Wages that are no longer satisfactory and a lack of upward mobility. Those are the two main problems plaguing the workforce at the New Orleans Police Department, according to Eric Hessler, attorney for the Police Association of New Orleans (PANO).
It’s certainly no secret that there’s a shortage of available law enforcement in the Crescent City. Look no further than the historic changing of the parade routes during the Mardi Gras season that ended this week. But just how greatly have the numbers dwindled at NOPD?
When asked how thin the police are being stretched, Hessler told Newell Normand on WWL Radio that the NOPD is staffed by “maybe 450-500 officers [at a time] throughout the entire city on three platoons, 24 hours a day. Out of eight districts, that’s not many… that would include support staff manning district stations.”
Hessler also estimates “three patrol cars” at a time for each district on an average day. That number is down drastically from the past, when the norm was “four two-man cars and two one-man cars” patrolling a district alongside task forces at all hours of the day.
A big reason for the staffing shortage is officer salaries, and the kicking of the proverbial can when it comes to needed, and promised, pay increases.
“All you have to do is look back in recent history and see that the NOPD’s promises to pay are historically a list of broken promises,” Hessler said, highlighting multiple times even just in recent years when pay raises that were touted never materialized.
Hessler said that police pay raises are used as a convenient political promise come election time but that so far it has not come to pass in recent years.
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