Citizen Crime Watch Blog

Well, it’s been a quiet week in…

…you know how the rest of it goes. But it has been a quiet week, crimewise, in the French Quarter and Marigny Triangle, particularly compared to the chaos of last week when all hell broke loose. There have been a couple of car thefts and a couple of car break-ins, but no major attacks on residents of our neighborhoods.

LeRichelieu suspect apprehended: The big news, however, is that the NOPD did arrest a suspect in the robbery 4.18.07 at LeRichelieu Hotel. Tyrone J. Barnes was arrested Tuesday evening, 4.24.07, and booked for simple robbery and second-degree battery.

According to the NOPD report, a California man and his wife were standing on the front porch of the hotel at about 6 a.m. waiting for a cab to take them to the airport. The perpetrator approached the man from behind and applied a neck hold with one arm. He stuck his other hand in the victim’s pocket. The victim resisted and their struggle carried them through the front entrance of the hotel into the lobby where they fell to the floor. The victim and his wife were yelling for help as the perpetrator was attempting to pull free. The victim, however, was holding the perpetrator’s hand in his pocket to prevent him from taking his money. In an attempt to break free, the perpetrator began to bite the victim. A hotel employee pulled the perpetrator off of the victim. As he was pulled away, the perpetrator held on to approximately $250 from the victim’s pocket. He
retained possession of the money and fled. The victim sustained severe bite wounds to his back and both arms. But in fleeing, the perpetrator dropped his own wallet containing his driver’s license.

Based on the information in the wallet and a positive identification of the suspect from a photograph, the 8th District NOPD issued a warrant for the arrest of Barnes, a 40-year-old black man, 5′10″, 150 pounds, whose last known address is 4212 Van Ave. in New Orleans. He had previous arrests for armed robbery, possession of a firearm by a felon, theft, and possession of stolen property. He’s being held at Central Lockup on $35,000 bond. His show-cause hearing is scheduled in court on 6.25.07.

Other robbery not related: Some suspicion that an earlier robbery near the Maison Dupuy hotel at Burgundy and Toulouse on 4.15.07 at 5:15 a.m. proved untrue, though both perpetrators were originally described as black males having braided hair, about the same age, height and weight.

The victim in this case was a friend of the daughter of Betty & Bill Norris visiting from out of town–yes, those Norrises, who themselves have TWICE been victims of robberies this year in the Quarter. He was walking on Burgundy toward Canal when the perpetrator came up along side of him and struck him, knocking him to the ground and then took his wallet. The wallet contained the victim’s ID, about $150 in cash, and credit/debit cards.

An 8th District detective is reviewing the hotel’s security tapes and is checking into a business where the debit card was used after the robbery.

The perpetrator is described as a black male, about 40 years old, 5′10″, 150 pounds, hair in braids, clean-shaven and dark skin, who was wearing a dark hooded sweat shirt and dark pants.

(If there’s any good news in this, Betty says it is this: “One really nice thing that happened is the taxi cab that saw (the victim) walking back to his car…asked (the victim) if he needed a ride. (The victim) said he didn’t have any money because he just got robbed. The taxi driver told him to get in anyway. (The victim) was so upset he couldn’t remember the cross street on Burgundy where he had parked his car. The taxi drove him around until they found it. (The victim)’s going to get me his name and phone number so we can send this good citizen some business.”)

Speaking of good citizens: The suspect chased down by a good citizen after Bill Norris was robbed in his driveway on 3.31.07 has been charged in a number of other robberies. There are now 24–count ‘em 24–charges against Gary Lindsey for everything from armed robbery and pursesnatching to aggravated assault. He’s got so many bonds slapped on him that he’s not likely to leave jail before his first court hearing 6.1.07. If he’s convicted, that’s a lot of crimes solved with one act of courage by a citizen.

Crime on your block?: We’re always interested in getting reports from residents of the Quarter and Triangle who have information about a crime in their neighborhoods. While we’re working out the bugs of getting crime reports routinely and regularly from the 8th District, it helps if we have advance knowledge of incidents that we can ask the officers there about.

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Please forward this message to anyone interested in the safety of the French Quarter and Marigny Triangle. To be added to our mailing list, send your name and email address to: NOcrimeline@gmail.com.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Thom Kahler

Officers Raid Constance Street Residence

On the morning of April 25, 2007, your 2nd District Task Force Officers arrested a 16 year old black male juvenile at his residence in the 5200 block of Constance Street . He was charged with PWITD (Possession with Intent to Distribute) crack cocaine and possession of a handgun. About a quarter ounce of crack cocaine and a firearm were seized. This particular suspect was well known in the area, especially to the officers working in the 2nd District.

This arrest was the result of an investigation, which was launched after receiving complaints from residents in the neighborhood. Please remain vigilant in assisting us with information about hot spots in the district. Remember to report any suspicious persons or activities you see in your neighborhood by calling 821-2222. In an emergency, call 911 immediately.

Captain Kirk Bouyelas
Commander
Second Police District

Purse Snatching Suspect Sought

This morning between 6:30am and 7:00am, there were two (2) purse snatching offenses which occurred in the Second District. The first offense occurred on Oak Street and Fern Street . The second offense occurred in the 700 block of Soniat Street . In both offenses, the suspect targeted Hispanic female victims who were walking in the area. He approached them from behind, grabbed their purse and fled in a tan colored vehicle.

The suspect is a black male in his mid 20’s. He is described as tall and thin. He was wearing a grey t-shirt and a black cap. The suspect is driving a small 4-door car which has been described as being tan in color. The vehicle is believed to have tinted windows. No further information is available.

If you have any information on this case, please contact Sgt. Chris Cambiotti or Det. Chris Kalka at 658-6022 or 658-6020. You may also call Crimestoppers anonymously at 822-1111.

Report any suspicious persons or activities you see in your neighborhood by calling 821-2222. In an emergency, call 911 immediately.

Captain Kirk Bouyelas
Commander
Second Police District

Below are Tom Jacobsen’s notes from the 2nd District NONPACC meeting held on 4/17/07 (HT: Julie Graybill and Bob Smith). The handout can be downloaded here (nonpacc_2nd_20070417.pdf).

This evening’s meeting was presided over by Captain Bouyelas. Officers Staehle and Eddington were also in attendance.

The captain opened the meeting by talking about the district’s revived “officer of the month” program. The program is being subsidized by COPS II, which was represented at the meeting by its president. The latter gave a brief history of the organization, which was started about 1990, and its objectives. We should all become members of this group, in my humble opinion. They do good work for the officers of the Second District.

Captain Bouyelas then announced the recipients of the first officers of the month for this year: Officer Elif Oliver (January) and Sgt. Wade Bowser (February). Both officers expressed their appreciation for the honors.

The captain then went on to discuss some statistics for the month of March. About 5,900 service calls were answered (most in the city) and 1,300 reports were filed (second most). The sum total of crimes in our immediate neighborhood (Zone C) in March was two residence burglaries and four thefts. As always, be ever vigilant and report all suspicious activity to the police.

The current force in the Second District is 104 officers (more than any other district) plus 9 new recruits (who will become permanent members of the force after their 4 months of training). Yet the total number of officers in the district is still below pre-Katrina levels.

The captain discussed a series of serious robberies in the district and successes in apprehending the culprits. None of these incidents took place in our neighborhood, however.

Bob Smith raised a question about the recent drug-related shooting on Austerlitz St. and the drug activity in that area. Bouyelas indicated that he has enlisted the help of the FBI in dealing with this “hot spot,” as he called it, and they are addressing the problem together. An analogous situation in the 3800 block of Constance St. is also being addressed.

The question of security cameras in our neighborhood was raised once again. Bouyelas said that, while he frankly does not consider them “a be-all and end-all” in crime fighting, he continues to work towards getting them installed and working.

Several people in the large crowd again talked about the ineffective responses that they have gotten when they called 911. Bouyelas acknowledged the problem and said that we should continue to call that number first. If there is not a satisfactory response, we should then try 822-1111 (Crime Stoppers). And if that fails to bring the desired response to call the District Two station at 658-6020. And remember, the captain’s email address is: KMBouyelas@cityofno.com.

Among others from our neighborhood in attendance at this evening’s meeting were Bob and Julie Smith. They may be able to amplify and/or clarify the above remarks.

Cordially,
Tom Jacobsen

Capt. Bouyelas later responded:

Just one correction. In emergencies call 911. In non-emergencies call 821-2222. While you can certainly call Crimestoppers with information on crimes in your area, you must call either 911 or 821-2222 for the police to respond. Thanks

Next 2nd District NONPACC meeting: Tuesday, May 15, 7:00. One of the 2nd Floor meeting rooms at Touro.

Mark Greenblatt, “A Numbers Game,” Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Journal, March/April 2007 (reprinted in The Gambit Weekly).

We began by requesting the most detailed incident-level data available in Houston for every crime committed in the city throughout the last three years. Each crime record we received contained information on the offense date, an incident number, offense code, police beat, census tract, city, county, time of offense, day of week, premise code and the address of the crime. We received the information on nearly 450,000 crimes in a plain-text file, which we imported into Microsoft Access.

To search for trends, we honed in on the offense code assigned to each incident. The offense code is a numerical description of a specific kind of recorded crime. We had to use the police department’s data dictionary to decipher what each code really referred to because the records track several hundred different kinds of crime.

My first question is, why can’t citizens and research institutions in New Orleans have access to this kind of data to perform analysis, and to be alerted in a timely manner to emerging public safety concerns?

We’re working on jumping through the hoops, but the progress has been slow in approving a data-sharing agreement. Caution on the part of public officials may be warranted, but those public officials who are reluctant to cooperate with citizens in furnishing more information about crime need to realize that post-Katrina New Orleans is a different place, and there are different attitudes. Citizens are more impatient than ever with bureaucratic delays in rebuilding their neighborhoods into safer, more liveable communities.

The analysis Greenblatt performed may not be rocket science, but it does require some professional education or experience. For this sort of work to be done on a regular basis, not just for a journal article, but for internal law enforcement purposes, to stay on top of shifting or emerging crime patterns, requires a dedicated vision, and full-time paid professionals.

The technology and science of crime mapping and analysis has matured in the last several years, but the New Orleans hasn’t kept up with those changes. There are two primary issues which continue to hinder the New Orleans Police Department in performing rich analysis of the data it collects every day.

1) The City of New Orleans has no vision for recruiting and retaining skilled technology professionals.

The Civil Service job descriptions and pay scales (the last time I checked) are 30 years old for skilled computer programmers, and non-existent for Geographic Information Systems developers.

I would recommend that the city focus on creating a program to modernize the way it recruits, retains, and provides opportunities for ongoing training of, technology professionals. The city should stop contracting out services to private vendors who do shoddy work at a high price, but instead, provide a career path for a core team of professionals which rewards them for innovation and valuable services provided to the city. An important component of such a program would be a review system tied to bonuses and promotions. Equally important, there should be compensated opportunities for further education in classrooms and conferences.

Technology changes every six months. Government needs to acknowledge and adjust to that reality. Moreover, for the purpose of enhancing the capacity of the NOPD to perform data analysis and supply rank-and-file officers with technology services support, the city should recruit and retain technology professionals with skills and experience specific to law enforcement. There’s a lot to learn about the particulars of how law enforcement data systems work (or should work). Technology professionals are force multipliers who can increase the effectiveness of every boot on the ground in a department rapidly diminishing in numbers.

2) The city has an antiquated records management system, and has yet to migrate the NOPD off of a paper police report system.

The ability to write reports directly to a records management system will reduce the delay in getting crucial information into a database for analysis from days or weeks, to just hours.

The city did hire out a contractor to write an electronic police report application to be used on NOPD laptops, but it isn’t now being used. What might be (generously) described as inappropriate planning for reality, the contractor developed the application to be used on a broadband wireless network — which didn’t exist.

There are other solutions which could have been envisioned, like transferring data from laptop to database using a USB thumb drive. The Chief Technology Officer, Anthony Jones, says that the city has purchased 400 new laptops which are being outfitted with Sprint broadband wireless cards to upload electronic police report data. It’s a bold vision, but the strategy merits scrutiny.

The average cost of a wireless contract, taking into consideration a bulk discount, would be about $50 a month per card. That’s $20,000 a month, or $240,000 a year. Projecting that cost over ten years, the cost will be $2,400,000. And that’s just the first 400 laptops. Scrutinizing the investment doesn’t mean that the strategy isn’t justified by the need, or that the city can’t afford it, but there are questions which should be asked. Were there were other options available? How are these decisions made? Would investments in improving the EarthLink network produce a satisfactory solution? Could the city build on the street camera wireless network for the same price to develop hotspots where reports could be uploaded? Would other common destinations for patrol units make logical sense to build wireless hotspots, at the Orleans Parish Prison, for example, or NOPD District stations? Would a simpler, less-costly solution be just as effective, such as using USB thumb drives.

Moreover, is there a strategy being developed to get those police report records out of the city’s antiquated AS/400 mainframe, with query interfaces and reporting capabilities that commanders and detectives can use in a meaningful way to perform custom analyses? The present method of getting data out of the mainframe is to write a request, and then to wait weeks or months for an old IBM greensheet printout (one wonders if there are still suppliers of that old paper stock). Try doing an analysis for patterns using a cumbersome paper printout sometime to see how impaired the NOPD is. This has got to change.

There are other areas where improvements need to be made. The NOPD data systems need to be integrated into one seamless whole with the Clerk of Court data systems, and Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff data systems, as well as other data systems of other law enforcement agencies in the metropolitan New Orleans area. Until these data system are more closely integrated, a complete picture of who the most violent repeat offenders are can’t be completed. There is quite a bit of talk between agencies to integrate, and citizens should feel optimistic that law enforcement agencies are moving in that direction, but there needs to be more public information provided about precisely what sort of planning and implementation is being considered.

In order to modernize it’s technological capabilities, the city needs to have decision makers on staff who understand technology, and who develop plans to take advantage of new technological opportunities. There’s always a cost-benefit analysis that should be performed, and budgetary constraints, but on balance, the technological investments based upon sound strategies and open planning processes will produce positive returns.

And once again — bringing this narrative around full circle — a vital component of a technological modernization strategy should be a public policy modernization strategy, to produce greater transparency, both in the decision-making process, and in furnishing records to citizens, to not only generate public confidence, but also, to create opportunities to foster innovation, ideas, research, and hopefully, solutions which will help in creating a better, safer city.

New Orleans needs a mission-to-the-moon strategy to modernize the way government functions. It doesn’t have to be rocket science. It just requires common sense, an awareness of how public attitudes in New Orleans have changed, and an understanding of how the world is changing technologically.

This was a letter following up on a crime data-sharing meeting which took place last Thursday with the City Attorney. Mayor Nagin expressed interest in the idea a week earlier, and requested the meeting. I think everyone agrees so far, at least in principle, with the idea of getting more timely crime information to citizens so they can at least be aware of public safety threats. The fact that Citizen Crime Watch is comprised of volunteers, and isn’t asking for any money out of the city budget helps the cause. The questions which remain have to do with determining what entity would claim ownership of the data, and how accurate it might be. These questions are answered in the letter.

Kerrie Ramsdell made an important point about how, more than a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, vital public safety infrastructure still remains in once-flooded ruins, in this Times-Picayune letter to the editor:

City needs police stations back
Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Our 5th District New Orleans police officers are presently working out of trailers with limited resources and technology (as are the 3rd and 7th district officers and the crime lab). It is imperative that the bureaucracy that has limited the move back to a building needs to be held accountable.

Whatever the reasons for holding up the renovations, they are unacceptable to citizens who depend upon the police for our safety and well-being.

We understand that our officers are doing the best they can with the resources they have, but the reality is that we cannot fully address crime prevention if the police don’t have adequate shelter and resources.

If we are committed to decreasing crime in the city, the city leadership must make the renovations of the district command buildings a priority.

We value our 5th District officers too much to let this issue go on any longer. We expect a realistic plan and timeline for these police officers to get back into their building ASAP.

Kerrie Ramsdell
Chairwoman
Marigny Crime Prevention Committee
New Orleans

Meanwhile, where’s the money to rebuild those police facilities?

While I applaud the recovery blueprint proposed by Edward Blakely, I think it worth noting that the $315.9 million to be devoted to the 17 target zones is less than half the $756 million that ICF International is to be paid for (mis)managing the Road Home program — and only a little more than the $275 million the U.S. is spending every day on the Iraq war. Money, as they say, talks.

Jerry Speir
New Orleans

A community ambassador delivered the letter above to Ray Nagin last week. After reading the letter, the mayor expressed interest in the idea working to create greater transparency by sharing 911 calls for service records with citizens via a data-sharing agreement with Loyola University’s Criminal Justice Program. He had some practical questions about how to implement the data-sharing arrangement from a technical standpoint, the accuracy of the emergency dispatch records, and how to protect victim privacy. There may be an opportunity to answer some of those questions in the not-too-distant future. There are good answers for all of the mayor’s concerns, so I would say that citizens should feel encouraged by his justifiably reserved but positive response, as should they feel equally encouraged by Chief Riley’s initially positive reaction last week to the idea.

2nd District Captain Kirk Bouyelas issued the following information in an email blast:

Robbery Suspect Identified & Apprehended

Over the weekend, NOPD Officers were successful in apprehending the suspect responsible for a series of purse snatchings and robberies throughout the City (including the 2nd District). The suspect is identified as one Gary Lindsey BM, 39 yrs. old. He is currently incarcerated as NOPD Detectives continue to work the case to have him identified in other incidents.

In the last two weeks, the City (including the 2nd District) has been plagued by a series of robberies perpetrated by the following individual:

Unknown black male, 30-35 years, 5′ 7″ – 5’10” tall, 200 lbs., stocky build, very short or a bald hair cut. This suspect drives a late model black Mitsubishi Eclipse (or similar model). It has a temporary license plate in the back window and possible damage to the passenger side.

If you see this vehicle or subject, call “911″ and advise them that you see the subject wanted for several robberies in the City. Please make your neighbors aware and pass along this information.