Send in the 5th District

Billy clubs, tasers, pepper spray, the whole nine. Let's end this crap once and for all.

"Next Mardi Gras let's have some enforcement of rules banning roping off of public land by individuals for their exclusive use during parades. Let's also have some real enforcement of rules regarding placement of ladders. Most parade goers with ladders flouted the law and knew exactly what they were doing --their ladders should be confiscated."

Amen, NOLA.com commenter person. This Mardi Gras was uncomfortable for a number of reasons chief among those being the inconsiderate behavior of the neutral ground campers during the second weekend.

Prior to that weekend, Serpas and Landrieu said,

Police and administration officials said personal portable bathrooms, sofas and other furnishings will not be allowed on neutral grounds, nor will people be allowed to rope off areas and ladders should not be placed in front of parade lines.

Early on Thoth-Bacchus-Endymion Sunday I took a few pictures.

Space roped off with caution tape


Ladders roped together


Ladders caution taped together to form a circular fortress


Tent after tent after tent


The tents are particularly annoying. At least a person standing behind a ladder wall can still kind of see the parade. Tents make this impossible. Walls of tents make the majority of the route inaccessible to anyone but the tent dwellers themselves. Days after Mardi Gras, Mayor Landrieu said,

"I think I can say without fear of contradiction it was, by and large, the biggest crowd that was ever on the streets of the city for any parade, " Landrieu said. "The crowds that are normally back past the outer edge of a neutral ground were actually back all the way across the street and into the cross streets."

Maybe there were, in fact, record crowds that day. But maybe they wouldn't have spilled "all the way across the street" if the neutral grounds were actually passable.


Crowds spilling into the non-parade side of St. Charles


Tents and other obstructions in the neutral ground

All of this comes back to the matter of the Mayor's and the Chief's will to stand by their stated intent to enforce city ordinances. On Lundi Gras, mayoral spokeswoman Mary Beth Romig appeared on the Bob DelGiorno show on WWL radio and badly misinterpreted what those ordinances say. After some back and forth, Romig concluded that it's fine to rope off space or set up tents in the public neutral grounds as long as you are in that space when the parade comes. That isn't this this NOPD statement told us just a few weeks ago. It says,

Remember the Neutral Ground (Median) is public property and it is illegal to “rope off” or barricade areas for private use.

No conditional language about using what you take there. Not only is Romig's interpretation of the rules incorrect, it's also an admission that the city had no plan to enforce those rules. Strange since there was no similar ambivalence about the letter of the law in Marigny-Bywater this Carnival season.

If tough enforcement of minor ordinances is good for the hippies and punks who live on one side of town, certainly it's good for the soccer moms and dads from Metairie who camp out on the other, right?