Why don't cops want to work?

Even in the year 2022, after all of these past several years of protest and upheaval, it is still true that the police will just up and kill you in an instant. 

Jefferson Parish deputies shot and killed a man in Marrero early Wednesday after they say he refused to get out of a vehicle.

Deputies responded to a 911 call to the 500 block of Wilson Street in Marrero at 2:15 a.m., according to a written statement from JPSO, which did did not offer any details about the nature of the call.

As they were investigating, the statement said, they encountered a man who was inside a vehicle and "refused lawful commands to exit the vehicle," they said.

For the heinous crime of remaining seated, they will just shoot you to death and nobody will stop them from doing it again and again.   They might also be stealing your car (or at least working with someone who does.) It's happened before. Any decent person would expect there to be a political movement afoot to rein in this terrifying behavior. But that movement has largely exhausted itself and, as a man once famously said, decent people shouldn't live here. 

Instead, we are subjected to a 24/7 crime panic bombardment across all media where the loudest demand is that the police be given even more liberty than they already have to destroy lives at will. If we do not allow them to do this, the argument seems to ask, what incentive do they really have to do any work whatsoever?

On Saturday, the Times-Picayune took a closer look at the much discussed NOPD "manpower shortage" and found that, at 1,069 officers, the department is currently at its lowest staffing level since the 1960s.  What the article doesn't say is that the city's population as of the 2020 census is down from 1960 by about a quarter of a million people which might put that in a little bit better perspective.  An infographic included in the article notes that the pre-Katrina 2005 NOPD was staffed at 1,730 and has never regained that number since. But, again, neither has the city returned to its pre-K population figure of 484,674.  The 2020 census pegs New Orleans at 383,997.  A 38 percent decline in police staffing, while significant, is not so out of step with a 20 percent decline in overall population as to be unmanageable. 

We also know that mere numbers don't tell the full story of the demographic upheaval visited on New Orleans over the past decade or so. Gentrification, displacement, wholesale demolition of public housing, and the scourge of short term rentals have greatly altered the distribution of New Orleanians and the nature of life in their neighborhoods. Sometimes it can even feel as though nobody actually lives here at all.

Given all of that, is a thousand cop force is even necessary in the first place? Police don't prevent crime. They respond to certain kinds of crime committed by certain kinds of people after the fact. But their mere presence does not automatically make a city any safer. The Times-Pic article picks up on this point, in fact. But in doing so, it raises another issue.

Whether more cops would mean less crime is doubtful, experts caution. But the mounting losses and their impact on Carnival season and response times have begun to lay bare the city’s reliance on police officers to do work that many seem to no longer want.

Over the last couple of weeks, early Carnival parades like Chewbacchus and Krewe du Vieux have seen their routes cut and then cut again on short notice as police have refused to show up for these "volunteer" assignments.  Between that and other high profile refusals of service, it's not a stretch to suggest this is a deliberate and strategic work stoppage as the police lobby for more money. Not that they have to put too much effort into that. The city seems more than willing to bend over backward for them.  Maybe they just have better things to do right now. 

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - Five New Orleans police officers have received target letters from the federal government regarding possible violations of criminal laws, sources tell FOX 8.

The letters come after FOX 8′s series of investigations looking into NOPD officers potentially double-dipping and one officer racing cars while on the clock. On 20 different days, FOX 8 found NOPD Sergeant Todd Morrell racing cars, while the police department paid him to be on the clock.

That included a day when video showed him at NOLA Motorsports on the West Bank, where he raced three times while also claiming he worked a 12-hour NOPD detail shift patrolling the fairgrounds neighborhood on the other side of the river.

And, look, NOPD need to get their thrills in somewhere.  According to one disgruntled cop interviewed for that T-P feature, the job itself is just too boring these days.

For one officer who left the NOPD last year, the grass was greener on the north shore despite what he described as a significant pay cut. He’d joined NOPD in 2019 after serving as a jailer in Mississippi, and patrolled in the department's 6th and 7th districts.  

“If I was going to be a policeman, I wanted to be in the city where you’d get all the crime,” said the officer, who declined to be identified out of concern for his new job.

But the officer said restrictions under the federal consent decree that governs reforms to the NOPD, along with what many officers perceive as draconian discipline by the department's Public Integrity Bureau, set his sights elsewhere.

As we've already said, police do not prevent crime. Police get called out when certain kinds of crimes happen. This guy understands the job description. He says he "wanted to be in the city where you'd get all the crime" so he'd be going out on a lot of these calls. Evidently, he also has ideas about what he's supposed to do when he gets there. But NOPD is operating under a federal consent decree which monitors their actions until such time as they can be demonstrated to be minimally compliant with the US Constitution. It's trouble getting over that bar in particular that drove this particular cop off of the force. I mean, imagine the indignity...

“Somebody said it best: ‘I’m pretty much a secretary with a gun,’” he said of the NOPD. “All I do is take reports. If you mess up and (the Public Integrity Bureau) gets involved, you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent.”

Our secretary friend here would prefer to be firing the gun at people, apparently. Somebody has to do it. It's practically a natural law.  But the grievances do not stop there. 

The former officer noted tight restrictions on vehicle chases and warrantless searches. He pointed to one incident that he said grounded his decision.

“I was on I-10 going towards Slidell, right past Michoud, and some guy in an older Cadillac was going 80 mph. I tried to stop him, he slows down to 60, I get in the middle lane to look at him, he ends up flipping me the bird and keeps driving,” he said. “By policy, I can’t chase him. I had to turn my lights off and watch this guy ride.”

Can't violate the 4th Amendment. Can't use his car to cause whatever havoc and death the gun won't do.  And they flipped him off too?  My word, the indignity.  No wonder nobody wants these jobs anymore.