I didn't want my first post after vacation to be about something so crappy

But I've been getting caught up on the last week's NOLA drama (one week in this town generates enough nutty news to fill 5 years of newsprint most places) and the first thing I'd like to point out is below. I promise a French-bashing vacation re-cap to come in the following few days.

In this post, Eli does an outstanding job of reviewing NOPD's early 90s nadir of corruption and violence and the imperfect but substantial improvements brought about by a more aggressive engagement with municipal police management from the Clinton administration and the reforms instituted by NOPD chief Richard Pennington.

The post then traces the record of current NOPD chief Warren Riley's involvement in ignoring (or possibly attempting to cover up) one of the uglier episodes of the police atrocity during that era. Currently, Chief Riley is seeking to block public access to PIB records involving himself and officers involved in the recent police shooting of Adolph Grimes.

In a reaction to that post, Clay comments

Warren Riley/Eddie Compass/Ray Nagin have supervised the demise of what was once a model police force and its replacement with it's national-nightmare predecessor. The thing is, the people that should be the most afraid of this is the cops themselves. I'm betting it's 6 months until you get another Antoinette Franks (cop that kills another cop).

I'll end with a quote from when Pennington lost after losing to Nagin in 2002:

"Pennington professed to have information abut Nagin that ‘sickened him to the core’, without specifying its nature."

That Pennington quote was one of the two most memorable moments of the 2002 campaign for me. (The other was Pennington's "Fix these raggedy streets" TV ad.) It is essential to note that, at the time Pennington made that remark, he was loudly criticized by the local press as a grandstanding buffoon. The quote played so poorly with the media that Pennington decided the take the Al Gore route and just let the matter drop rather than continue to be painted as desperate or as a sore loser.

It's really remarkable. Here we had a respected and successful police chief hinting that he knew something about his opponent (and possibly his opponent's associates in law enforcement) which he found "sickening" and no one thought to take him even remotely seriously. Why is that?

Simply put, at the time, the T-P narrative held that their endorsed candidate Nagin was too much of a "reformer" who "understands business" to be possibly conceived of as connected to anything potentially corrupt or incompetent. The man ran the cable company for chrissakes. (According to the T-P this also meant the he and his "whiz kid" friends understood technology. Yes, James Gill actually used to unironically refer to Greg Meffert as a "whiz kid")

Major media outlets in New Orleans associated Pennington's candidacy with their perpetual archnemesis, outgoing mayor Marc Morial.* They were far too gleeful about Slaying the Dragon and replacing Morial with a "businessman" to do any serious critical thinking about what Pennington's dark statement might have meant.

So when I read here that Nagin characterizes the T-P as "The worst" or WWLTV as "Has changed" I'm not technically inclined to disagree with those statements. But I still think he should acknowledge that his political career still owes both of those organizations a continual debt of gratitude.


*The degree to which this perception was accurate is highly disputable. Pennington served as Police Chief during Morial's administration but, as others have repeatedly pointed out, the continuity between the Morial and Nagin administrations is far more substantial than this superficial media narrative suggested.