On Friday, Mayor Cantrell (apparently back from France) swore in the person she expects to become the next "permanent" (at least until the next mayor takes over, anyway) Police Chief. It's Anne Kirkpatrick. As the only of the three finalists who wasn't either a guy who killed a man on a party bus or a politically un-viable interim appointee, she's the perfect fit.
If confirmed by a council majority, Kirkpatrick will make history in other ways. She would become the first female to become NOPD superintendent, coming after Woodfork opened the door as the first female interim chief.
Woodfork, who was one of the three finalists for the job along with Kirkpatrick and Thedrick Andres Sr., was appointed in December to succeed ex-chief Shaun Ferguson when he abruptly retired.
Kirkpatrick, a 35-year police veteran with 20 years in leadership position, last served as police chief in Oakland, Calif. Like Oakland, the NOPD has been laboring under a sweeping federal consent decree to foster Constitutional policing and usher in sound training and leadership.
A few notes here regarding Kirkpatrick's prior experience. There are issues one would hope City Council will address during the confirmation hearings. But the tendency with professional job-hoppers is they are granted a clean slate in each successive city they skip away to. There's always another sucker somewhere. Our city appears ready and willing to become the next.
Anyway, a NOLA.com article raised a bit of this a few weeks ago. One incident highlighted there was Kirkpatrick's role in covering for the cops who rolled a whole SWAT unit up on a homeless man named Joshua Pawlik. They found him sleeping in a park and murdered him.
Kirkpatrick endured intense criticism over her handling of discipline after five officers were involved in the 2018 shooting of a homeless man they’d awoken. The federal monitor over Oakland police wanted much heavier discipline than Kirkpatrick was willing to impose, calling her analysis “disappointing and myopic,” according to reporting by the East Bay Times.
Ali Winston, a journalist who co-authored a recent book on the Riders scandal and policing in Oakland, said Kirkpatrick was brought in to help “break up a frathouse atmosphere” but caved to the rank-and-file.
“She claimed to reverse culture in the department but basically rolled back serious discipline on a number of officers and didn’t follow through with a mandate to ensure consistency of discipline, that all cases are investigated thoroughly,” Winston said.
John Burris, a civil rights attorney involved in the Oakland police reform case, agreed that Kirkpatrick went light on the officers in the case.
“She really made an effort to cover it up,” he said. “She went out of her way to shade things and interpret them in a way that was designed to protect the officers.”
I decided to check out Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham's book this article mentions. In addition to her mishandling of the Pawlik investigation, it finds several other points of criticism to consider. Here is a quick summary.
1) At the beginning of the Trump Administration, Kirkpatrick violated the city of Oakland's promise to protect immigrants and instead cooperated with ICE to conduct deportation raids.
In 2017 Kirkpatrick put her foot on this third rail by ordering several officers to close off a West Oakland street to help ICE agents raid a family's home and arrest two men. The OPD issued a statement afterward claiming ICE was pursuing suspects who were "sex trafficking juveniles." Kirkpatrick said later that her department hadn't violated Oakland's sanctuary policies because the officers were assisting in a criminal "human trafficking" case, and she claimed one person had been charged with a "crime."
In truth, the case had nothing to do with underage sex trafficking, and no one had been charged with a crime. Instead, one of the detained men was charged with a civil violation for being unlawfully present in the United States. He was sent before an immigration judge for possible deportation.
2) The Oakland Black Officers Association alleged that Kirkpatrick discriminated against Black officers and recruits in various ways saying her conduct "hurts our members and the public at large"
3) Under Kirkpatrick, the Oakland Police showed signs of backsliding out of compliance with the dictates of its federal consent decree. Most critically there were problems with use of force violations as well as failures to complete investigations within an appropriate time frame.
Thus far, the press in New Orleans has shaded Kirkpatrick's "experience" working under a consent decree as a positive. The conventional line seems to be, she is well placed to finally complete the task of getting NOPD into full compliance. But that isn't what her record actually tells us. Rather than work to comply with the consent decree in Oakland, Kirkpatrick worked with outside consultants and PR pros to launch political attacks against the court appointed monitor and call the whole process into question.
(Judge William) Orrick knew that behind the scenes, Kirkpatrick and other city officials, not just within the police department, were already criticizing (the federal monitor Robert) Warshaw, laying the narrative that it was the monitor's subjective judgments that were the cause of the recent problems, not the OPD's actual misdeeds. More pointedly, current and former officers were lining up to criticize Warshaw, claiming that his views on the OPD's backsliding were influenced by the hefty paychecks he collected from the city. Clashes with city officials and Department of Justice attorneys in Detroit, where Warshaw also served as court monitor over that city's police reforms, were cited as supporting evidence, and even and ex-NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton took shots via Twitter at Judge Orrick and Warshaw over the latter's alleged profiteering.
Orrick made it clear he would have none of this in his courtoom: across sixteen years, the monitoring team exposed egregious scandals and reined in the OPD at crucial junctures, and it was trying to do this again. "I have complete faith in them and their ability, and they are the eyes and the ears of the court," he said of Warshaw's team.
Kirkpatrick's arguments before the judge in these hearings, though delivered with plenty of "we are doing progressive reforms here" type language, were little more than arrogant cynicism concerned primarily with political "narrative." This, in Winston and Bondgraham's telling, is the moment where her insincerity became most clear.
"So, your honor, the OPD is on the move," she said. "We are progressive. We are not regressive."
It was a presentation Orrick could appreciate, balancing the clear and obvious failures during the chief's twenty months on the job with some good work. But Orrick wanted a little more soul-searching from the police commander. "Before you go, Chief, what do you think is your biggest challenge?" he asked.
Kirkpatrick thought about it for a moment and answered: "the narrative."
An astonished look came over the judge's face for a split second before Orrick frowned and asked her if she meant to say communication.
"No sir. The narrative that we are not moving forward," explained Kirkpatrick.
"That's what you think your biggest challenge is?"
"I think that's a challenge," the chief replied. "I think there are other -- I think that's the challenge. I think that we do indeed have culture shift. I think that we have failed in explaining the proofs."
It was for these reasons that a citizen-led police oversight commission (no we don't have one of those in New Orleans) decided to fire Kirkpatrick. Afterward, she remained defiant. Kirkpatrick held a political rally with the police union and their political allies denouncing the consent decree. She also filed a lawsuit against the monitor.
While that T-P article cited above does acknowledge Kirkpatrick's politically framed attacks on federal police monitoring seem to be on the same wavelength as Cantrell's bucking of the NOPD consent decree, it also shrugs the notion off. One would hope that City Council, proud as they are of flexing their muscles over appointment powers lately, might take a more critical view. But something tells me they won't. We'll find out next week.
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