Quality of life enforcement

Uh oh. Sounds like the neighborhood association wanted a noise ordinance enforced.

Officers responded to a disturbance around 7:15 p.m. Friday at a community pool in the northern section of the expansive Craig Ranch subdivision. Residents and a private security officer called police to complain that several teenagers did not have permission to use the pool and had refused to leave, police said. The pool is part of the residential community.

Several people complained that the teenagers had started fighting. Three officers arrived and found a large, rowdy crowd. The department dispatched nine additional officers to respond to the incident, Conley said.

“Any time you confront a large group of people, it’s a very dynamic situation and tensions can rise very quickly,” he said.

And you know what happens when "tensions rise" is you get cops pulling guns on teenagers and throwing young girls to the ground by their hair.



Imagine if we, in New Orleans, ever got the idea that certain kinds of young people didn't belong in certain neighborhoods.

But youth advocates -- including Joshua Perry, the head of the juvenile public defender's office in New Orleans -- say it is a virtual certainty that curfew enforcement lopsidedly targets poor, African-American children. Remarkably, the New Orleans Police Department, which has been criticized by the federal Justice Department for racial profiling, says it does not keep track of the race of the children it arrests.

Some data is available, however, and it suggests curfew critics could have a point. In 2011, 93 percent of youths detained at the city's curfew center were African-American, according to statistics from the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office that were provided to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana.

Imagine, also, if we created a special, public-privately funded, "quality of life" police force to go around enforcing such a measure. What would that look like?

Members of the city's new civilian police force, the NOLA Patrol, will begin working in the French Quarter Monday (May 18).

The group, which went through 200 hours of training over five weeks, will handle quality-of-life violations and other non-emergency tasks, freeing up an understaffed New Orleans Police Department to focus on more serious crimes.

If you're having a pool party in the Quarter, make sure you review the guest list closely.