After more than a decade of federal oversight, the New Orleans Police Department says it is ready to police itself.

Since 2013, the NOPD has been under a federal consent decree meant to bring it in line with constitutional standards. The consent decree followed a 2011 Department of Justice report that identified a pattern of misconduct and civil rights violations in areas including use of force’ stops, searches and arrests; and biased policing. Now, the NOPD and the DOJ are asking a judge to begin winding down the consent decree by placing the NOPD in a two-year “sustainment” period. During that timeframe, the NOPD aims to prove that it can maintain the reforms it has made with less federal monitoring.

Public opinion on policing in New Orleans remains mixed; critics of the sustainment plan argue the department has failed to build community trust, especially on issues such as racially biased policing. Watchdogs have also pointed to continued staffing problems in the department’s Special Victims Section, which handles sex crime, domestic violence and child abuse investigations.

Verite News spoke with NOPD Deputy Superintendent Nicholas Gernon, head of the department’s Professional Standards & Accountability Bureau and Deputy Superintendent Ryan Lubrano, head of the Investigation & Support Bureau, about the consent decree and the current status of the NOPD’s Special Victims Section, which handles sex-crime investigations. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Verite News: In the department’s consent decree, there’s a section called “policing free of gender bias,” which discusses reforms in NOPD’s handling of sexual assault and domestic violence reports. Can you talk about the progress the department has made on these reforms since 2013, and where the department is currently at with compliance on this section?

Gernon:  That section … is rated by both NOPD and the federal monitors as compliant. However, we’re always looking to do better, right? … The one part of it that we’re always working towards is the section that says NOPD agrees to ensure its policies and procedures … comply with applicable law and comport with best practices in current professional standards. Those are ever-changing because you would hope your best practices don’t get stagnant, right? The best practices of 1994 will not be the best practices of 2024. 

That’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to kind of keep in mind that the consent decree was a snapshot in time, right? It was remedies put in place to address deficiencies of the 2009-2013 police department. That police department doesn’t exist in this city anymore. And that police department, as long as people like me and Chief Lubrano are here, will never, ever, ever come back.

Verite:  Can you give some examples of specific changes or reforms that have been made over time in terms of sex crimes policing?

Lubrano: I think the public definitely has more faith in the department because of some of the things that Chief Gernon talked about with the consent decree. We definitely have more people that are willing to report those crimes. We take all those crimes serious. Any allegation we get, we do take it and we do look into it and investigate it. 

One of the things [a supervisor in the Special Victims Section] was able to put together was a [domestic violence] call-back unit. At some point, we were kind of worried that — based on manpower issues and response times, we didn’t want to miss those calls. So this unit actually has people assigned that look at all the calls that come through, and they call them back by the next morning to try and get those crimes reported. That was a pretty good enhancement to the domestic violence portion of it.  

Gernon: The last report that the federal monitors did in the summer of 2023, the special report on sexual assault — one of the things that they say is that to NOPD’s credit we’re not running away from their problems. This is what the system’s supposed to do, is we’ll identify issues and then we will implement corrective actions for it. 

We demonstrate over and over again that when we see or identify problems, we implement strategies to correct them, such as that domestic violence, sexual assault “gone on arrival” issues. There was a DV/sexual assault “gone on arrival” report in October of 2023. We’re working through the corrective action plans to try and implement those.

Verite:  Can you talk about how NOPD intends to maintain the reforms and progress it has made on sexual assault and domestic violence investigations during the proposed sustainment period? 

Gernon: During the sustainment period, we should be clear: None of the reforms that have been implemented go away. … We’re still under the jurisdiction of the federal court. Everything we still have to do today, we’re going to have to do during the sustainment period.

All of the audits, all the spot checks, all of the opportunities for transparency will exist as they do now. However they will be added by external forces such as the [New Orleans Independent Police Monitor], the Inspector General or other appropriate auditing agencies. 

We put a lot of information out there. We don’t do it just to file reports. We do it so that people can see what’s going on with that police department, but more importantly so that they can pick at the edges and test the validity of the data and test whether we’re getting it right or wrong.

And to her credit, I actually think Julie Ford is an excellent representation of how transparency and data can lead to a person looking at it and saying, “Oh, there’s a problem here.” And then us being responsive to that problem, right? So I’m talking about the data reporting areas that the police, that she found in our submissions to the FBI for sexual assault cases, and then she brings it to Chief Lubrano and I, we vet it, we look at it, and we’re like, “She’s absolutely right.”

This police department didn’t run from that, didn’t try and hide it, didn’t ignore it. We embraced it. 

The day that we stop progressing on this police department will be the day that we start backsliding it. That’s not going to happen. 

Verite: Speaking of Julie Ford’s work, one of the statistics that was brought up in her recent public comments with Mary Howell is the most recent clearance rate for rape cases that was reported to the FBI (6.75%). Can you talk about the factors that contribute to this number?

Lubrano: So far year-to-date we have 652 sex crimes investigations. That’s of December 14. When you look at the sex crimes number, 652, that includes other sex-related crimes such as video voyeurism, felony sexual batteries and others. It’s not just all second-degree and third-degree rapes. But as we talk about the clearance rate, I’ll give you a kind of idea – of those 652, 37 cases were cleared by arrest or exception, 101 cases were solved by obtaining an arrest warrant, and then several other cases that are still under investigation.

Since maybe 2019, we do have more cases reported, so that’s obviously going to affect the numbers somewhat. We’re unique — this kind of falls into the consent decree part that Chief Gernon was talking about — we’ll take any allegation. When I say that, I would compare to other organizations that might not take something if they didn’t have the full picture, the full story, all the evidence in hand. 

We take all allegations. That leads to that high number of 652. That goes over to child abuse as well. Child abuse actually has 812 cases year-to-date. The case load is extremely high. I want to say it’s about 94 cases per detective. It’s a lot. So there are several things that play into that lower clearance rate, but I definitely think the biggest factor is just the amount of cases that we take.

I spoke on this earlier, but I think the public has more trust in reporting those types of crimes to the police department today based on things that we’ve implemented over the last several years. 

When [advocates and researchers] bring us recommendations, the first one’s always manpower. You need more manpower, you need more manpower. 

So what we’ve done … we started civilianizing a lot of these investigative positions. We currently have 19 civilian investigators assigned … and two civilian investigative supervisors.

For commissioned police officers assigned to [Special Victims], we have six full-time detectives assigned to sex crimes. We have seven assigned to child abuse, and we have two assigned to cold case. Four handle double duties overnight — they would take either a call of a sex crime or a child abuse incident. And then we have one officer assigned to the human traffic human trafficking task force,  

With this caseload, damn, just think of how bad it would be without these 19 civilian investigators. … Those numbers with the civilian investigators has certainly helped us extremely. We also have 10 social workers and one social worker supervisor assigned to the Special Victims Division.

Gernon: About two years ago, we made a commitment to the community that, look, we’re not gonna hire enough police officers to dig out of this hole. And the judge and the council and the community really demanded, you better find something else. 

The something else was the civilianization of some of these roles that don’t need a full-fledged commissioned police officer to do. We’ve gone from committing to that to now having 19 civilian investigators and 2 supervisors on the ground. And we’re hiring, we still have 4 more that we’d like to hire? So, please, if somebody has the passion for this type of work, but they don’t necessarily want to become a police officer, we are hiring civilian police investigative specialists assigned to the Special Victims Division to assist our detectives and our victims and survivors in finding closure.

Verite: How many cold cases does the Special Victims Section currently have? What happens when a cold case gets a DNA hit?

Lubrano: That’s kind of hard to answer. Any case that’s not solved is basically a cold case. Say the detectives run out all leads, and then some new evidence comes — they would obviously have new leads to investigate.

Verite: It seems like there’s some concern about how cold cases affect detective workloads.

Lubrano: I have a cold case squad. … They would look at anything that had new additional leads…

But sometimes we have cases where a victim just doesn’t want to move forward, you know? Sometimes we have cases where somebody might have been a tourist or homeless and then you start having that problem of locating that person and getting them re-involved with the case. We also have cases that might be waiting on something — more information from the victim or something with evidence like the DNA.

Verite:  Can you talk about the plan in terms of handling and preventing test kit backlogs before the Crime Lab is up and running. What is the current timeline for the Crime Lab?

 Current timeline for our crime lab to test DNA is 2027. They’re building that now. 

When we talk about backlogs,  I think we’re in the 1,000 range right now, but like a large portion of that … it was over half — are sexual assault kits that a survivor had done, but didn’t take that next step and contact police for an investigation. … The backlog would really be what’s been submitted and [Louisiana State Police] hasn’t tested yet. … The last time I looked at it, the backlog was small.

Verite:  Attorney William Most recently submitted a public comment during the consent decree process regarding the NOPD’s handling of former officer Rodney Vicknair, who was convicted of sexually assaulting a teenager he first met while transporting her to the hospital for a different sexual assault she had reported. According to Most, NOPD says the department hasn’t done anything differently following the Vicknair incident. 

Most wants the department to implement a series of policy changes to help prevent another incident like that one. Can you respond to Most’s comment?

Gernon: A lot of the issues and deficiencies that led to Rodney Vicknair being hired and a lot of the recruitment practices of 2006 and ‘07 had already been reformed by 2020. 

Have we done anything since Vicknair? We’ve looked at a lot of things. The recruitment and the background investigation side — no, because the things that needed to be done were done.

Now, that’s [not to speak for ] what the department did when it was put on notice for Vicknair. But that wasn’t a recruiting and background issue, right? That was an upper-echelon-of-this-department issue — by being put on notice by the IPM. 

It’s all the things that came out in court. This is all under appeal, so I’m getting on really shaky grounds here, but let’s be honest here. It came out that the department had some awareness of this and did not take appropriate action, which led to one final rape of the victim prior to [Vicknair] being arrested.

Were there other things that came out of Vicknair that we need to learn from? You’re damn right there are, and we are learning from them. Of Mr. Most’s six [recommendations], if you want to know if we’re hearing it? One of his points, we put into the sustainment plan: that we would hold a serious discipline review board into the Vicknair matter to determine the failure of supervision of the police department and where we can prevent that from ever happening again. 

Verite:  Is there anything else you want to add in context of the consent decree?

 Gernon: We’re where we expect to be and we look forward to the court’s ruling so that we can then prepare for the next phase of this police department. 

The next phase for the New Orleans Police Department is going to be one where we’re able to demonstrate that these reforms are lasting, that these reforms are not contingent upon DOJ and federal court oversight.

I will promise you, we will have problems, there will be bumps in the road, there will be deficiencies, there will be something that will happen between now and the end of the time — but we believe that we’ve set up these systems in place to catch it and correct it before it creates a greater harm to our community. That’s my goal and that’s my commitment to the people of New Orleans. 

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Michelle Liu worked previously for The Associated Press in South Carolina and was an inaugural corps member with the Report for America initiative. She also covered statewide criminal justice issues for...