The mass shooting on Bourbon Street over the weekend continues to be front-of-mind for both residents and tourists - but in a surprising finding according to the latest weekly crime report from the Metropolitan Crime Commission, the French Quarter is actually one of the safer areas of the city. Newell believes more crime will happen in the French Quarter if city officials continue to not give the New Orleans Police Department a real chance to fight back. Newell asked Rafael Goyeneche, President of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, to share his thoughts on how to stop mass shootings like this from happening in the future.
"The recent violence in the city is very alarming, and New Orleans Police Chief Shaun Ferguson feels like it's pushed them a step back from the progress that they've made over the past four to six weeks," Newell said.
Goyeneche said, "I sound like a broken record because every time I come on, we're talking about more violent felony crime... and the public is well aware of it. 90% of the community we survey say we need more police. 75% of the community acknowledges that crime is worse this year than last year… we'll be talking about it again for the foreseeable future because there are just not enough police officers to deal with the surging violent crime epidemic right now. So what happened over the weekend was 17 shootings and we'll see that happening in 2022, until we change the way that we support the police department and the way the police department is deploying their limited resources."
Newell said "I look to see what candidates in critical races are talking about and I just don't see that there's an intense focus on fighting crime or re-establishing the NOPD."
"The solutions to the crime problems really are the responsibility of politicians to address,” Goyeneche replied. “Mayor Mitch Landrieu imposed a hiring freeze over 10 years ago and the police chief at the time, Ronal Serpas, said what the consequences would be - and everything he predicted is coming to fruition right now. The police department's numbers are at the lowest levels in 50 years, at a time when violent crime is surging and the politicians still are not doing anything about rebuilding the numbers of the police department... You're going to need to offer a raise to police officers to attract more recruits and to slow the attrition rate in the police department, and I haven't seen any politician step up and address that."
Newell said, "Mayor Cantrell announced she wanted to spend a million dollars on installing between 150 and 160 license plate readers and another $11 million to be split between NOPD, the fire department, and the New Orleans EMS to increase available overtime, and set aside some money to try and increase police staffing. What I find interesting is that it seems as though the administration and the council are at odds over more resources for law enforcement and unfortunately, I think we're going to see more of these issues in the French Quarter unless we get proactive there.”
Goyeneche responded, "Politicians have handicapped the police department's ability in how they were able to identify the shooters, the people of interest, and the suspects. The police have videos and they have some pictures of some of the individuals, bu the NOPD can't use facial recognition because of the city council ordinance that was passed. They had to put those pictures on television and ask the public to call the police to identify the suspects.... The whole idea is to identify these offenders before they can go out and re-offend, but the New Orleans police can't use technology that their partners and other parishes in the state can use. It impairs the police department's ability to address the violent crime surge that we're seeing.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.