The federal judge overseeing the New Orleans Police Department’s decade-long consent decree is poised to make a pivotal decision — whether to begin to wind down the reform agreement that has touched nearly every aspect of policing in the city.
U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan will announce on Tuesday her decision on whether to grant a motion by the city and the Department of Justice to enter a two-year “sustainment” period, the judge said at the end of a hearing Monday (Jan. 13). Under sustainment, the NOPD will have to prove that it can maintain the reforms mandated by the consent decree, with less federal assistance.
NOPD top brass and officials with the Department of Justice spent several hours outlining the department’s progress on Monday, assuring Morgan that the NOPD has a plan in place for continued constitutional policing in key areas, such as policing free of racial and gender bias and community engagement.
NOPD Deputy Superintendent Nicholas Gernon said the department has hired eight new sex crimes detectives in recent weeks and also plans to work with a Harvard professor to run tests for bias in policing practices in real time.
Stephen Mosgrove, with the city’s neighborhood engagement office, said he has been hired to focus specifically on police community advisory boards, or PCABs. Mosgrove pointed to his new role as one example of how the city is taking PCABs more seriously. Mosgrove said the city’s plan to invigorate the PCABs — a consent decree requirement that NOPD has consistently struggled with — will also involve better informing civilian PCAB members about their roles on the boards and using more social media for community engagement.
The NOPD has been under federal oversight since 2013, following a United States Department of Justice investigation that found the department engaging in unlawful and racially biased policing. The oversight entails a sweeping revision of the NOPD, requiring it to overhaul its policies and practices in areas including bias-free policing, uses of force and stops-and-searches.
In September, the city and DOJ asked Morgan to enter into a two-year sustainment period, during which the NOPD has to prove that it can sustain the reforms it has made under the consent decree with less federal monitoring.
The city and DOJ claim that the department is generally in compliance, pointing to findings by a team of court-appointed monitors that the city has reached sufficient compliance in a number of crucial areas, such as investigating officer misconduct and how officers use force. At a court hearing last month, supporters of transitioning to the sustainment period also argued that NOPD has created a new culture of policing.
On Monday, Morgan said she wanted to keep the hearing focused on the matter at hand — a potential sustainment period. But that didn’t stop the city, or the DOJ, from discussing a last-minute filing Friday (Jan. 10) from Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration that urged Morgan to again consider ending the consent decree altogether — without a sustainment period.
Cantrell first formally requested an end to the consent decree in 2022, claiming the oversight agreement was affecting officer morale at a time of declining police ranks. But Cantrell’s combative stance against the decree, which put the city at odds with federal monitors and the judge, appeared to have softened after NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick took helm of the agency in 2023.
Last week’s surprise filing asks the court to rule on ending the decree before deciding on the sustainment motion, citing recent comments from Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill, who have both argued that Morgan should terminate the agreement altogether.
On Monday, members of the New Orleans City Council protested the way the city handled the termination motion. Council members noted that they had not approved an effort to enroll a lawyer from the attorney general’s office to represent the city in the consent decree litigation. The request to enroll the attorney came Friday with the city’s motion to terminate. In a letter to Morgan, Council President JP Morrell said such a move was a violation of a provision of the city charter requiring the council to approve the city’s legal representation.
“It should go without saying that permitting the state to unilaterally appear and represent the City’s legal interests in pending litigation presents a host of practical, ethical, and policy concerns,” Morrell wrote.
At the hearing, Jonas Geissler, with the DOJ, said that the city didn’t notify the federal department of the last-minute request to terminate.
“We want to see a successful resolution in this case,” Geissler said. “This sustainment plan provides a glide path toward that resolution.”
Since September, the court, the federal monitors and NOPD have hosted several public meetings to receive feedback on the potential shift to a sustainment period.
Some members of the public remain skeptical of calls to transition into a sustainment period.
Groups such as New Orleans for Community Oversight of Police (NOCOP) and Eye on Surveillance have called for the consent decree to remain in place, pointing to racial disparities in NOPD’s use of force and arrests, along with a possible conflict of interest concerning deputy NOPD monitor David Douglass and a private company he founded that is affiliated with former NOPD officials. Beyond those issues, other critics have also raised issues with NOPD’s handling of sex crimes.
Morgan has the authority to move the NOPD into sustainment, during which the department would have to show that it can follow certain benchmarks to police itself, and could eventually terminate the consent decree altogether. But even if Morgan approves the move into sustainment, she can extend the amount of time the department is in a sustainment period or even return to an increase in monitoring if the NOPD shows a decline in progress.
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