By John Simerman and Missy Wilkinson
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — A federal judge ended her 12-year oversight of the New Orleans Police Department on Wednesday, clearing the city and Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick to run the city’s police force free of court monitoring under a 492-blueprint for reform that officials say has helped transform a department once mired in scandal.
U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan issued her order shortly before 1 p.m. inside a packed auditorium at Loyola Law School, filled mostly with current and former police brass and city officials there to celebrate.
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Morgan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, granted a longstanding request by Mayor LaToya Cantrell, recently joined by a Trump administration Justice Department averse to consent decrees, to terminate the agreement before the department’s work on a 2-year “sustainment” plan was complete.
“Everyone in this room should be rightly proud about what NOPD accomplished here,” Morgan said.
It marks the end of an era for the city’s police force that spanned the bulk of the last two mayoral administrations and the work of five police chiefs, including former interim chief Michelle Woodfork, who was among four of them in attendance.
The cost was $20 million to the federal monitors alone over its 12 years, among other expenses associated with reaching myriad benchmarks under what was then the most expansive police consent decree in the U.S.
Several of the police officials and others involved in creating or implementing the consent decree in its early years were in attendance at Wednesday’s proceedings, along with Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams, Mayor-elect Helena Moreno and all of the City Council.
“We have been at this for more than a decade,” Morgan told them. “We all shared the same goal: turning the NOPD into a first-class, empathetic, procedurally just, constitutional law enforcement agency.”
Lead monitor Jonathan Aronie said the consent decree “allowed the good kids to take back the playground, and they have.”
Morgan praised the monitors who have reported to her and said she was confident in the community’s role going forward in holding the department accountable. She addressed the duration of the consent decree and defended its cost, pointing to sheer breadth of reforms and noting the reams of audits and “years of concentrated effort.”
“It did not take too long. It took the amount of time necessary for the NOPD to make the changes called for and to make them durable, able to stand the test of time,” Morgan said. “A premature rush through the process just to be done would have been a tragedy.”
She cited the cost of the monitors at $20 million and said she’d repeatedly asked the city for evidence of exorbitant costs to implement the agreement but never received it. She said that money likely saved the city many millions on police misconduct payouts.
“If you think the cost of constitutional policing is high, try the cost of unconstitutional policing,” Morgan said.
Jonas Geissler, a DOJ attorney, told the audience Wednesday that it wasn’t politics that is now ending the agreement, but the department’s progress.
“The case is complete because the remedies are durable and have been met,” he said. “But for some local political impediments, this work may have been completed a number of years ago under a prior administration.”
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