Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  At the hearing, reported on by the local Times-Picayune, the Groves family was represented by Mary Howell, the same lawyer representing the Madison family in its civil case against the city. Howell also represented families in another police case of lore, the Algiers 7 killings in 1980, when city police responded to the death of a young white officer by gunning down four black residents.

  Even with such dark episodes, police reforms amounted mostly to empty words. “We have to fix this problem,” Mary Howell said when Kim Groves’s killer was finally sentenced, a cry that had become all too familiar.

  The Len Davis, Antoinette Frank, and Algiers 7 cases, long viewed as the NOPD’s darkest hours, may have been matched by the series of police killings after Hurricane Katrina.

  On September 2, 2005, two days before the bridge massacre, a thirty-one-year-old black man named Henry Glover was planning to flee the city with his brother. First, they stopped at a strip mall to gather suitcases filled with stolen merchandise left behind by friends. In the days after Katrina, that strip mall was also used as a temporary detective bureau. A rookie white police officer providing security for the office, David Warren, glimpsed Glover from a second floor lookout and, authorities said, shot him in the back as Glover, unarmed, tried to flee.

  Glover’s brother flagged down a passing motorist, and the Good Samaritan tried to find medical help for the bleeding Glover in the back seat. Desperate for help, they turned to another police headquarters, this one a former elementary school being used as a special operations bureau. Police held them at gunpoint, handcuffed them, and, the Samaritan said, beat them. Then another white officer, Greg McRae, drove off in the 2000 Chevy Malibu, with Glover’s dying, bloodied body in the back. He parked at a levee behind a police headquarters and, with Glover still in the back seat, set the car afire.

  Just as it had with the Danziger defendants, the Department of Justice initially scored major prosecution victories in the death of Henry Glover.

  Warren said he acted in self-defense, saying he thought Glover was an armed looter. In December 2010 federal jurors convicted Warren, McRae, and another white officer, Lieutenant Travis McCabe, who had submitted a false report about the death. The federal jury acquitted two other officers also on trial for the death, burning, and cover-up.

  Warren was sentenced to twenty-five years and nine months in prison and ordered to pay $7,642.32 to Glover’s family for funeral expenses. McRae was given seventeen years and three months in prison.

  That salving of the victims’ wounds did not last long.

  In December 2012 a federal appeals court threw out Warren’s conviction, saying his case should have been tried separately from his codefendants. A year later another jury acquitted Warren, who continued to say he acted appropriately. “I believe I took the proper action that day,” Warren told reporters as he walked free from prison.

  A judge later dismissed the conviction against Lieutenant McCabe and, in 2014, the US Attorney’s Office announced it would not retry the case. McCabe and his family were “absolutely elated with the government’s decision to dismiss the indictment against him,” his lawyers said. McCabe was reinstated to the force. He got three years’ back pay.

  McRae, who burned Glover’s body, was the only officer whose conviction stood. He sought a new trial, citing a psychologist’s report that he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by Katrina. His seventeen-year sentence stuck.

  For the Glover family justice remained elusive. After Warren’s acquittal, the family left federal court arm in arm, praying that the state would pick up the case that faltered in federal court, praying that someone would pay for Henry Glover’s death.

  Their quest could be seen as a metaphor for the larger bid to reform the NOPD. Even with hard evidence of crimes, justice always appeared out of reach. In Glover’s case, an unarmed black man had been shot in the back by a white police officer, another white officer set a car afire while a bleeding man was in it, and others covered up the macabre scene. Just one officer was convicted and most of the accused were freed.

  Likewise, larger reforms never fully took root. Former mayor Marc Morial pushed corruption cases, but then his handpicked police chief lost in a bid for the mayor’s seat in 2002, and the reform framework crumbled with a new administration.

  In the years after Len Davis’s cocaine-protecting, execution-ordering ways were exposed, the Department of Justice and others would urge sweeping reform of the New Orleans Police Department. Several years before the Danziger shootings, the DOJ found that city police officers could not always articulate proper legal standards for stops, searches, or arrests.

  The Justice Department’s suggestions to change those patterns were largely ignored. The department “still does not provide meaningful in-service training to officers on how to properly carry out stops, searches, and arrests. NOPD’s failure to train officers or otherwise provide guidance on the limits and requirements of the Fourth Amendment contributes directly to the pattern of unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests we observed,” the Justice Department found in 2011, nearly a decade later.

  In 2001 a report issued by a Police-Civilian Review Task Force, comprising community leaders and police officials, suggested that the department establish an independent monitor who would review brutality, excessive force, and other complaints, fill elected officials in on the department’s progress, and make further suggestions for change.

  It took eight years for the city to create the Office of the Independent Police Monitor. And, it took the monitor more than a year to start getting the information from police to assess those questions.

  AND THEN, AS THAT independent monitor position was just being put in place, nearly a decade after the community called for it, the DOJ issued a damning rebuke of the police department’s practices in a report entitled “Investigation of the New Orleans Police Department,” released on March 16, 2011.

  The New Orleans police was so focused on statistics, the Department of Justice review found, that officers routinely pushed the limits of the law to make numbers goals.

  “The NOPD has long been a troubled agency. Basic elements of effective policing—clear policies, training, accountability, and confidence of the citizenry—have been absent for years. Far too often officers show a lack of respect for the civil rights and dignity of the people of New Orleans,” said the 158-page report.

  The civil inquiry called upon the expertise of a dozen police training experts and included onsite visits to the department and meetings with church and community groups. Because the Danziger investigation was active at the time, the inquiry excluded that case, focusing instead on police actions not then on trial. The review did not include any of the post-Katrina cases of misconduct—including the death and burning of Henry Glover, whose killing was explored in a PBS Frontline report, “Law and Disorder,” produced with ProPublica and the Times-Picayune.

  Even with those cases excluded, the Justice Department’s findings were starkly damning. “We find reasonable cause to believe that NOPD engages in patterns of misconduct that violate the Constitution and federal law,” the Justice Department concluded.

  “NOPD’s statistics-driven approach to policing appears to contribute to the strong community perception of bias in stops, arrests, and other encounters. Individuals we spoke with, particularly youth, African Americans, ethnic minorities, and members of the LGBT community, told of frequent stops and of being targeted, booked, and arrested for minor infractions. They consistently described how these tactics serve to drive a wedge between the police and the public, antagonizing and alienating members of the community.”

  The facts supporting this conclusion touched nearly every component of the police department’s practices, from the way officers were trained to how and when they stopped suspects, how and when they decided to fire their weapons, even how they put police dogs into use. Police officers often fired without cause, but the department rarely punished its own, the Justice Departmen
t found.

  “Our review of officer-involved shootings within just the last two years revealed many instances in which NOPD officers used deadly force contrary to NOPD policy or law. Despite the clear policy violations we observed, NOPD has not found that an officer-involved shooting violated policy in at least six years, and NOPD officials we spoke with could recall only one out-of-policy finding even before that time.”

  The department had long re-assigned officers involved in a shooting to the city’s Homicide Section temporarily as the case played out. There, any statements the officer made to internal investigators were adjudged as being “compelled,” meaning the statements could not be later used against them should a criminal case arise. “It is difficult to interpret this practice as anything other than a deliberate attempt to make it more difficult to criminally prosecute any officer in these cases,” the Justice Department concluded.

  The DOJ saw cases where poor training alone could not explain the investigative missteps. Cases where the force failed to lift fingerprints from a handgun found on the scene of shooting or misrepresented witness statements to make it appear they acknowledged having guns. The department’s canines were often uncontrollable, attacking their own handlers and suspects. Officers roughed up subjects in handcuffs.

  “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 most startling findings involved the subjects of officers’ fire and aggression. As one Orleans Parish judge told the DOJ, “If you are a black teenager and grew up in New Orleans, I guarantee you have had a bad incident with the police.”

  In a report filled with sobering findings, the statistical evidence affixed hard numbers upon longstanding complaints of racial profiling, including the following:

  • In 2009 NOPD officers arrested five hundred African American males under age seventeen for serious offenses, ranging from homicide to larceny over fifty dollars. In the same time, they arrested eight white males in this age group.

  • The department arrested sixty-five African American females, but just one white female in the same period.

  Adjusting for population, the black to white arrest ratio was sixteen to one. Nationwide the ratio was three to one. “The level of disparity for youth in New Orleans is so severe and so divergent from nationally reported data that it cannot plausibly be attributed entirely to the underlying rates at which these youth commit crimes, and unquestionably warrants a searching review and a meaningful response from the Department,” the 2011 civil rights investigation found.

  The NOPD use of force data, examining when officers fired their weapons at subjects, was equally as stark.

  • From January 2009 to May 2010 NOPD officers fired their weapons at suspects twenty-seven times. In all twenty-seven cases, the target was black.

  • The Justice Department reviewed resisting-arrest charges in cases involving the police force. Of the ninety-six cases on file, eighty one, or 84 percent, involved black citizens.

  “What we have found so far is strongly suggestive of differential enforcement for whites and African Americans,” the Justice Department concluded. “NOPD personnel at all levels of the Department not only acknowledged that the community perceives racial and ethnic profiling as a significant problem, but some also expressed their own belief that such discriminatory conduct occurs.”

  New Orleans police officers say there is no targeted enforcement. “I don’t necessarily think it’s skewed,” said Eric Hessler, the former narcotics officer now representing police as a lawyer. “I think that’s the unfortunate fact of urban New Orleans. There’s a violent crime problem. Violent criminals are usually armed and will do what they need to do to get away.”

  Hessler recounts an episode from his days on the force, after he handcuffed a young black suspect in the back of his police car. “Shorty, why are you guys always in here messing with us?” the man wanted to know. “Until the violence stops,” Hessler came back, “we’re going to be in here.”

  THE VIOLENCE SOMETIMES EBBED, but never stopped. The DOJ demanded change, entering into a formal, court-approved consent decree with the city of New Orleans that would force structural reform. In July 2012, three months after the Danziger 5 were sent away to federal prison, the Department of Justice announced that historic consent decree. “This agreement is the most widespread, wide-ranging in the department’s history,” Attorney General Eric Holder said, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu at his side. All officers would get special training on use of force and would be barred from stopping people based on their race.

  That decree required the force to institute “broad changes in policies and practices related to use of force; stops, searches and arrests; custodial interrogations; photographic line-ups; preventing discriminatory policing.” And, it encouraged community engagement, stronger recruitment and training, officer assistance and support, performance evaluations and promotions, and misconduct investigations. It mandated more transparency by the New Orleans Police Department in how it operates and encouraged greater civil oversight.

  The consent decree required that a court-appointed monitoring team be established and that the team submit regular reports assessing the department’s status in embracing change. The pact would remain in effect, essentially, until the department proved it had systematically changed its ways.

  Jim Letten, the local US attorney, called the consent decree a blueprint for moving forward. “This groundbreaking agreement represents a critical milestone in the recovery of New Orleans and a victory for our city, its police department and most of all its citizens,” Letten said.

  Inside the Big Easy the idea of having the federal government come in drew a mixed response. Some looked at the millions spent probing into every fiber of the force and said the money should be spent elsewhere.

  Hessler, the police lawyer, saw potential positive results for the officers on the street. The federal government’s watchful eye could ensure the department does a better job of recruiting officers and pays them more. He said NOPD officers, earning $37,000 fresh from the academy, earn less than officers in neighboring departments, anywhere from 6 to 28 percent less. A pay and hiring freeze depleted the ranks of hundreds of officers. “How do you recruit when ninety-five percent of what you read about the New Orleans Police Department across the country is bad?” he asks. The consent decree, done right, could change those perceptions.

  The Justice Department lauded the city for cooperating during the review. “We will continue our partnership with Mayor Landrieu, the police department and the community to ensure that the critical reforms are achieved,” said Thomas E. Perez, the Civil Rights Division’s assistant attorney general, who would later become President Obama’s secretary of labor.

  That July day Mayor Landrieu ushered Attorney General Holder into the press conference to announce the decree in Gallier Hall, the historic Greek Revival building that once served as city hall.

  In January 2013 US district judge Susie Morgan signed the decree.

  Within a month, the city was having second thoughts.

  Landrieu went to court to try to undo the pact, citing the unexpected costs of administering the decree while upgrading the Orleans Parish Prison, another mandate forced upon the city. The mayor also cited the string of online comments by former federal prosecutor Sal Perricone. Those comments, the mayor argued in court papers, tainted the pact and should serve as a way out.

  In September 2013 federal appeals court judges refused to let the city back out. The city knew what it was getting into, the judges ruled. Perricone’s comments had no bearing on the consent decree.

  That legal tussle aside, the NOPD’s top boss was telling the public he advocated reform.

  Superintendent Ronal Serpas had launched his police career in New Orleans, working as a top
underling to Richard Pennington during the Morial administration when the city cracked down on scofflaws. Next Serpas made reform waves in Nashville, Tennessee, before returning home as the NOPD chief in May 2010. As superintendent, Serpas touted a sixty-five-point reform plan, cited cases like Danziger as a black eye not a rallying point, and said he was working with, not against, the Department of Justice. NOPD had “zero tolerance for untruthfulness,” the superintendent said.

  “Since May of 2010, Chief Serpas has worked closely with the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Team to investigate allegations of patterns and practices of unconstitutional policing by the NOPD in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the years that followed, which has also resulted in the conviction in Federal Court of numerous officers for crimes that resulted in the death of citizens and subsequent cover-up by NOPD officers and supervisors,” the superintendent’s website said.

  In September 2013 Serpas told the community his office was taking concrete steps to build trust. Officers would start wearing body cameras so that each time an allegation of abuse arose, the public could see what really happened. “Imagine a day in the city of New Orleans . . . where every single time we pull over a car, we ask somebody who they are or what they’re doing, that the entire incident is audiotaped and videotaped,” he said.

  The reality proved less noble than the promise. When a Justice Department monitoring team reviewed how often officers turned those body cameras on during use of force events, the results were sobering. Nearly 60 percent of the time no video had been shot or preserved. Jarvis DeBerry, a Times-Picayune columnist with an interest in police conduct, wrote a column headlined “What Good Are Body Cameras If NOPD Won’t Turn Them On?”

  Then in August 2014 Serpas abruptly announced his resignation, leaving on the same day to take a job in academia. Once more the NOPD was looking for a leader to right the ship.