New Orleans Citizen Crime Watch

Topics covered in this Citizen Crime Watch letter:

1. The case of the disappearing crime statistics.
2. City take-home car audit reinforces the argument for electronic records transparency.
3. Join the “Strike Against Crime” on January 9th.
4. What can you do to help Citizen Crime Watch?

Now you see it, now you don’t

Is someone in the Nagin administration trying to hide the city’s crime problem? Could it be Ray Nagin himself? Or Warren Riley, perhaps?

After Citizen Crime Watch asked Mayor Nagin and NOPD Superintendent Warren Riley to explain the under-reporting problem on the city’s crime-mapping Web site, the records suddenly disappeared entirely. Was it intentional? How else could anyone explain why records were removed from the city’s crime-mapping Web site. With no response whatsoever from Mayor Nagin or Chief Riley, what else could we possibly conclude?

Of course, it will now be impossible for Citizen Crime Watch, or any other independent entity, to verify the crime statistics reported by the New Orleans Police Department.

But hey, who cares? Uh — unless you’re a crime victim.

It’s immature to think that we can deal with our crime problem by sweeping it under the rug and ignoring it. We have to confront it head on.

How much gasoline can you fit into an 18-gallon tank?

Well, that depends. If it’s a city-owned vehicle, you might be able to squeeze 91.2 gallons into the tank.

That’s just one detail found in Inspector General Robert Cerasoli’s report on city-owned take-home vehicles. Of the initial 273 cars audited in the IG report, 27 percent of them were issued to personnel in the mayor’s office. The IG also reported that the city could save over a million dollars next year if it eliminated the take-home car policy. But the potential savings could grow much larger, after a wider audit of take-home cars in other departments is completed. Furthermore, taxpayers of New Orleans should consider not just the one-time savings, but the long-term savings that would accrue over many years.

We are all indebted to Mr. Cerasoli for his commitment to helping us create more efficient and ethical government services. Let’s go a step further, however, from a formal auditing procedure. While it’s right to honor the research and experience that were required to complete the take-home car report, the issue underscores once again the need for the city to adopt an open records policy.

Consider, for example, the possibility that the records of all take-home vehicles were available online. Imagine the kind of accountability that citizens themselves could exercise if anyone were able to go to the city’s Web site to inspect the fuel usage of any assigned vehicle – using live records.

That’s the idea behind “NolaStat” – an innovative policy recommendation which will be presented next month to members of the New Orleans City Council. NolaStat replicates the successes achieved by the Washington, D.C. CapStat program, which publishes virtually all of that city’s live operational records online, and uses those records in weekly administrative meetings to ensure quality city services.

NolaStat will get a hearing before the City Council’s Government Affairs Committee on January 15th, thanks to Council Member Shelley Midura, who chairs the committee. Shelley and her council aide, David Gavlinksi, have kept their focus on the NolaStat idea while also dealing with the budget, trash contracts, crime cameras, and a host of other issues. Shelley’s attention to fostering more efficient government service should not go unnoticed.

Mark January 15th on your calendars. It would be helpful for citizens to show their support. There will be another reminder sent out with the date and time of the presentation.

Strike Against Crime

We’re all fed up with the failure of public officials to focus on public safety concerns since the march on City Hall almost two full years ago brought 5000 people into the streets.

Most recently, Mayor Nagin refused to negotiate with the City Council a way to properly fund the District Attorney’s office, public defenders, and youth recreation activities. Silence is Violence is calling for a “Strike Against Crime” on January 9th, to re-focus the attention of public officials who didn’t get the message the first time.

There’s more information on the Silence is Violence Web site (http://silenceisviolence.org/article/129).

Would you like to help Citizen Crime Watch create a safer community?

The mission of Citizen Crime Watch is to provide information to the community about emerging crime patterns. Two years and countless hours bent over a laptop have now passed since the Web site was created.

Let’s make 2009 the year that Citizen Crime Watch reaches its full potential. Here are some critical goals for the year:

• Complaints. Provide the ability for citizens to report crimes, criminal activity, and neighborhood nuisances. When complaints show up on a map, they’re much more visible, and public officials are more likely to respond. In keeping with that vision, when citizens enter complaints, those concerns will be forwarded to the respective public officials.
• Alerts. Provide text message and email alerts about emerging crime patterns. When you log onto Citizen Crime Watch, you will have the ability to set up a profile, and indicate which kinds of crimes you’re concerned about, and how often you want to be notified. When the thresholds are met, you will be notified. Information is power – the power to respond to possible public safety threats keeps you and your loved ones safe.
• Reports. Provide reporting capabilities. You may want to have a report you can distribute to members of the community who lack internet access. You may want to have more information at your disposal before you ask your NOPD district commander how crime hot spots in your neighborhood are being targeted. Alternatively, you may want to demonstrate to a developer where the best places are to invest in your neighborhood. Reporting capabilities will support these, and many more uses.

A personal goal I have for Citizen Crime Watch is to inspire and help youth by providing computer educational activities. You may have other goals. Let your ideas be heard by becoming a board member. Or recommend someone to sit on a board. Ask the crime committee chair of your neighborhood association if he or she is involved. It’s time to build up the capacity of Citizen Crime Watch so that its full potential can be realized. Here are some needs. What can you do?

• Data entry. Yes, this is consuming an increasing amount of my personal time — anywhere from one to five hours a day. The problem would be remedied if the city and the NOPD were more cooperative in sharing crime records in a standardized format, and at regular intervals. Until that happens, it’s time again to ask for help, so that I can dedicate more time to capacity-building endeavors. Ideally, it would be good to have at least one person from each of the eight police districts helping with data entry.
• Legal assistance. What do you know about creating a 501(c)(3)? Articles of incorporation? These are essential issues which must be resolved before significant fundraising efforts can begin.
• Fundraising. Citizen Crime Watch is a non-profit organization, but someone is going to have to be paid to do the programming work – ideally, more than one person. The better the Web site, the more complicated the programming. There should at least be two programmers and a designer working on the enhancement project. Do you know any possible funders? Or do you have any brilliant ideas about how to support this project?

If you would like to volunteer or contribute to Citizen Crime Watch, send an email today to: citizencrimewatch@gmail.com.

I sincerely wish all of you a safe and happy holiday season, with best wishes for a blessed New Year.

Cordially,

Brian Denzer
Founder/Executive Director
Citizen Crime Watch
http://citizencrimewatch.org
5721 Magazine Street #205
New Orleans, LA 70115
citizencrimewatch@gmail.com

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A comment on David Winkler-Schmit’s post on BlogofNewOrleans about Ray Nagin’s budget cuts:

Cutting needed money out of criminal justice programs and, simultaneously, education, sounds like a recipe to keep New Orleans #1 in crime.

How about cutting some fat out of contractor budgets?

AP:

The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday released figures showing that the United States has more people in prison than any other country in the world. And Louisiana has more than any other state.

As of Dec. 31, 2007, nearly 2.3 million people were in U.S. prisons and according to state correction officials, Louisiana has 37,969 adults behind bars. That number does not include juveniles or those doing municipal time.

Tour guide says N.O. cop hit him
Local man arrested in Quarter altercation
The Times-Picayune
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
By Laura Maggi

Two nights before Thanksgiving, popular New Orleans tour guide Randy Bibb had stopped his bicycle in the French Quarter to give a tourist directions to a hotel when the blaring of a truck’s horn startled him.

A pickup truck with a horse trailer hitched to the back had turned onto Dauphine Street and apparently was obstructed by the two men talking near the curb. And the driver, whom Bibb initially did not realize was a New Orleans police officer in an NOPD truck, didn’t take kindly to Bibb’s blunt request that he “go around,” the tour guide said.

Indeed, moments later Bibb, 50, found himself in police custody, eventually booked with public drunkenness and obstruction of a public place, after the officer, Willie Gant, punched him twice in the jaw in a profanity-laced tirade, Bibb has alleged.

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NOPD officer accused of beating Metairie man
11:00 PM CST on Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Bigad Shaban / Eyewitness News

A 25-year veteran of the NOPD is accused of beating a Metairie man in the man’s front yard Tuesday afternoon around 3 p.m.

Steven Fayia, a 19-year-old resident of Metairie said he was about to take out his neighbor’s trash on Tuesday when an armed New Orleans police officer pulled up to his front yard in uniform and started beating him.

“For like a good two to three minutes he’s just hitting me on the head,” said Fayia. “That’s when he busted my teeth, my jaw swollen, I got a bruise here, kept hitting my on the side.”

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Or was it intentionally sabotaged?

It’s little wonder why the city might want to remove the ability to download records from the city’s Web site. Withdrawing public access to records is the modus operandi of the Nagin administration when subjected to scrutiny.

So, rather than respond to my concerns that the NOPD was under-reporting crime on the city’s Web site (by as much as 50 percent for assaults), the NOPD decided instead to remove the ability to download, or even view records.

Of course, one way to make crime go away is to stop reporting it. The former Soviet Union could do wonders to make its problems disappear by only reporting positive news. Note that the Soviet system collapsed.

Where there were once records displayed below the city’s crime map, there’s now a big blank space. Likewise, the Excel spreadsheet download in the lower right-hand corner produces an empty spreadsheet.

I have asserted repeatedly that reporting crime information in a timely manner is an essential function of the New Orleans Police Department, and the Mayor’s office. Fostering the creation of an informed citizenry should be the first task of public officials in fulfilling their responsibility to the safety of the community.

The NOPD and the city have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of competence in their ability to maintain well-functioning information reporting services.

The only solution is for the city to start giving its records to the community, so that we can build our own information services to better serve our needs. Doing so will actually save the city millions of dollars in contracts to politically-connected perennial contractors.

In fact, Washington, D.C. has already banked on a strategy to crowd-source the development of useful Web sites as a matter of policy. The “Apps for Democracy” contest produced dozens of examples of useful Web services using freely-available government records published online. For the mere opportunity to showcase their talent, and a chance to win a modest $2,000 award, 47 Web sites were created by programmers for Washington, D.C., worth over $2 million in combined value. The city invested just $20,000, but any one of those applications might have cost the city a million dollars in a contract to an expensive vendor

Ray Nagin has promised greater government transparency from day one. Instead, we’ve gotten nothing but obfuscation and deception.

It’s time for Ray Nagin to prove that his word is good.

Jarvis DeBerry:

What do you do if a loved one is killed in New Orleans? Can you fool yourself into thinking that cops, prosecutors, judges and jurors will do the right thing and make sure the killer pays for the crime?

If your informed opinion of the local criminal justice system tells you that justice is unlikely, what exactly do you do?

Jarvis DeBerry:

“Don’t get me wrong: He was a drug dealer,” one of the murdered man’s relatives told a reporter, but he was moving heroin out of necessity, she said. He needed to provide for his family and couldn’t get a job with his record.

State Police to investigate missing evidence cash
by Laura Maggi, The Times-Picayune
Monday December 08, 2008, 6:20 PM

The Louisiana State Police will investigate what happened to more than $9,000 that was checked out of the New Orleans Police Department’s evidence room by a district attorney investigator last fall and now appears to be missing, Orleans Parish DA Leon Cannizzaro said Monday.

In a written statement released by Cannizzaro’s office, the district attorney, who was sworn-in last month, said he spoke with state police investigators on Monday, who agreed to conduct the investigation.

“Records indicate that an investigator employed with my office last checked out the evidence in September 2007; therefore, to preserve the integrity of the effort, my office has committed to working with the Louisiana State Police throughout the course of this investigation,” Cannizzaro said.

The missing $9,193 belongs to the mother of a man who pleaded guilty last fall to various drug possession charges in Criminal District Court. The cash was seized in a bust when officers in the spring of 2006 stopped Jesse Perez and another man, finding heroin and other drugs in the car.

John Fuller, an attorney representing Jesse Perez, first tried to get the money back last summer. But he soon found out that neither the NOPD’s Central Evidence and Property room nor the evidence room run by the clerk of Criminal District Court could account for the money.

Bob Young, a spokesman for the NOPD, said that all of the evidence in the case — the cash and a small amount of drugs — was checked on on September 21, 2007, the same day that Perez was supposed to go to trial. He ended up pleading guilty.

Former N.O. cop indicted on 2 rape charges
One accusation is made by 13-year-old girl, one by woman
The Times-Picayune
Saturday, December 06, 2008
By Gwen Filosa

A former New Orleans police officer has been indicted on charges of raping a 13-year-old girl this year and a woman in 2003.

Christopher Buckley, 36, is charged with raping the woman once in 2003 and the girl twice this year. He has been in Orleans Parish Prison since police booked him Oct. 21 in connection with the girl’s complaints.

Buckley remains in jail on $1.2 million bond, raised from $332,000 in light of the fresh indictment.

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