogue police officers.

Upon the discovery of Robinson's body, Officer Riley wrote a letter to Major Loicano at the Public Integrity Bureau, telling him of Robinson's visit the previous February.

It was Major Loicano who ultimately reported Riley's violation, as we can see from the Major's testimony at Riley's appeal of the suspension to the Civil Service Commission in 1998:

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Now to bring it all back, lets get back to Filosa's article:

At issue was a request by newspaper reporter Brendan McCarthy to view any Public Integrity Bureau records kept by the New Orleans Police Department on Riley, along with his top three officers and the officers involved in the Jan. 1 fatal shooting of 22-year-old Adolph Grimes.

Certainly, we can understand how it is in the interests of Superintendent Riley and PANO (Police Association of New Orleans) to deny public records requests related to Internal Affairs and the Public Integrity Bureau. And we can also understand how it's in Superintendent Riley's interests to deny the public the right to inspect his own complaint records.

But I think it will be very interesting to examine common threads possibly bind all ten officers in McCarthy's request together. How many of Riley's top Lieutenants came from the old internal affairs outfit of the early '90s? What about from narcotics and vice of the '80s?

The most disturbing thing to think about is how the NOPD in total seems to have gone full circle back to the old pre-Pennington days. How many brutality cases have we heard about since Katrina? How many arrests of uniformed officers? And how much never sees the light of day?

Further Nagin Notes

This aperitif nicely follows my latest "defense" of his administration.

First, make sure you've read Jarvis DeBerry's latest, one of his better columns in recent memory.

He brilliantly evokes the Daily Show's interview with the current Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, which I thought was the best Palin-related piece of journalism from the whole campaign cycle.

Note to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and everybody in his administration: Don't return any calls placed by "The Daily Show." That shouldn't be hard. The mayor's staff rarely calls back real journalists. So blowing off fake ones shouldn't be difficult.

Even so, those in the administration should take exceeding care not to sit down with anybody from "The Daily Show" lest they get thrown a hardball question like, "What do you do?"

Such a question would surely stump them, for as best as residents can tell, many folks in Nagin's administration don't do much of anything except fend off requests for information and come up with hotheaded responses to criticisms that they're do-nothings.

The rest of the piece hits all the same notes we've been hitting out here in the wild, wild Internet. Essentially he argues that the Mayor's defensiveness in the face of chronic incompetence on his own staff has become, not just indicative of but also a reason for, the larger inability to get anything done. (I have no idea how to punctuate that sentence, my apologies)

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I'd also like to address some lingering thoughts from the "defense" post.

To highlight part of Cliff's comment:

"...not enough attention is given to the fact that he is really not doing anything that hasn't been done in city government since the beginning. This is the way New Orleans has always worked and the next mayor will be doing the same things unless there are some new ethics rules or a change in the city charter. This city was built on taking care of friends and allies. I think the support in the black community for ineffective leadership is overstated. I think the black community has given up on local government."

Yes, Nagin's popularity and legitimacy within the black community has always been overstated. He did not boast tremendous black support in 2002. But what is too rarely acknowledged or explained is why African Americans helped reelect him in 2006. I think it is too easy to say that they were won over by the chocolate city speech or some other nonsense. Rather, African Americans were willing, in general, to put Ray Nagin back over the top because of what was perceived as the alternative - a recovery ideology guided by the same green dot racists that had nearly planned their communities out of existence. Never mind for now that Mayor Nagin is now in bed with many of those same interests, he was the known evil and the "safe" choice during a time of trauma.

You can see evidence of this through an examination of Mayor Nagin's media strategy since that time, because it hasn't changed. His position is predicated on his own realization that he does not have credibility within the black community. What he understands and consistently attempts to take advantage of, is that some will begrudgingly prefer him to the unknown others he's been painting with such large strokes. He exploits fears of white/uptown/racism as a way of explaining himself. Clearly, it's not working very well even though it has bought him breathing room at times. It's a fairly common desperation tactic used by white and black politicians all over the country. (Though some of the fears have been pretty understandable, I should add.)

Obviously that oversimplifies and overgeneralizes some pretty complex interactions, but it's a helpful frame from which to examine the current political climate.

Cliff's larger point is that Nagin is just the latest in a long line of corrupt and ineffective mayors should also be noted. I know that I can sometimes get so caught up in the present that I lose sight of just how systemic this has always been. I was trying to think of that context when I used the phrase "aspired to adequacy" to describe the Mayor's first term. I wasn't trying to argue that he wasn't corrupt or didn't have terrible ideas, I think I was trying to get at the idea that Nagin's various first term foibles were not exactly exceptional when considering the historical context. Of course my larger point was that Mayor Nagin's second term has reached that transcendent level of ineffectually.

A Quarter to Midnight in 1970

I finally finished New Orleans After the Promises by Kent Germany.

There's one last passage I'd like to reproduce:

During his mayoral campaign, Landrieu articulated plans to attack organized crime and the drug trade and to improve the police department. He called for fiscal reform and for tax redistribution. He promised to make City hall more efficient, to rehabilitate "blighted areas," to secure more outside funding, and to "purify" Lake Ponchartrain. Over the next few years as mayor, Landrieu's efforts seemed to work. Errol Laborde, a local publisher and commentator, remarked that the image of the city as a backward-looking, stagnant society dominated by elites was being proven false. Landrieu's agenda was rooted in the idea that investing in individuals and building self-awareness were cornerstones of economic growth. "To live a life as a responsible citizen," he declared, "man must have hope" and must have proof that "the American economic system has failed no one." The poor, he asserted, "want to work, to achieve, to give meaning and substance to their lives, to become substantial and responsible citizens capable of bearing their fair load." The economic system had been wonderful in providing a high standard of living, but its failure for the poor meant it had failed everyone. He worried in particular about New Orleans's "unfortunate drive toward self-destruction." It was "a quarter to midnight," New Orleans could not "afford anything less than the truth about itself."

So I guess now we're about 5 till? Or are we already ten past?

Germany's narrative points to the Mark Essex rampage as indicative of the larger deterioration of widespread progressive political reform efforts and of the promise of the Landrieu administration.

For whatever reason, this paragraph really jumped off the page for me.

C.R. Nagin Boulevard?

Leigh and I have been separately reading New Orleans After the Promises by Kent B. Germany.

I picked it up again over the weekend after I published part 5 of my series on Alphonso Jackson and the sickening systemic perversion of black capitalism by New Orleans' African American political and economic elite.

I'm going to reproduce a critical paragraph that supported by a prescient cry from Oretha Castle Haley in September, 1969.

Please read the whole thing:

A more important reason for black political disunity was the way that black leaders seized and then exercised power. The rewards system of local politics encouraged a decentralized and fragmented scramble for power. Benefits went to individuals and to tightly organized groups, and the market rewarded those people who possessed the wherewithal to manipulate it. In New Orleans, the climb to power was inherently disruptive and discouraged racial solidarity. The elections of 1969 and 1970 showed that black support of black candidates was not necessary for the growth of black power. Many black leaders pursued coalitions with whites as essential political stepping-stones. Others denounced these politicians for putting their own careers above the interests of the black community. Oretha Castle Haley spoke for "black women" who were "fed up" with being second-class citizens. She demanded that the city's black male politicians "stop being puppets and tools of the white man," stop being "traitors," and "stop pimping for the man to the detrement [sic] of your women, children and community." Black leaders who coalesced with white leaders, she declared, were simply selling themselves. In a stirring call for men to "fulfill" their masculine roles, she offered them a thundring challenge: "We dare you to become men!" If they did not, then the black woman was going to stop "standing 100% behind her man" and assume "responsibility" for the salvation of the race.

In another recent post I asked if New Orleans had a 1990s. Maybe New Orleans didn't have a 1970s or 1980s either. Oretha Castle Haley could make the same statement today and it might be even more descriptive of the way a microscopic African American elite has been incorporated into a racist and classist power structure that sustains itself through endemic political and economic exclusion.

New Orleanians Never Learned the Macarena?

Often, I find myself discussing New Orleans with friends of mine from Philadelphia. I am fond of one phrase that is especially evocative for that particular audience and have repeated it often in conversation.

"New Orleans never had a 1990s."

It's true. While other urban areas rode the wave of the economic boom of the decade, New Orleans lost the last remnants of its hydrocarbon industry to Houston.

My Philadelphia friends shudder when I say that because we remember what Philadelphia was like as it emerged from the Darkest Ages: crack, crime, Rizzocrats, and the Move bombing. Certainly many problems still exist in Philadelphia and I don't wish to speak of it as if all of its problems are fixed and forgotten - certainly that is not the case.

Still, during the 1990s, at least some things about Philadelphia changed for the better. The national economy improved and Mayor Ed Rendell, who has now sold out the city to his casino friends as Governor, possessed, at the time, the near-perfect combination of optimistic vision and shrewd political game-playing that was required of anyone hoping to get something done in a machine city. There was a new energy, community-based organizations were smiled upon and some formerly stagnant neighborhoods became popular. The city seemed to reverse the suburban exodus. Maybe there was too much gentrification. As bad as the city needed to restore an upper middle class tax base, I'd argue things got way out of hand in Queen Village, where I was raised. Nonetheless, it's pretty tough to argue that Philadelphia didn't emerge from the 1990s with a positive outlook.

Maybe most of all, then-Mayor Rendell was able to cultivate a tremendous friendship with President Clinton. Perhaps this combined with the recognition that the Philadelphia area held the key to Pennsylvania in state and national politics to allow national money to flow into the city via the Clinton-Gore urban initiatives.

Philadelphia was a round one federal empowerment zone. So too was Camden, New Jersey, right across the Delaware River. This represented a huge influx of federal help in the form of money and expertise. The first round designated empowerment zones in 72 communities in ten urban centers in late 1994. Round two communities, announced in 1999, added another 15 metro areas.

New Orleans, perhaps because it lacked the competent local political leadership that federal officials were looking to work with, was left out of both rounds and did not receive money.

So while other urban communities looked forward to the 21st Century, Orleans Parish watched as its economy became less diverse, as its tax base continued to move across local bodies of water.

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Let's revisit the Morial administration. Tell me what happened here in the 1990s. Is the extremely general impression that I give mostly accurate? What are the other reasons New Orleans was left out of the greatest period of prosperity in American history?