During an open-lines segment on WWL Radio’s Friday episode of the Newell Normand Show, a former New Orleans police officer called in to place the blame for the NOPD’s current worker shortage squarely on the shoulders of one person: former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
Landrieu “was warned by his own police chief that they were hemorrhaging police officers, and he did not care,” said the caller, who only identified herself as Christy but did intimate that she was a 31-year veteran of the police force in New Orleans before retiring in 2013.
Christy credited former NOPD Chief Richard Pennington for instituting a hiring push before Landrieu’s terms as mayor that she said resulted in the only time during her tenure that the NOPD was “adequately staffed.” But that all changed, she said, when Landrieu took office.
“Police started leaving in droves. He did nothing about it,” Christy said. “Even the current mayor knows that you need the police. He did not care. So they started losing dozens and dozens and dozens of police.”
Christy said it’s her opinion that the rise in crime in the city should also be somewhat credited to the previous city council for decriminalizing some municipal offenses, but that that doesn’t absolve the former mayor.
“I lay the initial blame for the police department’s decline on Mitch Landrieu,” she said.
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