And have you had enough yet?
I was getting alert after alert this weekend, picking up the phone and seeing that another person shot another person. We're experiencing the same thing that they're seeing across this country in most urban areas, where they’re dealing with shortages at police departments. We know we have it here, we just heard from Rafael Goyeneche that the number is probably down somewhere around a thousand.
I often ask, why is that such a deep, dark secret, how many police we have? In fact, in the Sheriff's office, we were compelled to file a list of our employees with the Clerk's office. It was not a big secret. We could tell you exactly how many we had in the patrol division, in the detective bureau, in narcotics. I’m not sure why we want to keep where we are from a staffing perspective from the public. In my view, it's all about leadership. It's all about transparency. It's all about the choices made about prioritization within the city. And that's not unique to the city of New Orleans or any other jurisdiction. I simply do not understand why this has to be a guessing game for us. What are we afraid of? What are we ashamed of? I understand it's an election year, where your voice will be heard and you can say if you have had enough! How many murders, how many armed robberies, how many carjackings, how many vehicle burglaries? How many of these must one experience before we have had enough?
How much thinking about re-imagining police should we do? To give you an example, an estimated 5,300 officers quit or retired from the New York Police Department. That's a department that has roughly 34,000 policemen. Just over 200 have left Seattle, DC lost 300 since the council enacted sweeping police reforms last summer. In Baltimore, the department has lost nearly 300 officers since last year. The leader of the local FOP there says that they are so short-staffed that detectives are leaving because they're overwhelmed with their caseload.
And what those officers are doing is moving to smaller suburban departments, because in these major cities, wanting to re-imagine or defund policing created this snowball effect. When you just push the little snowball off the cliff, what happens? It gets bigger as it rolls down the mountain. And that's what's happening here.
So when do you have enough? I thought over the weekend I had reached that level, then I came home to see this statement from a spokesperson at the Audubon Zoo.
National Police Week is May 9 through the 15, and in celebration of same, they were going to host “Blue at the Zoo” from May 11th to May 16 alongside the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation, which was founded to promote and foster positive, interactive experiences. We've talked ad nauseum about community policing. We've talked about re-engaging with the public. We've talked about building community pride, transparency, increasing communications with police departments and so forth. But right after this announcement was made on Monday, it triggered negative feedback by some members of our community, and from some persons outside of our community (who gives a damn what they think?) and Audubon then scraps the idea. They have now become lifetime members of Woke-Topia and have succumbed to the cancel culture mob.
What message does this send to the police community here, where the Audubon Zoo is now afraid to offer a program that's simply a discount? They don't want to promote or advertise this in an overt way - don't worry, says the Audubon Zoo, we're going to continue to participate with the police on the downlow, we're going to be covert about it. Does that make everyone out there feel better? Not me. I can't believe they actually pay the people that actually crafted this message.
They need to get their head out of their proverbial you-know-what and wake up, because these folks are the ones that are the fine line between an ordered and structured society and anarchy. Are they perfect? No. Do they do it right every day? No, but we should not be ashamed to celebrate the successes of policing in our community. Now I know Chief Ferguson probably had more to say, and God bless him -he said he thought Audubon's decision was “disappointing.” And at the very least that's what it is.
But the beauty is, that there's a whole lot of other places that you can go spend your money. There's a whole lot of other places that you can donate to. That is the upside. Since everyone wants to engage in this cancel culture, you have the power of the purse, and you have the ability to make a decision based on what's in the best interest of your community. So for those of you that feel as strongly about this as I do, believing that policing is incredibly important to our community, you have the power to spend somewhere else. It doesn't have to be there, just as they have the power to join Woke-Topia. You have the power of not visiting, or embracing their vision.
If you don't invest in our own community in an overt way - not by some little amount of money that you're willing to donate to the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation - but by your words and actions, and if you are going to become a coward over the issue of supporting police, may God have mercy on your soul. We're asking men and women every day to go out there and risk their lives for the benefit of their community, people they don't even know, while their own family members are biting their fingernails down to nothing in worry of whether or not they're coming home that afternoon.
Every day I get those alerts - a police officer shot in the line of duty, punched in the line of duty, spit on in the line of duty, kicked in the line of duty. And one of the top not-for-profit organizations in this state is ashamed to support them in an overt way.
I wasn't sure I had enough - but now I am.