We have to do something

They delayed the Morganza again. 

Enough pussyfooting around with all the knobs and dials on the river. Time to call close enough good enough and let it all rip. I mean we have to do something, right?  What is the worst that could happen?

Scientists don't yet know what precise weather conditions could overwhelm the Old River complex, but anything stronger than the 2011 event would present a "real risk," and the risk will continue to increase as more sediment is deposited in the channel, Xu said.

“These changes diminish the river’s capacity to carry water on its current course. When sections of the river’s floor rise to a sufficient point, a sudden increase in flow — perhaps from a flood — could drive the Mississippi River to overwhelm the control structure and adopt a new path, potentially causing the Mississippi to be captured by the Atchafalaya,” his research summary states.

Okay okay but there's too much nerdy engineering in all that.  Tell us about something else bad that could happen.

NEW ORLEANS, La. (WVUE) - As hurricane season approaches, one expert said he worries what kind of impact high water in the Mississippi River will have in an active hurricane.

Though river levels will likely be lower during the peak of the season, Alex Kolker -- a coastal sciences professor at Tulane and LSU’s Marine Consortium -- said storms still pose a threat.

High river levels this year have forced an unprecedented opening of the Bonne Carre Spillway and, likely, the Morganza.

“This river is managed for river floods and it’s managed relatively well. The one thing it’s not managed for is if you were to have a hurricane and a river flood at the same time,” Kolker said. “A high river like we have now, in late August, that would be a bigger concern.”

Yeah but that's not very likely to be something we are gonna have to worry about in June, right?  Right?

Ugh! Look, fine. Everyone, let's all do our civic duty to be as pro-actively freaked out as possible because that is supposed to help for some reason. But can we also maybe try and live our lives in the meantime?   LaToya says we are too busy in the summer hunkering down and whatnot to have a parade but I would like to see the evidence for this.

The Mystic Krewe of Nyx has responded to New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell's decision to nix plans to host a summer parade.

On Monday, Cantrell rejected the proposed July parade citing "public safety resources in the middle of hurricane season."

Nyx leadership announced plans for the parade in May. The 8-year-old, all-female krewe wanted to become the first major krewe in Carnival history to have two parades in a single year. They would have rolled on July 27.

That's not a good reason to deny the permit.  A better reason to deny it would be because, even though there are plenty of parades that happen outside of Carnival season all year long, including several during the summer months, this particular organization is captained by a con artist who is constantly looking for ways to leverage her position into one ponzi scheme after another. The summer parade was probably one of those.

As of this writing, the Freret "summer strut" is apparently still on. My guess is that is because a second line style event is subtle enough to get a pass while Nyx had a big attention-getting downtown parade with Kern floats and stuff planned.  A lot of Julie Lea's problems tend to issue from her never having learned to sophisticate up the corruption.

Anyway, just saying we don't have enough cops during the summer is nonsense. The State Troopers in the Quarter are so bored, in fact, they are shooting people for minor traffic violations. And, really, what would it hurt to pull a few NOPD off of curfew enforcement duty for a day? According to almost every expert rounded up in this story, the curfew does more harm than good anyway.  They tried telling that to the Cantrell people but were defeated by logic.

A 2016 article in The Guardian also raised the problem of curfew laws increasing police interaction with youth that isn’t always positive. "It was really kind of scary to have them treat you like a hardened criminal,” a 19-year-old who was stopped for a curfew violation told the newspaper: 

New Orleans officials said they are aware of the research questioning the effectiveness of curfew laws, but Stevens said officials concluded the enforcement is in the best interest of public safety.

“Right now, it’s important that we do something, and we have to do something with a sense of saving our young people to the streets,” Stevens said. “One way is to start to let them know laws are in place. You need to abide by the law that’s in place.”

"We have to do something"

"Ok but that thing you are doing is ineffective and probably harmful."

"But we have to do something."

QED

If the Corps of Engineers had that attitude, we'd have opened Morganza weeks ago.

Kick them out

It's well past time to get the State Troopers out of New Orleans.

An attorney for a man who was shot by a state trooper early Sunday said her client was a civilian agent with the U.S. Army who was visiting New Orleans, and that he pulled out his gun after feeling threatened by a group of juveniles who were following him.

Meanwhile, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, or "CID," on Tuesday confirmed that it was investigating after one of its civilian special agents had apparently been shot by a state trooper while the agent was on vacation in the city. The agent is "suspended from all law enforcement duties pending the outcome of the investigation," said a statement from Chis Grey, the CID public affairs chief.

Mitch invited the Troopers to augment downtown policing on what has become a permanent basis, for all intents and purposes back in 2014. But they had already been working special events and serving other long stints in the Quarter for some time.  Their tenure here has drawn controversy on several occasions. It's not clear, for example, what "security" is gained by having the Troopers write tickets for expired brake tags. That may be preferable, though, to just letting them loose in the streets to attack people at random. The Troopers are not subject to the mandates of the NOPD consent decree intended to bring that department into constitutional compliance. As such they tend to act out from time to time. Examples of this behavior include but are not limited to:

This incident where they assaulted two young men one of whom happened to be the son of an NOPD officer.

This assault on a man who just happened to be locking up his business at a time when the Troopers were looking for somebody else.

This assault on a man who happened to be local musician Shamarr Allen.

Or this incident that happened to make national news where the Troopers body slammed a tourist on Bourbon Street.

And, again, these are just the events that happen to get attention.  The Troopers harass people all the time down there.  And it's not just them you have to worry about.  

The security situation in the French Quarter doesn’t make a lot of sense to New Orleans City Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer.

In addition to the New Orleans Police Department, the city’s busiest neighborhood is patrolled by four different agencies, some of whom don’t coordinate with each other, at a cost of nearly $8.8 million a year. A supplemental sales tax charged only in the French Quarter, approved three years ago, pays for $2.9 million of that, but there’s a variety of different funding going to a variety of different places – a situation Palmer says has become unwieldy.

Palmer is looking, specifically at the State Police, the independent security forces run by the French Market Corporation and the Downtown Development District as well as taxpayer funded French Quarter Task Force which manages a separate NOPD detail.

But, at times, there are even more layers of complexity than this. The State Supreme Court is in the Quarter and, despite sitting directly across the street from NOPD's 8th District HQ, has its own security force. They shoot people sometimes.  A few years ago, Attorney General Jeff Landry put together his own little gang to run around the Quarter searching people for weed for a while. Also there briefly existed a posse of civilian "quality of life" officers known as "NOLA Patrol." And, of course, we're all familiar with Sidney Torres and his crime fighting hi-jinx.

Palmer is just asking questions at this point, but it sure does look like she's on to something.  If we must be policed in the first place, it's likely the safest, and most cost effective way to go about it is  see to it that the actual Police Department is responsible for handling that task. Kick everyone else out of there and focus on getting that right.

You think you know...

There's a line somewhere in the Police Administrator manual about responding to all video evidence of abusive behavior with some version of, "#Actually that is entirely appropriate."

Col. Mike Edmonson, the State Police superintendent, said Tuesday that the trooper’s use of force was justified under the circumstances. He said the cellphone video showed that Hoffman was “belligerent” and was resisting arrest.

Anyone who watches the video is probably inclined to respond, well, no, he's not belligerent so much as he's just drunk and stupid.  Whatever the case, it's clearly the trooper who escalates the confrontation into an act of theatrical violence.  But, according to Edmonson, we aren't qualified to pass judgement on the things we see with our eyes.

This sort of thing also happens after mass shootings. Gun lobbyists and enthusiasts leap in to counter calls for tighter regulations with lectures about how #actually, aggrieved victims aren't technically qualified to discuss what is or isn't an "assault rifle."

Only gun lobbyists are qualified to talk about guns. Only police are qualifies to talk about police brutality. Only the coach is qualified to talk about the pass rush. And so on. 



For example, we may have observed, that the State Troopers seem to be spending most of their time in New Orleans writing brake tag tickets and beating people up in the French Quarter. But Mitch Landrieu absolutely loves having them here and keeps begging them to stay.  And he's the expert so we'd better listen to him.

Troopers gonna troop

Not sure how Landrieu and Serpas get to criticize this.  They're the ones who begged for the "help."

State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson told reporters Wednesday (July 30) his troopers were justified in using force to bring a musician to the ground and handcuff him during a 9th Ward traffic stop last week, though he called the roughness "unfortunate."

Shamarr Allen, 33, a trumpeter who leads a well-known band, Shamarr Allen and the Underdawgs, claimed in an interview with WWL-TV that troopers unnecessarily pushed him, kicked him and threatened him with their guns drawn. He said he was trying to comply with troopers' demands.

"You move one time, I'm going to blow your head off," Allen recalled hearing a cop tell him in the WWL interview. "In my head I'm like, 'Maybe this is how it's going to end for me.'"

But Col. Edmonson said at a Wednesday news conference in the French Quarter that after reviewing video of the incident and a police report, he concluded the troopers used reasonable force for the situation at hand.

The "situation at hand" was they were looking for a suspect who had just escaped custody.  So they randomly stopped anyone who happened to be in the area and threatened him with  "I'm going to blow your head off." 

Somewhere Norman Robinson is smiling.

It's also worth remembering that the troopers are pretty much just doing what they were hired to do.  We understood their history when they arrived.

The incident is not the first allegation of racial bias involving State Police troopers in New Orleans. During Mardi Gras 2013, several white plainclothes State Police troopers tackled two young black teens to the ground in the French Quarter, detaining them until one of their mothers, who was an NOPD officer, intervened.

Anyway, if you're driving around out there tonight, it's a good idea to be aware the Serpas Signal is up. Hopefully no one tries to blow your head off.

The New Orleans Police Department’s Traffic Division will conduct a sobriety checkpoint, in Orleans Parish, on Thursday July 31, 2014, beginning at approximately 9:00 P.M. and will conclude at approximately 5:00 A.M.  Motorists will experience minimal delays and should have the proper documentation available if requested, i.e., proof of insurance, driver’s license, etc.