The NOLA coalition's first report on crime and community safety in the Crescent City is out.
So far, the coalitions members are noting positive gains in making New Orleans safer.
"We've had some good initial efforts," coalition member Greg Rusovich told WWL's Newell Normand.
Those good intial efforts include Mayor LaToya Cantrell hiring a consultant to revamp the department, changes that will be coming to the NOPD's public integrity bureau, and the New Orleans City Council voting to allow the NOPD to use facial recognition techology to help solve crimes.
"We worked really hard with the council and the mayor to fix the tech ordinance giving cops the authority again to use a wide variety of technology," Rusovich said.
Another good move Rusovich mentioned is city leaders' efforts to retain officers, including the funding of pay raises and other benefits for existing officers. Those perks will be funded by federal ARPA money.
The question for Rusovich and the coalition is: how will those retention efforts be funded when the ARPA money is depleted?
"Using one time revenues, which has been proposed from the ARPA funding, to go toward recurring expenses is something that needs a lot of review, and we need to understand where is the money coming from," Rusovich said. "These are ultimately that came through ARPA back in to the city and into other communities as well. We just want to make sure in three years from now, four years from now that we're told by city leaders at that point that we have a big budget deficit and, therefor, we have to cut 200 cops."
Rusovich notes that this is just the beginning of a much larger effort by the coalition to reduce crime in New Orleans.
"Overall, I think we're off to a good start," Rusovich said, "but we've got a hell of a lot more work to do."
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