Keep Doing What You're Doing

This is not just Dennis Allen's motto, or even Gayle Benson's apparent marching orders to her coach this offseason.  It's also a favorite creed of city governance. We can change the elected mayors and councilmembers around as many times as we like. We can vote them out of office, put them in jail, threaten to recall them, and we've tried all of these. But as long as there is no popular political movement animating any of this turnover, then, in the words of Joe Biden, nothing will fundamentally change about how the actual business is done. 

For most of the last year, through the exercise of a fraudulent recall movement, among other things, the ruling elite of the city have been playing a game we might call, "This here mayor we created and elected is bad now. Very much unlike the next mayor we will create and elect on very much the same platform."  Something similar happens to all of our second term mayors, lately. It's a kind of blood ritual where our entrenched powers purge themselves of responsibility for the last demon they summoned so that they may move on and call upon the next one. 

Last week, we pointed out the example of Forward Together New Orleans. This is the non-profit created by current sacrificial goat, LaToya Cantrell in order to administer the very large privatized section of city expenditures off budget and as far away from the scrutiny of governmental transparency, accountability or civil service rules as possible.  There was a time when that was the new vehicle created so that a new mayor could pretend to do things differently from the previous one. But now that mayor is being exorcised so we have to pretend something different will replace that too. 

What's replacing it, however, is more of the same. 

New Orleans health director Dr. Jennifer Avegno went before the city council last month to present a vision for a new “public health” driven approach to gun violence — describing the killings in the city, which have reached the highest levels in years, as an epidemic.

She emphasized the need for robust programming to address the underlying conditions of violence, along with targeted interventions to interrupt conflicts before they escalate to violence and provide services to those most likely to be involved.

 “There must be a community-wide, public-private collaborative with real infrastructure and capacity that works solely on a violence reduction strategy and can implement it quickly,” Avegno told the council. “This group should survive political administrations. It should be highly resourced.”

 It was presented as a new approach. But it sounded remarkably similar to the plan Mayor LaToya Cantrell rolled out when she created the now-embattled Office of Gun Violence Prevention just two years ago.

The health language is the trendy branding now, which is why councilmembers have asked the Health Department to come in on this. But really we're just proceeding along the same path as ever. "Ultimately" it won't be the Health Department, or any city department anyway. 

Currently, she said, she is working on a “landscape analysis” of existing public health and intervention programming in the city meant to address violence to determine what should be continued and what could be scrapped — including, ostensibly, those programs previously being run by the Office of Gun Violence Prevention.  

“What programs do we have?” she said. “Who are they serving? How many people are they serving? Do we have evidence to suggest that they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing? Or that they’re effective? What are the gaps?” 

Initially she plans to advocate for several initial allocations of federal funding to get started on “catalytic” programs that she believes already have shown evidence of effectiveness — mostly money from the American Rescue Plan Act. Like past iterations of violence reduction programs in the city, she said that ultimately she anticipates that much of the funding will be routed to independent non-profits to do the work of violence prevention. 

We're just setting up to drop all the public money down to the same old non-profit industrial complex through a slightly different chute.  What will it do when it gets there?  Well, we already know that too.  Same thing it's been doing. 

Perhaps the most robust program included in the report is an initiative launched in Chicago in 2017 called the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI), which uses referrals from community organizations, along with an analytics tool based on law enforcement data to identify individuals with the “highest risk for violence involvement” and provides them with twelve months of programing that includes subsidized employment, cognitive behavioral therapy, skills training, and other support services. According to Asher’s report, participation in READI significantly reduced the likelihood of arrest for homicide or shooting, as well as the possibility of victimization. That program costs around $20,000 per participant.

The READI program claims that the list of individuals they develop is never shared with law enforcement, but the use of similar predictive data analytic tools has proved controversial in New Orleans in the past. 

The "most robust" program involves taking federal money intended to help people suffering the effects of the pandemic economic displacement and not actually doing anything to help them.  Instead of addressing basic needs, instead of working to make people housing and food secure, we're going to put them on a pre-crime list and subject them to "behavioral therapy and skills training."  In other words we're not helping the victims of the disaster so much as we're keeping them from getting out of line or becoming less compliant workers. 

And, of course, as the article goes on to explain, this isn't anything new or different from what's been going on for years through successive administrations. 

In 2018, The Verge revealed that Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration had been quietly using software developed by the technology company Palantir to produce a list of individuals to target as part of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy — part of his broader NOLA for Life murder reduction effort. Some of those individuals were “called-in” with social service providers and various law-enforcement agencies and given the option to participate in social programs or be subject to “enhanced prosecution.” 

After the agreement with Palantir lapsed in 2018, The Lens obtained emails showing that the Cantrell administration was working to develop another tool utilizing law enforcement data to identify individuals with the help of sociologist Andrew Papachristos — this time to target for “impactful social interventions.” But little was made public about the effort, and civil liberties groups again raised transparency concerns, along with questions about how the information would be used and whether or not it would be shared with law enforcement. 

It is unclear what, if any, new tools might be utilized in the new effort being developed by the health department to identify individuals.

The reason it's unclear what might be new is... none of this is new. We're all just going to keep doing what we're doing: Handing out public money to privatized formations of political cronies create phony "anti-crime" programs that, in reality, only continue to harm people.  If anyone ever starts to get wise to this grift, there's always another mayor to symbolically slaughter so we can start it all over again.