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.