"He made a presentation on it"

From last week's Gambit feature on the widespread exploitation of immigrant labor in New Orleans.

When workers demand payment, employers retaliate with threats to report them to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services or the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), Gonzalez says. She says many documented and undocumented laborers are afraid of authorities because the workers don't speak English and have heard stories of others who have been arrested and deported. At a press conference, Mayor Ray Nagin and NOPD Superintendent Warren Riley tried to quell these fears, saying the NOPD will not ask the immigration status of crime victims or witnesses.

  That's not always the way it works, Gonzalez says.

  In November 2009, a worker named Jose Mejia Castro asked for unpaid wages from his former boss, contractor Woodrow Randall. What occurred next is disputed. According to a Municipal Court affidavit given by NOPD officer Carolyn Dalton, Castro became angry and screamed at the "victim." In another affidavit by officer Tony Burrell, Randall pushed Castro into a car. Neither officer filed a report, but both men were issued summonses for disturbing the peace.

  Castro gave a third version of the incident when he filed a complaint with the NOPD's Public Integrity Bureau. When Castro requested his money, he says, Randall threatened him with a hammer and then pushed Castro into the car. Castro called NOPD for help, but when Burrell and Dalton arrived, they interrogated Castro about his immigration status. Gonzalez was also at the scene, and she reminded the officers of Riley's statement that immigration status was irrelevant.

  "She literally said, 'I don't care what Riley has said, because I'm giving him a citation,'" Gonzalez says Dalton told her.

  It remains a verbal, not written policy, according to Janssen Valencia, NOPD's official liaison to the Hispanic community. Valencia says he hasn't seen anything in writing that officers shouldn't ask about a victim or witness's immigration status, but adds it is considered Riley's verbal policy.

  "He made an announcement with it," Valencia says. "The mayor was with the superintendent when he announced it. I haven't seen anything in writing with it; all I know is he made a presentation on it."

And there's your Riley era NOPD leadership in a nutshell. Talk and politics with no actual institutional control. Not that we'd want to hold our breath waiting for the police to do anything that might disrupt the supply of cheap/free under-the-table labor in this town.