By Brendan McCarthy
Times-Picayune
NEW ORLEANS — Federal agents this week raided the office of the New Orleans Police Department homicide division, seizing the files and computer hard drives of two officers assigned to investigate police conduct in one deadly post-Katrina shooting episode, law enforcement sources told The Times-Picayune.
Representatives of the FBI and NOPD confirmed the seizure late Thursday.
FBI agents served a search warrant Wednesday afternoon for files in the offices of two supervisors, Sgt. Gerard Dugue and Sgt. Arthur Kaufman, the sources said.
The two sergeants were the lead investigators who examined the shooting of civilians by police on the Danziger Bridge days after Hurricane Katrina. Gunfire from police, who were responding to reports of shots fired at officers, left two men dead and four people wounded.
Dugue also had been assigned to investigate the shooting of a man, possibly by police, in Algiers in the days after Katrina hit. The man’s charred remains were later discovered in a burned car on the Algiers levee, behind the 4th District police station.
The Times-Picayune has reported that the Department of Justice convened a federal grand jury that is currently looking into both incidents.
Dugue and Kaufman weren’t actively involved in either shooting, but played follow-up investigative roles.
A statement from FBI Special Agent in Charge David Welker, released Thursday night, confimed that agents executed a search warrant at the NOPD.
Welker said the seizure was linked to an ongoing civil rights investigation related to the Danziger Bridge shootings. The warrant is under seal, he said.
Bob Young, the NOPD’s spokesman, released the following statement on behalf of Police Superintendent Warren Riley: “The NOPD is cooperating with the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI in their continuing investigation into the Danziger Bridge incident.”
Young also said that federal agents were joined by investigators from the NOPD’s Public Integrity Bureau in serving the warrant. He declined to comment further. NOPD officers are barred from speaking directly with the media.
Both of the sergeants whose offices were raided are veteran homicide detectives; Dugue is in charge of the cold case squad and Kaufman supervises a platoon of detectives. The homicide division investigates all shootings in which police are involved, fatal or not. In those cases, a supervisor, at least at the rank of sergeant, handles the investigation.
The Danziger Bridge shooting on Sept. 4, 2005, led to a state grand jury indictment of seven police officers on murder and attempted murder charges in late 2006. The charges were dismissed last fall by then-Judge Raymond Bigelow, who concluded that prosecutor errors during the grand jury process tainted the case.
The U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division took over the case after state charges were dismissed.
While the shooting victims have said they were unarmed and ambushed by police, the officers have maintained they fired their guns only after first taking fire.
Attorneys representing the police officers indicted with murder and attempted murder charges in the Danziger Bridge shooting repeatedly noted the homicide divison’s investigation cleared the officers. But the internal probe was criticized by others for relying almost solely on the testimony of the officers who were involved, with little backing from other witnesses or physical evidence.
For example, one key witness cited in the NOPD’s investigative report was a man later found to be impersonating a St. Landry Parish sheriff’s deputy. The man had supported police accounts of the incident. Although the investigation continued for months after the chaos associated with Katrina subsided, the fact the man was a fraud was never mentioned in the police report.
Also, information such as Social Security numbers that could be used to track down two civilians -- both quoted in the report as confirming the police officers’ version of events -- were not included in the police report. Their identities and addresses do not appear in electronic databases that collect credit information, voter registration and utility sign-ups.
The Algiers federal probe, undertaken initially by the FBI and now taken up by grand jurors, appears to focus on different groups of officers, one set allegedly involved in shooting a New Orleans man named Henry Glover, the other in the torching of the vehicle where his body was later discovered, sources close to that case have said.
Since at least May, a federal grand jury has been hearing testimony from police officers about both the shooting and how the body ended up burned in a car, sources have said.
The NOPD didn’t actively investigate Glover’s death for years after the storm, but opened an inquiry after an article implicating police in Glover’s death appeared in The Nation magazine in late 2008.
Copyright 2009 Times-Picayune