The finger pointing between the New Orleans Police Chief and District Attorney at recent City Council meetings has made for good headlines, but the city’s crime problem remains intact so far. Rafael Goyeneche with the Metropolitan Crime Commission told me that the crime data suggests that a lack of prosecution and incarceration are to blame.
What are your thoughts on what was said by the City Council to Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams and NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson, as well as their response to the Council?
A lot of it was political theater, in my opinion. I wonder where the incumbent Council members have been the last two years, when police staffing was decreasing. The DA's office has been failing to hold violent offenders accountable for over a year now. The new members of the Council are attempting to quickly come up to speed on what's happening - this was an opportunity for them to establish a baseline, but I want them to do their own fact checking with respect to some of the comments made by the DA's office. I question the accuracy of some of the statements he made… Tuesday night was the first time in magistrate court that Jason Williams’s office recommended the judge set bail at $500,000 for an armed robbery suspect. Apparently the DA’s office now has a new policy to offer bail recommendations in violent crime cases.
There’s been a lot of discussion about crime data. Jason Williams said your organization’s data is wrong. Both Williams and Ferguson say their data is right. Wouldn’t it be nice to get somebody independent of all of these criminal justice agencies to look at the data and give it to the public?
That's exactly what the MCC has been doing for the past 20 years! We don’t endorse people for public office or take positions on elections. The MCC tracks all felony arrests and we report it to the public. We even follow the arrest through the criminal justice system, so we’re able to track the cases that are accepted for prosecution into the courts, and issue reports on a judge by judge basis. We look at everything… our data is correct. If Jason Williams or anyone else believes that our data was incorrect, he should show us. We’ve documented every acceptance and refusal of his office during the first 10 months of his administration - and he hasn’t challenged the accuracy of any of that data.
Jason Williams shouldn’t fear the crime data if he truly believes in his ideology. It would be interesting to dig into these violent crime individually too - because they would show he’s been refusing those cases from the beginning, right?
In the first 18 days of this year he’s dismissed 11 felony crimes of violence. Some of those cases include charges of armed robbery, home invasion, domestic abuse, and second degree murder… the NOPD arrested 79 violent offenders during that same span of time. The DA's office accepted 25 violent felony cases and refused 15 violent felony cases.