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New Orleans, DOJ ask court for joint exit from police consent decree [1]
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Date: 2024-09-27
The city of New Orleans and the U.S. Department of Justice asked a judge Friday (Sept. 27) to establish an off-ramp to a yearslong federal police oversight agreement, arguing that the city’s police department is now broadly in compliance with a wide-ranging set of mandated reforms.
U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan will need to greenlight the plan in order for the New Orleans Police Department to exit the consent decree through a two-year sustainment period. Morgan has indicated in recent months that she would be amenable to ending the consent decree.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department, Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s office and NOPD did not immediately provide comment Friday.
The consent decree went into effect in 2012, following a two-year investigation by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division that found that the structurally flawed department engaged in unlawful behavior, including “excessive force, unconstitutional stops, searches, and seizures, and discriminatory policing.”
Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who first invited the DOJ to investigate the department in 2010, said at the time that the reform agreement was intended to span five years. But the department’s progress has been at times slow and contentious, with federal monitors observing “backsliding” on improvements in recent years.
The new sustainment plan proposed by the city and DOJ outlines a two-year cooldown period, with the federal monitoring team that has tracked NOPD’s compliance with the consent decree doing spot audits.
“The purpose of the Sustainment Period is to present the City and the NOPD the opportunity to demonstrate that they have the systems in place to monitor their own compliance and to take meaningful corrective actions where such monitoring identifies areas in need of improvement,” states the proposed plan.
In a court filing, federal prosecutors acknowledge that NOPD still has remaining tasks to complete in some areas of improvement, including in stops, searches and arrests; bias-free policing; and community engagement. But the department is sufficiently compliant in those improvement areas to merit a call for a sustainment period, according to the DOJ.
Court-appointed monitors are expected to hold community meetings regarding the plan over the next 45 days, according to a notice issued by Morgan. The court will also hold a public hearing within that timeframe. Morgan is expected to hear oral arguments from the city and the DOJ on the request within two months.
Stella Cziment, the city’s independent police monitor, said that the plan does not signal an end to the consent decree but a potential change in the way that NOPD is monitored. She said her office has long called for an opportunity for the public to address Judge Morgan, but now she’s not sure how public opinion will shape Morgan’s decision.
“The public needs to understand that we have not been given any rubric or metric for what their voice will represent and how their input is going to be weighed and considered in either a denial or a sustainment strategy,” Cziment said.
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