The NOPD is at per-capita staffing levels not seen since the late 60s, 70s, and 80s according to New Orleans Public Safety Analyst Jeff Asher.
As of Monday, January 24th the department had 1,047 officers, good for about 273 cops per 100,000 residents. That’s a 40% decline from 2010 when New Orleans had 436 cops per 100,000 residents, just over 1,500 total.
“Per 100,000 New Orleanians we have roughly the same number that we have had for most of the city’s history,” Asher told the City Council Monday.
“We have just significantly fewer number of officers, at a lower rate, than we have had since Katrina and since the sort of late 90s, early 2000s.”
Many of those who support increasing NOPD funding to bulk up the force point to FBI data that shows the violent crime rate steadily increasing in New Orleans since 2010, which happens to be the year where NOPD staffing began a rapid decline.
Supporters also cite stats showing crime rates were about a third higher than they are now in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, arguing that those police departments were unstaffed, which led to more crime.
Opponents of increased NOPD funding say the violent crime trend is a nationwide phenomenon based on non-policing socio-economic factors. They also say the same trend occurred in many cities where police departments did not shrink over the last decade.
So when, and why, did the NOPD begin shrinking? Asher said it began in 2010 with a hiring freeze that resulted in attrition without replacement.
“So we went almost four years, three or four years, without police funding,” said Asher.
The analyst said recent retention and recruitment efforts starting around 2016, like officer pay raises, only resulted in a boost of roughly 100 officers. That fact complicates the push to bolster the NOPD through funding alone.
“The idea that 1,600, so 500 more officers, is attainable within any time in the near future given the constraints that the department operates in terms of how difficult it is to grow, will be a really hard number to reach,” said Asher.
1,500 to 1,600 officers have been cited by some law enforcement experts as the optimal number of officers to police New Orleans at the current population level.