Uberize

It's fair to say every candidate for mayor has been unseemly in their fetishizing of both the tech driven "sharing economy" and of local law enforcement.  But only Frank Scurlock managed to distill the essence of this in a single word and act.

New Orleans mayoral candidate Frank Scurlock is facing a misdemeanor count of lewd conduct in Santa Monica, California, where he is accused of masturbating in an Uber vehicle in February.

Scurlock, whose splashy campaign ads have pledged to “Uberize” the New Orleans Police Department, was allegedly caught masturbating by a driver taking him to a hotel in West Hollywood on Feb. 10, Santa Monica Chief Deputy City Attorney Terry White said.

If you had been wondering what a candidate might mean when he says he wants to "Uberize NOPD," well, now you know it is even worse than you thought.  What's worse than even that, though, is it's not just Scurlock who wants to go around Uberizing over cops.

Desiree Charbonnet is doing it too.  This absurdly stupid ad even mimics Scurlock's cops-but-with-an-app-or-something premise. Her website puts it in even more alarming terms. There we find proposals to defund consent decree compliance monitoring as well as the Neighborhood Housing Improvement Fund in order to pay for more police. It also doesn't help that her plan has the support of New Orleans's proto-facist District Attorney as well as some of its notoriously corrupt bail bondsmen.

The Cantrell campaign took a few minutes away from promoting prison labor to try and make some hay out of that last point recently. We're still trying to figure out how they ever thought they had any room to talk, though. Anyway, Cantrell is as Uber-enthused over tougher policing as any of these candidates.  Maybe not as intense as her Uberizing over Airbnb but it's close.

Troy Henry is also doing it. At the most recent forum, he indicated his vision for NOPD would involve creating a "strike force" that goes after "bad dudes." He and Charbonnet also criticized consent decree restrictions on paid details. Charbonnet even said that NOPD officers are "demoralized" by the fact that Saints game detail gigs go to Jefferson Parish law enforcement.  We agree. It was extremely demoralizing when a Jefferson Parish Levee Authority officer told us to stop banging on the wall during the Saints-Patriots game last weekend. The way that game was going, we'd have much preferred to have NOPD just come by and shoot us.

And, of course, Michael Bagneris is Uberizing over the police as well. His website features a plan to hire 300 more cops by recruting heavily among military vets, install more surveillance cameras, and create a not-at-all scary sounding "Crime Analytics Department" to  "proactively identify violent criminals."

Yesterday Scurlock said he was going to "evaluate" the status of his campaign after having grossed everybody out this week.  If he drops out, he won't be missed. But we do have to thank him for leaving us this word with which to describe how grossed out we are by the rest of the field as well.