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.

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?

Thanks, but nah

"yadda yadda hunker down, lean forward, etc etc"



At the afternoon presser they just announced a 6pm curfew for tomorrow night.  Seems like NOPD already has plenty to do during these events without also having to enforce a nuisance directive like that. But it is the style now, so..

Quality of life enforcement

Uh oh. Sounds like the neighborhood association wanted a noise ordinance enforced.

Officers responded to a disturbance around 7:15 p.m. Friday at a community pool in the northern section of the expansive Craig Ranch subdivision. Residents and a private security officer called police to complain that several teenagers did not have permission to use the pool and had refused to leave, police said. The pool is part of the residential community.

Several people complained that the teenagers had started fighting. Three officers arrived and found a large, rowdy crowd. The department dispatched nine additional officers to respond to the incident, Conley said.

“Any time you confront a large group of people, it’s a very dynamic situation and tensions can rise very quickly,” he said.

And you know what happens when "tensions rise" is you get cops pulling guns on teenagers and throwing young girls to the ground by their hair.



Imagine if we, in New Orleans, ever got the idea that certain kinds of young people didn't belong in certain neighborhoods.

But youth advocates -- including Joshua Perry, the head of the juvenile public defender's office in New Orleans -- say it is a virtual certainty that curfew enforcement lopsidedly targets poor, African-American children. Remarkably, the New Orleans Police Department, which has been criticized by the federal Justice Department for racial profiling, says it does not keep track of the race of the children it arrests.

Some data is available, however, and it suggests curfew critics could have a point. In 2011, 93 percent of youths detained at the city's curfew center were African-American, according to statistics from the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office that were provided to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana.

Imagine, also, if we created a special, public-privately funded, "quality of life" police force to go around enforcing such a measure. What would that look like?

Members of the city's new civilian police force, the NOLA Patrol, will begin working in the French Quarter Monday (May 18).

The group, which went through 200 hours of training over five weeks, will handle quality-of-life violations and other non-emergency tasks, freeing up an understaffed New Orleans Police Department to focus on more serious crimes.

If you're having a pool party in the Quarter, make sure you review the guest list closely.

Uh oh time to extend the curfew again

Have to keep those "white men with salt-and-pepper hair" out of the Whole Foods, you know. For their own protection.

Kristen Palmer: "Won't somebody think of the children!"

Councilmemeber Palmer appears in today's Times-Picayune once again lying (or at least deluding herself) about the recently passed curfew law. The law which Palmer disgustingly justifies on the grounds that it "protects children" in fact exists in order to codify the misguided notion that the oldest most iconic section of our city belongs more to tourists and the tourism industry than it does to the actual residents of New Orleans.

Palmer writes

The over-arching question has been, why the French Quarter and this particular section of the Marigny? The answer is simple. No other neighborhood in the city, state or nation sized at .66 square miles, just 12 blocks wide, contains more than 350 alcohol beverage outlets, and includes adult entertainment establishments and numerous strip clubs.

To begin with that's not the "over-arching question." The over-arching question is why does council claim the police authority to limit the movements of citizens in a free society at all based solely on their age? But, if you're an important person like Kristen Palmer who isn't likely to be randomly stopped just for being outside you don't care about that sort of thing in the first place.

What important people like Kristen Palmer care about is what makes other important people comfortable. In this case the important people in question are the operators of those beverage outlets and entertainment establishments who don't want their customers scared away from their Disneyland by the sight of unapproved characters. Nevermind any of this hooey about protecting minors. Most of the (also wrongheaded) popular support for these curfew laws is based on residents' and business owners' fear of, not fear for unsupervised minors.

Moreover, the very idea that there are sections of a city which are solely dedicated to one style of business flies completely in the face of the entire concept of urban living. Even today in its sorry denuded state the French Quarter is still a mix of restaurants, specialty shops, grocery stores, residential space, museums, courthouses, churches, schools, and of course bars and music clubs. Thanks to leaders like Kristen Palmer and the short-sighted moneyed interests she serves, we haven't been the greatest stewards of this special historic neighborhood but we also haven't quite managed to kill it yet.

Meanwhile The Lens has published a refutation of Palmer's elitist lies by Quarter native C.W. Cannon. I encourage you to go read his column in its entirety but here is where he makes his strongest point.

Black critics claim that the law is intended to target black young people. They’re right, of course, but even if we pretended this were not the case, the idea stinks. I realize there’s a national trend to shield children from witnessing certain adult behaviors, e.g. drinking and smoking, but I fail to see what’s so dangerous about my kid hearing music through the doors of The Spotted Cat or d.b.a., just as, when I was a kid, we used to hang in front of the Faubourg or the Dream Palace. In fact, I WANT them to experience a radically integrated society, including different races, sexual orientations, and age groups. That’s precisely the reason I’m choosing to raise them in the old neighborhood. This law isn’t about protecting them, it’s about protecting tourists from seeing them.

Kristen Gisleson Palmer's FQ curfew extension just passed

The racketeers who run the tourism industry down there are no doubt pleased. If the Twitters are any indication (and when are they not?) the council meeting where the ordinance was discussed was a classic exercise in NOLA political farce. We eagerly await the final reports of the scribes if for no other reason than proper documentation of Jackie Clarkson's latest stand-up material.

The main point of opposition arose from the (basically correct) impression that the law was singling out black youths for being in the wrong neighborhood, so to speak. But since Chief Serpas already operates traffic checkpoints which effectively restrict the movement of citizens across town during the evening hours, such a measure is pretty much a redundancy.

And so, rather than argue against the curfew altogether, many of the assembled activists argued that it be extended citywide so that all of us can come together as "one city, one voice" or whatever and share in the misery. And this is what Council agreed to consider doing at some future date.

Meanwhile, if you're bringing your teenage football fans to New Orleans for this weekend's games, please don't let them go into the Quarter unleashed after 8 PM.

Creeping Santorumism

Ultra-conservative kook Rick Santorum finishes second in the Iowa Caucus on Tuesday night and the next day we've got New Orleans City Council members making Santorum-like bullshit statements to justify their hyper-restrictive curfew proposal.

Gisleson Palmer justified the plan by saying that the French Quarter and Frenchman Street “are extreme areas of permissiveness, which I think we need to keep our minors safe from.”

Really? Palmer would have us believe she's protecting children from "extreme permissiveness" For one thing, I thought that was Grant Storms' job. For another, this curfew measure, Palmer wants all minors out of the Quarter after 8PM, is actually a direct response to fears that the perception of rampant crime in the city might harm the tourist industry. See the below post for more on how our city leaders see our dignity as subservient to the needs of their wealthy friends' businesses. But at least there Nagin and Landrieu and Serpas have the courtesy not to lie to us about just who they're trying to "keep safe" in most circumstances.