The Big Uneasy

August 2, 2015 4:11 PM

"Everyone in New Orleans knows that 911 is a lost cause." ‘‘What I’m doing now isn’t all that different from the trash thing,’’ Torres said. ‘‘It’s about seeing a need — an unfortunate need — and stepping up to fill it.’’
posted by bitmage (54 comments total)

Well, I foresee no problems with this.....
posted by triage_lazarus at 4:20 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ugh. Defund the police and let the rich have their own police forces that do it again. Great idea, 'murica.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:22 PM on August 2, 2015 [16 favorites]

Everyone wanted to be living in a Neal Stephenson novel, right?
posted by Artw at 4:28 PM on August 2, 2015 [30 favorites]

Im 95% sure this is a Jindal 2016 ad.
posted by T.D. Strange at 4:37 PM on August 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

hey remember back when people would claim with a straight face that the US was considered a first-world nation with things like an infrastructure
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:39 PM on August 2, 2015 [60 favorites]

Seated at his kitchen table, Torres began furiously refreshing his iPad.

Fifty shades of blue?
posted by srboisvert at 4:47 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Everyone wanted to be living in a Neal Stephenson novel, right?

Hey, could be worse. At least we got Snow Crash instead of Seveneves.
posted by Itaxpica at 4:48 PM on August 2, 2015 [14 favorites]

The New Orleans Police Department is unique in the USA for having not one, but TWO alumni on Death Row.

With a history like that, I can't honestly blame people for setting up private rent-a-cop armies, no matter how politically and morally noxious that choice might be in and of itself.
posted by the hot hot side of randy at 4:51 PM on August 2, 2015 [10 favorites]

This guy is a amateur. Here in Michigan, we just create the worlds largest private army.

Oh.
posted by clavdivs at 4:54 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

the US was considered a first-world nation with things like an infrastructure

A lot of people in New Orleans refer to it as America's only major third world city. It's shouldn't be considered representative of anywhere else.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:59 PM on August 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm extremely okay with nations being judged by their poorest city rather than their richest. If anything, it's more representative.
posted by schmod at 5:05 PM on August 2, 2015 [62 favorites]

So get up get, get get down
911 is a joke in yo town
Get up, get, get, get down
Late 911 wears the late crown
posted by symbioid at 5:09 PM on August 2, 2015 [9 favorites]

This is right out of Jennifer Government.
posted by Slinga at 5:12 PM on August 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Also, considering New Orleans unique in this regard is letting the US off way too easy.
posted by zjacreman at 5:26 PM on August 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

"It's Uber, for policing". No, I mean it, it literally is Uber for policing.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, "Uber for policing" sounds like a "we're actually here, kill me now" circumstance. On the other, the NOPD is just about the worst police department in North America (and I lived in Montreal, where the police shot a shoplifter in the back of the head after they had him cuffed and facedown on the sidewalk).
posted by fatbird at 5:36 PM on August 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Presumably since these guys aren't actually cops they are a bit more accountable if they assault or murder citizens?

Or is there some dumb NRA backed law to ensure they don't have to hold back if they get it into their heads to go in shooting?
posted by Artw at 5:40 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

"‘‘Look, it’s cool that the city supplied me with cops who can arrest people and use their guns. But I pay their salaries, I own the app and the vehicles..."

Cool is not the word that I'd use for this.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 5:43 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

since these guys aren't actually cops

They're off-duty cops getting paid the princely sum of $50/hr at the top of the scale.

Or is there some dumb NRA backed law to ensure they don't have to hold back if they get it into their heads to go in shooting?

Stand your ground, and the knowledge of how the investigating officer, with whom you golf on the weekend, will interpret a crime scene.
posted by fatbird at 5:45 PM on August 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Just wait til some fuckwad hacker plays around with this App.
posted by clavdivs at 5:46 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Off duty cops? Oh fuck, worst of every possible world. You just know they are going to abuse the fuck out of that situation and blue every possible boundary.

That shit should be made illegal.
posted by Artw at 5:49 PM on August 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

One private police force is open to corruption and inefficiency. We need two private police forces, competing for business! Metacops and Enforcers! Goes great with private prisons.
posted by Rangi at 5:57 PM on August 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

On the one hand, I agree this is terrible. On the other hand, when I lived in New Orleans, one of the universities did a study to measure police response time by firing a full box of blanks (I believe it was 50 rounds) from a gun. Response time was 0. As in they just didn't show up. And that wasn't exactly uncommon. I remember we got in a pretty bad car accident and the 911 response was basically "lol so what". Fortunately the ambulance and fire guys were nice. Deputies from the Parish responded because Fire called them on the radio as a favor to us, NOPD never did.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 6:08 PM on August 2, 2015 [15 favorites]

No police. In New Orleans. Mind boggling.

It's fascinating to be living in what is apparently a nation in the process of slow but steady collapse into madness.

America loses major cities - Detroit, New Orleans - to chaos and entropy while spending literally trillions to fight imaginary enemies in third-world countries an ocean away. And in this upcoming election, like all of the others, this won't be an issue (unless Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, but let's not derail).

I tend to see everything from the point of view of a history book written a hundred years from now - and at this point my imaginary book reader is yelling, "What the fuck is wrong with you people? You had everything and now you're going piss it all away for nothing?"
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 6:18 PM on August 2, 2015 [59 favorites]

Yeah, the tragedy is that it's gotten this bad. The NOPD was so broken, before and after Katrina, that embarking on a massive hiring surge likely would've done more harm than good. I do wish that someone would've figured out a way to involve the Parish cops to help cover the shortfall much earlier than now, ten years after the storm.

Of course, now that the funding is out of this guy's hands and into the Convention and Visitors Bureau, it feels less like the first act of a comic book movie before you find out the dude is the villain. The funding aspect is the easier part of this — ideally I'd like police services to be funded straight out of traditional sources like taxes, because everyone deserves better police protection, not just the neighborhoods with businesses who can afford it. On the other hand, tourism is the biggest industry in town, and if the French Quarter isn't safe then that industry is fucked, and the city suffers even more.

This is a decent first step to stop the bleeding, but if this is all that ever comes of it I'll be furious.
posted by savetheclocktower at 6:22 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

What's frustrating about this is, in part, that there's an obvious solution using the NOPD: station more officers in the French Quarter. This is what is, in effect, happening anyway, just fucking do it officially and without all the technolibertarian middlemanning.
posted by fatbird at 6:25 PM on August 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

fatbird: "What's frustrating about this is, in part, that there's an obvious solution using the NOPD: station more officers in the French Quarter. This is what is, in effect, happening anyway, just fucking do it officially and without all the technolibertarian middlemanning."

Do you think there's a surplus of officers dedicated to patrolling safe neighborhoods, or just sitting in a room somewhere twiddling their thumbs? This initiative is part off-duty cops (i.e., working overtime) and part state troopers. There are not enough cops in the NOPD.
posted by savetheclocktower at 6:30 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Do you think there's a surplus of officers

I think there's an aspect of police management called allocating resources. If there are shootouts, break-ins, and stabbings every night, then the rest of New Orleans would have to be pretty much Apocalyptic to still have 26 minute response times for the French Quarter, unless they're just not bothering to shift police around to higher crime areas.

They probably could do with more police officers, or with more overtime for NOPD or state troopers (who are obviously willing to take it). That doesn't mean they can't address a serious crime problem in the short term with some active presence in the area.

What the current story says is mainly that the command at NOPD doesn't really give a shit about the problem, even if individual officers do.
posted by fatbird at 6:47 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Hasn't it always been the case that you could hire off-duty New Orleans cops to show up and do police work for you, armed and in their normal uniforms? My understanding was that these "private details" were how New Orleans police officers made most of their income. Those cops have been selling their services to the highest bidder since forever.

The only difference with this new venture is that they're being paid to do normal neighborhood patrols instead of protecting businesses or events. It actually seems less corrupt than usual.
posted by ryanrs at 6:48 PM on August 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

Torres’s crowdsourcing approach to crime, conceived throughout February and March, was the impulsive byproduct of his belief that the New Orleans Police Department, which has shrunk by around 500 officers since Hurricane Katrina, was no longer able to protect even the neighborhood less than a square mile in size that contained the city’s most valuable real estate.

This assumption that obviously the area with the city's most valuable real estate should be a policing priority is just so creepy.
posted by ssg at 7:05 PM on August 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Well tourism in the French Quarter is kind of a big deal to the city's economy. It's not just that rich people live there, but it's also about jobs and city revenue.
posted by ryanrs at 7:07 PM on August 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think that it has been at least 50 years since New Orleans was one of the major cities of the south. It has been dysfunctional on a different level from other troubled or poor second-tier American cities for a very long time.
posted by knoyers at 7:10 PM on August 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

I wonder if that $900,000/year from the tourism bureau includes body cameras. I mean, it's only responsible of private industry that's funding its own security forces to spend the extra money on something that's recently proved it may be the only thing standing between a homicide being ruled justified, and a cop indicted on murder charges.

What'll be especially interesting is if NOPD is required to wear body cameras/run dashcams, but these private forces aren't.

Literally, the only positive I see in this right now is that they patrol what has become a lower-crime area (as they say at the end of the article) and so there are a bunch of off-duty cops being paid a ton to do nothing and that frees up the actual NOPD to respond to real calls in areas of greater need.

Except then those off-duty officers might get bored ... and start manufacturing reasons to pull over that motorist who doesn't look like he belongs in the neighborhood. Ugh.
posted by none of these will bring disaster at 7:13 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

On the other hand, off-duty cops may not be pushed to stop people to hit a cash-strapped city's revenue goals?
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 7:14 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ghostride The Whip: On the other hand, off-duty cops may not be pushed to stop people to hit a cash-strapped city's revenue goals?

That is a good point. I wonder if this private unit is even allowed to do traffic stops, or if they're limited to responding to emergencies reported on the app.
posted by none of these will bring disaster at 7:20 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

One word. DREDD.
posted by triage_lazarus at 7:34 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

One word. DREDD.

This is also literally the plot of Continuum.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:37 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Hold back on super pedantic response about how the world of Dredd works that somehow makes it look better than the world of modern policing.
posted by Artw at 7:38 PM on August 2, 2015

You mean like how Dredd summarily executes white people, too?
posted by ryanrs at 7:40 PM on August 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Well, he's part of a horrible system but he's a competent part of a horrible system, and to a large extent he's effective at what he does. Cops who get compared to him are generally none of those things, so I guess he's "better". Of course he's an idealized embodiment of fascism so I guess he is kind of worse too.

Also Mega-City One is pretty much a command economy so none of this libertarian shit would fly.
posted by Artw at 7:52 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

(having a Dredd story featuring riots out while Ferguson was happening was very fucking weird. I have thought about this shit a lot lately.)
posted by Artw at 7:53 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

A lot of people in New Orleans refer to it as America's only major third world city. It's shouldn't be considered representative of anywhere else.

Not yet, maybe. Give it a few years.
posted by doctor_negative at 8:04 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Both of my daughters were wandering around the French Quarter at all hours, a couple of months ago. Someone convinced them it was perfectly safe. I didn't like all my eggs in that one basket.

The privatization of many once public, therefore accountable, services is horrifying, when you read the uncivil discourse on the web. Then the people who enjoy petty, momentary power, get paid to act out their neuroses.

Trashanova! Sounds like a toast.
posted by Oyéah at 8:33 PM on August 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

clavdivs: "Here in Michigan, we just create the worlds largest private army."

Guess what, the Illinois governor is planning to call in the National Guard to run the state if he manages to screw the unions to the point where they strike.

ryanrs: "Hasn't it always been the case that you could hire off-duty New Orleans cops to show up and do police work for you, armed and in their normal uniforms? "

Armed, yes -- most municipal cops are required to carry and to interfere in crimes even when off-duty (and are allowed to work as private security guards). Whether they can do after-hours work in uniform is a VERY HOT TOPIC and varies quite a bit by jurisdiction, and municipal insurers have varying opinions on whether your cops can wear uniforms off-duty and whether that makes the city liable for off-duty errors. I went through a huuuuuuuuuge union contract negotiation on these issues (which ended by the state deciding it was easier to decertify the department in question so they couldn't carry guns at all, rather than trying to deal with the part where an extremely geographically-limited police department could carry outside their jurisdiction, long story, so we never really got to the uniform part).
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:48 PM on August 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Here's the website to rent New Orleans police officers:
New Orleans Office of Police Secondary Employment
posted by ryanrs at 9:08 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

A lot of people in New Orleans refer to it as America's only major third world city. It's shouldn't be considered representative of anywhere else.

I'd also claim it's our only major cultural city, whatever that's worth.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:18 PM on August 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Police officers in the city of St. Louis also rely on secondary employment to maintain their lifestyles. Lots of them do security, in uniform, for sporting events, festivals, and so on, and almost all of them have some other source of income besides their salary for being a police office.

Many city cops were pissed during and after the Ferguson protests because the extra hours they were putting in doing their primary duties cut into the time available for their second jobs.

I don't know exactly what all this says about the state of law enforcement, but I'm pretty sure it's not good.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 9:27 PM on August 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

No police. In New Orleans. Mind boggling.

Nah. Louisiana in general and New Orleans more specifically have been deeply fucked-up and mis- and mal-managed places since, well, forever.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:27 PM on August 2, 2015

This is of a piece with the lifeguard scandal here in Atlanta. Everybody wants world class communities, but most of them aren't willing to pay the world-class taxes it takes to have them. So instead we lower taxes and try to "privatize" everything. Which only results in essential things being done half-assed by the lowest bidder. That's what trying to "run government like a business" gets you.

God Bless America.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:12 PM on August 2, 2015 [14 favorites]

I saw few, if any, realistic alternative proposed in the preceding comments. Put more police in the French Quarter ( and move them out of other areas ), raise taxes and have the city/government do it ( maybe a good idea, and I bet even the residents of the FQ might support it, but how about all the marginal income/poor residents of rest of New Orleans-besides you have to pass the tax). Just wait until ???? ( as if there have not been enough problems already ). I personally do not think public safety/health services should be privatized but I do like that something is being done--it is a pilot and one that, from my perspective, should be supported through a reasonable evaluation period. I would hope there would be some comments regarding realistic/pragmatic alternatives that would address the crime issues in the FQ--a major source of revenue for the entire community. One can carp/complain and raise valid issues about income inequality, the privileged, the unfairness of it--but the fact is people are currently living in NO, the FQ is a revenue generator for many people, the residents of the FQ are probably not the .01% or 1%. Demographics suggest they are predominantly white males (2:1), childless, ages 18-64 with most of the income from wages. self employment, interest/rental income, social security and retirement.
posted by rmhsinc at 2:56 AM on August 3, 2015

I don't think you have to provide an alternate solution to think a bad solution is shitty. If that was the case, we would be entirely ruled by shitty solutions just because of lie-goes-round-the-world-before-truth-gets-its-pants-on sort of realities when it comes to shitty ideas versus good ones, at least until someone actually had time to plan out a better one.

The question we should be asking is "will this potentially create a worse situation for varying reasons than doing nothing". I don't think it's so easy to say yes to that one.

If you're going to essentially co-opt public employees, who nebulously have their broad and far reaching powers and protections who were trained with public money and likely using at least some publicly funded equipment to protect your little burbclave... then you should be forced to either dump money into the entire department to make it more responsive everywhere, or just not get to play the game at all.

This is also happening here, minus the ipads and ATV-golfcarts. I've had some time to think about this.

The solution should be something to the effect of a law that cops can only work off duty out of uniform, and are not allowed to have any powers outside of an armed security guard. They don't just get to decide "hey, i'm basically an on duty cop now!" if a situation gets shitty or someone pisses them off.

I also think it's extremely fucked up that they're driving this rich guys golf carts around with police department logos on them.

If someone runs in to that car does it count as hitting a cop car? If someone shoots one of these cops that's assaulting them or shot their friend does it count as assaulting/killing an office as if they were on duty?

A lot of important stuff like this needs to be clearly defined. At a national level even. Because as it is, it seems like they're essentially getting for hire cops who don't have to follow a lot of the normal rules but get to count as cops whenever it's convenient for the people who can afford to pay them 20k/mo each.

It's not conspiracy theory bullshit to see how you get from this to here.

This is also especially problematic for it's own reasons when you consider that this isn't anything new for NOLA, and that there's kind of an undeniably racist(and classist) element to it as there was then.
posted by emptythought at 3:42 AM on August 3, 2015 [6 favorites]

emptythought--so the solution is to pass a law which will not pass, and would likely be found unenforceable/illegal, and complain about racism, elitism etc and deny the other citizens of NO Parish the benefit of having more police in other parts of the city. In reading the article I did not see any evidence that this is "bad solution" except saying it is a bad solution. Crime is down, the community feels safer, police are making more money and the restraints of civil and criminal liability are still in place. As I said--I do not see this as a preferred solution but I might if I lived there.
posted by rmhsinc at 5:01 AM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'd also claim it's our only major cultural city, whatever that's worth.

Yeah, but it's been clear for a century that America isn't going for a cultural victory, nor are we headed to Alpha Centauri. Bismarck can expect our tanks on his doorstep as soon as the GOP hegemony manages to get us lined up for a straight conquest win.
posted by Mayor West at 6:43 AM on August 3, 2015 [7 favorites]

It's a little from column A, a little from column B.

Is it a further extension of some already shifty practices? Yes.
Is it a terrible idea that will end in scandal or worse, encourage more of the same? Yes.
Is it desperately needed? Yes.

But those who think New Orleans won't vote for tax increases are incorrect. We know that we need more officers, comments on that article aside. It will take a long time to start seeing those funds put to use, however. The cap has been raised, but now we must vote on the taxes. This task force is one step in a plan put forth by city government.
posted by domo at 7:06 AM on August 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

My favorite part of this ticking time bomb is how what spurred him into action was him also getting robbed. I guess the proles could be okay living in a combat zone, but when it hit him personally, suddenly it was an outrageous situation that needed immediate addressing.

Which is the usual attitude of the Libertarian Conservative, I suppose.
posted by Legomancer at 11:48 AM on August 3, 2015 [2 favorites]