Remind me to write down all the ways in which the Cantrell adminstration has embraced a police state mentality

There's a lot of items to catalog there.  More than I've got time to run through right now.  Here's another one to throw on the pile, though.

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - “We’re doing everything that we should be doing and committing ourselves to doing even more,” Mayor Latoya Cantrell said.

With a juvenile crime problem across New Orleans, Mayor Cantrell said her administration is taking proactive steps to curb that crime, includes working with the Covenant House when it comes to curfew violations.

Jim Kelly is the Executive Director of the Covenant House and said the city will soon begin aggressively enforcing curfew for anyone 16 years old or younger.

“So, they came to us and said to us, we really want to enforce curfew. Can you guys help us? Well, that’s why we exist,” Kelly said.

Curfew starts at 9 p.m. and ends at 6 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. through 6 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.

Of course, LaToya loves enforcing curfew.   It was just last week that she and NOPD Chief Shaun Ferguson and Mayor Cantrell spent the better part of a  press conference talking about how crappy New Orleanians are at being parents.

“It is time to take ownership of your kids," New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said Thursday morning. "Be responsible for these kids. We as a department, we as a criminal justice system, we as a city government can not do this alone. We do need your help with this”

They need your help.  Meanwhile they will be helpful to you by arresting your children for the very serious crime of being outside. You might think having to deal with all the added stress and inconvenience of dealing with that makes the job of being a parent all the more difficult but, remember, it's for your protection... or it's for somebody's protection... maybe.  There's no evidence that juvenile curfews do anything at all to reduce crime.  Sorry there's no research on whether or not they affect "brazenness." But LaToya sounds like she has some opinions on that.

For potential victims, officials told them to call 911 and not engage.

“They’re armed, and this is serious," Cantrell said. "They are brazen, and they have no fear. Call 911, do not engage. Because we believe, based on what we’ve seen, it will not end in a manner that we want in this city. It will not end positively.”

At least she doesn't call them superpredators. Although, I did think, for a second, I was watching Joe Biden talking about the crime bill again.

President Bill Clinton in 1994 signed the crime bill into law with broad bipartisan support as violent crime rates peaked in the US in the early 1990s. Included in the law was the federal "three strikes" provision, mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes. 

"We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created," said Biden, then a fourth-term senator from Delaware so committed to the bill that he has referred to it over the years as "the Biden bill."

"They are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale," Biden continued. "And it's a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society."

In the speech, Biden described a "cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally ... because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity." He said, "we should focus on them now" because "if we don't, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now."

The 1994 crime bill supercharged mass incarceration, greatly expanded the power of the American police state and penalized a generation of poor people, basically, for the conditions of their own poverty.  I thought we knew that already.  In fact, I thought so many people understand this now, as compared to in 1993, that this sort of rhetoric has become a political problem for Biden in the Democratic primary. It must not be much of a problem for Cantrell and her police chief, though because... geeze.

Anyway I'm still trying to decide if the bigger problem here has to do with Mayor Trump's authoritarian streak or if it's more about the petty corruption of involving a problematic religious non-profit in the enforcement scheme. Is Covenant House being paid for its role in this? If so, how much?