Yeah yeah yeah, here comes the occasional bit about how I've been tweeting too much and blogging too little and all memory is being lost in the sands of windswept digital chaos and I need to do more deliberate writing for archival purposes, etc. etc. But, seriously, I'm getting back to posting here soon. Really.
Meanwhile, the Hunkerdowncast has its first official spin-off piece of media, so there's that. Basically we're gonna watch some New Orleans themed/shot/set movies and talk about them. Here's the first one.
Update:
Oh speaking of blogging again, I did write this bit for the above mentioned show. Might as well just post it.
Last month the mayor of New Orleans and several city councilmembers decided we are all ready for our close-ups and voted to rescind a very recently passed ban on use of certain surveillance technologies such as facial recognition software by the New Orleans police department.
There is no evidence that these tools do anything to reduce violent crime. They have been shown, however, to reinforce the existing biases of the criminal punishment system against poor and marginalized people, and to cast a wide dragnet over a city where everyone is effectively treated as a suspect. Of particular concern was the potential for police to violate the privacy of consenting sexual partners and to use it to enforce a newly activated state prohibition against abortion.
City Council had already passed a resolution explicitly instructing city law enforcement not to enforce the so-called state “trigger laws” that went into effect when the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe vs Wade. The resolution calls for no city funds to be used to catalog or report abortion cases.
However, when the new surveillance ordinance failed to include language prohibiting NOPD from using surveillance tools against abortion seekers or against consenting sexual partners, council had to scramble to amend the law again a week later.
Meanwhile Mayor Cantrell embarked on a public campaign against the NOPD federal consent decree monitoring program put in place in 2013 after a Department of Justice report found that NOPD officers routinely engaged in “patterns of misconduct that violate the Constitution and federal law.” One prominent case at the time being the 5 NOPD officers charged with murdering and burning the body of Henry Glover in the days following Hurricane Katrina (put a pin in that one).
At a press conference, Cantrell asserted that the consent decree had put officers “in handcuffs” and that she was "concerned about our officers' ability to protect themselves” However, in interviews, many NOPD officers who exited the force report that they have not been driven away by mandates for unbiased constitutional police practices but rather by an capricious, political and punitive NOPD management style responsible for flagging morale. Federal Judge Susie Morgan, the person responsible for administering the decree, slapped back at Cantrell during a subsequent hearing saying that comments by the mayor, “Suggesting that officers want the consent decree to end so they can return to policing the way they did before 2013 is wrong, and dangerous.”
Called back before the City Council to address this and other matters, Police Chief Shaun Ferguson then let slip that NOPD policy does in fact recomend collecting information on abortion seekers after all. It was at this same hearing that District C councilmember Freddie King asked the chief if there was something he could get the police to do about homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk because it makes "everyone's quality of life a little undesirable." This coming on the heels of CM Oliver Thomas having run a pair of panhandlers off of Crowder Boulevard to the thrill of his Instagram followers.
All of this is to say that the mayor of New Orleans (who was in DC this week continuing to lobby against the consent decree) along with a faction of the City Council now appear more determined than ever to turn their cameras and other instruments of state surveillance against the city’s most vulnerable populations for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
But what if I told you that there was another way for the rich and powerful to clean up the streets of our unhappy little corner of the planet while also boosting the city’s high dollar tourist trade at the same time? Therein lies the premise of this week’s film.