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Friday, October 12, 2018

Somehow we still like stop and frisk in New Orleans

What's worse, actually, is we like it for budgetary reasons.
When the discussion turned to balancing traffic camera revenue losses with an idea Montano floated about adding more officers to NOPD's traffic unit, the response from the council was overwhelmingly negative. There were the usual questions about whether the department had adequate manpower to shift its resources and whether it would put NOPD in jeopardy of violating its federal consent decree. City Councilman Jason Williams also asked whether the move would constitute meddling from the executive branch in the NOPD's operations.
I actually watched this hearing and that paragraph doesn't accurately describe what I heard. Your mileage may vary. Here is a link to the video.  Montano said that more cops stopping more people on the street was a good idea both for recovering revenue and for making more arrests as a result of impromptu searches and random questioning that might lead to discovered narcotics or identification of suspicious characters and whatnot.  In other words, he wasn't just talking about city finance. He was arguing in favor of invasive stop-and-frisk policing techniques.

Furthermore, the reaction from Council wasn't "overwhelmingly negative."  It's true Jason Williams had questions about whether NOPD had the manpower to beef up its traffic division but he did sound like he agreed with Montano's assertions in theory. 

Anyway, we live in a police state. And it's so bad that even the potential DA candidate on the City Council appears to tacitly endorse that.

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