The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  The first serious effort to reform New Orleans’s police department was headed by Police Superintendent Richard Pennington. Pennington was a striking figure at 6-foot-4 and 240 pounds, with the pedigree that New Orleans needed. He had served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War after graduating from high school. He began his career in 1968 as an officer in the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. His first police partner was Donald Graham, who later became publisher of the Washington Post. He quickly rose through the ranks while earning a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from American University and a master’s degree in counseling from the University of the District of Columbia.

  He was number two in charge in D.C. when New Orleans chose him to head its beleaguered department. So, he packed up his home, his amateur camera gear, and his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and moved to New Orleans with his new wife. Ironically, on the same day then-Mayor Marc Morial was proudly introducing Pennington as the possible savior for the city’s troubled police department, New Orleans police officer Len Davis was having Kim Groves killed.

  When Pennington took over the police department, New Orleans was in the midst of breaking a city record for murders, and gaining the dubious title of the nation’s “murder capital.” Police corruption was rampant, and citizens wouldn’t report rotten cops for fear they’d end up like Groves.

  To reform the department, Pennington’s first order of business was to get rid of as many corrupt cops as possible. This was an important first step. Five years later, 458 officers in a department of 1,630 officers were gone; including 85 who had been arrested, 100 who had been fired, and 200 who were being disciplined. The remaining officers who left the department retired.

  To regain public trust, Pennington disbanded the Internal Affairs Unit and reassigned its officers. In its place, he created the Public Integrity Bureau to conduct those investigations. He staffed it with different personnel, including two FBI agents, and a relatively new officer on the force named Michael Harrison would be key to the department’s future. By adding former FBI agents, Pennington sent a message to the rank and file that old loyalties would not help when officers came under review. The new Public Integrity Bureau was located outside of headquarters to encourage more citizens to go in and file complaints. The unit also began running undercover sting and surveillance operations on police officers. More people began coming forward as word spread that the police—at least some police—could be trusted.

  To break up the cronyism that had fostered misconduct and criminality, Pennington moved all 250 detectives, including those in robbery and homicide, out of headquarters and into the eight police districts and placed them under command of the district captains. He began using computerized statistics to identify problem areas and the crimes committed there, and he established substations at three of the most crime-ridden public housing complexes in the city and staffed them with a total of 50 officers.

  Ultimately, crime decreased. New Orleans had recorded 425 murders in 1994, the year Pennington took over. Five years later, the city had 162 murders, a 62 percent drop.

  Pennington also turned his attention to recruiting. During his first visit to the police training academy, he discovered 12 of 17 recruits had arrest or criminal records on charges ranging from drunk driving to rape. Today, people with similar records or other negative marks—including delinquent child-support records, bad driving records, dishonorable discharges from the military, excessive debt, or a history of consorting with criminals—cannot join the force.

  The new rules also applied to the officers on the force, leading to an exodus of questionable and criminal cops.

  To attract and maintain a better caliber of police officers, Pennington sought salary increases. He raised starting salaries from $17,000 to $26,000 annually, with a bump to $30,000 after the first year. If you give some people a gun and not enough money, the officers will pay themselves. Many departments with high levels of corruption have low salaries, as officers subsidize their income through illegality, such as bribes and kickbacks. The raise in pay allowed Pennington to limit officers’ off-duty work hours to 20 a week. Limiting off-duty jobs helped keep officers from working in places like nightclubs that can attract a criminal element. Corruption and bad practices largely disappeared until Pennington left in 2002 to run the Atlanta Police Department, following an unsuccessful bid for mayor of New Orleans. In his absence, the department gradually slid back into some of its corrupt practices.

  Police Superintendent Michael Harrison is the latest department head tasked with turning NOPD around. He was only on the job three years when Pennington took charge. The news of Officer Davis’s arrest and the changes the new chief put in place set off a small tsunami through an already fractured department.

  Now it was Harrison’s job to take on a corrupt criminal culture. “Morale was rock-bottom,” he told me. “I had watched the new chief [Pennington] and learned some things. When dealing with a department during rocky times, I learned how to deal with controversy and stay poised even when you’re making unpopular decisions that upset the status quo.”

  He is being prodded forward by a US Justice Department consent decree that found the department was routinely violating its citizens’ constitutional rights. Some officers beat suspects as a matter of course, even those in handcuffs. There were incidents in which officers unnecessarily assaulted mentally ill suspects. Officer-involved shootings or in-custody deaths were investigated inadequately or not at all. The mishandling of investigations was so bad that the department thought it looked intentionally botched.

  I met Harrison in the summer of 2017 when we appeared together in New Orleans on a panel discussing police and use of deadly force. He is an immediately likable man—warm, smart, dedicated. He was born in the Ninth Ward, but moved back and forth between the Ninth Ward and New Orleans East when his parents split up. The two communities were dramatically different. The Ninth Ward was gritty New Orleans—gumbo, music, tiny homes with pralines cooking next door, shootings and stabbings and having fun all at once. New Orleans East encompassed suburban-style homes and lawns and sedate communities before its decline in the 1980s. Harrison graduated from high school, joined the Air Force National Guard, got married, and bumped around before he joined the police force. At that point, he and his family moved to Algiers, the second-oldest neighborhood in New Orleans and the only Orleans Parish community on the west bank of the Mississippi River. Historically, the community has been known for poverty and crime, much of it rooted in some of the neighborhood’s public housing projects—Fischer Projects, DeGaulle Manor, and Christopher Homes. But, like everything in New Orleans, Algiers has another side. It is also famous for Super Sunday, an all-day Mardi Gras event held there since Harrison was a toddler. Each year since 1970, hundreds of residents line up along Whitney and Newton streets on the third Sunday in March to watch the parade of approximately 40 Mardi Gras “Indian tribes,” black men and women adorned in elaborate, impressive costumes of jewels and pink, gold, blue, and green feathers.

  Harrison joined the NOPD in 1991, four years after graduating from high school. He quickly advanced through the ranks. He became a detective in 1995, a sergeant in 1999, a supervisor in the Public Integrity Bureau in 2000, the Seventh Police District assistant commander nine years later, and, from 2011 to 2012, he was commander of the division that oversaw drugs, vice, criminal intelligence, and gang enforcement. He was named to head the department in 2014.

  His ascension was most likely accelerated, Harrison told me, by his penchant for knowledge. After he received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, he earned a master’s degree in the same subject from Loyola University. He also busied himself with management training at the School of Police Staff and Command, the Senior Management Institute for Police, and the FBI’s National Executive Institute, among others. Deeply religious, Harrison is an elder at his church, City of Love Church.

  Harrison’s job is complicated by the fact that he is being ask
ed to be a transformational leader in the same police department in which he grew up. Over the past 26 years, Harrison had to survive a cesspool of police malfeasance in an often lawless law enforcement agency. To be a good officer, Harrison had to swim through a river of foul cops and illegality and somehow come out on the other side clean. He is not an outsider, as Pennington was when he came in with the same mandate. Harrison began seeing the levels of corruption among his fellow officers from the moment he joined the department as a rookie.

  “I admit that I’ve seen us in our darkest hours,” Harrison told me. “I saw things that I shouldn’t have seen. It was crazy. Officers were doing bad things and good officers who saw them doing bad couldn’t say anything, or they’d be punished and ostracized. Those good officers were pushed aside. They weren’t the ones who got promoted. It was the bad guys who got promoted, and you had a lot of good officers who were being swayed by the dark side.”

  Harrison has started his efforts by holding fast to a set of principles and personal commandments for a department that had come off the rails again. When I asked him about reform, he listed what his department is doing: The department must be open and clear to the public. To that end, it has vigorously embraced body cameras; to the tune of 800 cameras at a cost of $8 million. Every patrol officer who encounters the public is assigned one that must be turned on when the officer is engaged with the public. Additionally, the department has developed guidelines for a nine-day release of all video to the public after it has been reviewed internally.

  The department has created a web page to provide residents and others with a plethora of information, including a list of all police calls and responses over a 24-hour period, a map of all criminal activity in the city, the city’s annual crime data, a daily internal NOPD administrative major offense log that documents major offenses or events occurring over a 24-hour period, a copy of all press releases, and the Justice Department’s consent decree.

  Harrison told me that listening to residents and being responsible are vital. He said that’s all part of his efforts to encourage community support and involvement. “I’m as much the police chief for the residents of New Orleans as I am for the department,” he said. Consequently, he and his officers, from top-level commanders to regular beat cops, are often asked to meet with residents to hear their concerns, whether it be abandoned buildings, lack of recreational facilities for children, drug dealers, or neighborhood toughs.

  Additionally, the department has expanded its web pages to include information many residents need or want. The website now offers information about financial assistance for crime victims, enrollment in a Citizens Police Academy that spotlights the various functions of the police, and sections where residents can file online complaints against an officer or give commendations, request barricades in their neighborhood for special events, and view a list of registered sex offenders in a radius they define and then track their records.

  With all this in mind, there is a catchphrase that has been circulating around management discussions for years: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It is a shorthand way of saying that no matter what strategy you may have to change an organization, unless you address the culture of the group—how people perceive their jobs and responsibilities, workers’ ingrained performance routines, current staff allegiances, and how and why they work—your strategy will fail every time. Nowhere is that truer than within law enforcement and nowhere in law enforcement was it more true than New Orleans.

  In a department with a history of abuse, Harrison struggles to instill in his officers the idea that people come first. He has a saying: “A negative outcome doesn’t have to be a negative experience,” probably a message he picked up from one of his many management classes. But his logic is clear. When a motorist receives a traffic ticket or a person is jailed for a crime, for the civilian that is a negative outcome. Nothing will change that part of the police encounter. But how the officers handle the incident determines whether it is a negative experience. Was the person handled with dignity and respect? Was he given clear and concise commands and information during the encounter? Did the officer listen to the complainant’s concern? Did the police response make the situation worse or better? Did the officers treat the people who pay their salaries with respect?

  So, when President Donald Trump seemed to endorse aggressive and violent police conduct shortly after becoming president during a speech to police officers in Brentwood, New York, Harrison made his point clear. “The president’s comments stand in stark contrast to our department’s commitment to constitutional policing and community engagement,” he said in a public statement. “Any unreasonable or unnecessary application of force against any citizen erodes trust at a time when we need support from our local communities the most.”

  Why, I asked Harrison, was it important for him to make a public statement attacking the president? He easily could have said nothing. Others in law enforcement, including the 23,000-member International Association of Chiefs of Police, had already taken the president to task for his comments on use of force. It wasn’t enough, he said. He needed to send a very clear message to a lot of people. “It was a message for the president,” he told me. “It was a message to the members of our department, to my police chief colleagues around the country, to any potential applicants who want to join the New Orleans Police Department, and, most of all, to the men and women who work here to know that we are committed to ethical policing. It was important to show our community the importance of our transformation. We will be hard on crime and be soft on citizens.”

  It’s one thing to say a department needs a culture change. It’s another to change that culture. Harrison has begun by moving quickly against the code of silence that is almost sacrosanct among law enforcement and hinders the ability to root out bad cops and bad practices. Less than a year after taking the job, he fired three cops and suspended one after an officer’s bodycam video showed one of them striking an intoxicated, handcuffed man several times while he was seated inside a station house in New Orleans’s famous French Quarter. The incident was discovered during the daily review of officers’ body-worn cameras. The patrolman who hit the man was fired, along with two officers who witnessed the event and lied about it when they were questioned. The third officer was questioned and admitted that he saw the abuse. He was suspended because he didn’t report what happened immediately, as required by department policy.

  “When officers do something wrong, and when the officers who don’t tell find themselves in bad [or worse] shape, the culture starts to change,” Harrison said. “But it takes some executive decisions on the front end. We have put in a system now where sergeants [patrol officers’ first line of supervision] can be held liable for their officers. Trust me, when officers see sergeants getting demoted or fired, they pay attention. You must have a strong disciplinary process. You have to be fair. You have to show equity in promotion and discipline. There have to be systems of accountability—punishment for bad behavior and reward for outstanding service.

  “It’s difficult because, over time, officers develop relationships. It’s just natural. They’re friends. One person becomes the godparent to the other person’s child. An officer loans another one money to pay his mortgage. But everybody has to understand that our individual actions affect the entire community—the police community and the citizen community. It shapes everybody’s perception.”

  One of the initiatives Harrison has launched to eliminate police malfeasance is a homegrown effort called Ethical Policing Is Courageous (EPIC). It requires police officers to police fellow officers in the field. He wants officers to stop fellow cops before their conduct escalates into something they would regret. “I saw things going on when I was a patrolman, but I didn’t report it,” he said. “I don’t want that to happen now. When my officers see a fellow officer about to go down a path, about to do something that we would all regret, I want his partner to stop him. I want him to intervene. We have eight ho
urs of instruction on this every year. In the past, bad things happened and good officers weren’t empowered to intervene. Don’t just stand there. Intervene.”

  Three days after New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu named Harrison the new police superintendent, Harrison reshuffled his top command staff. Harrison named a new deputy chief of the Investigations and Support Bureau, which oversees the evidence and crime lab divisions as well as major criminal investigations into murders, rapes, and gangs. He demoted two former ranking supervisors and named a new commander of the Compliance Division, to oversee new policies, including performance standards, crime analysis, and body-worn cameras. Harrison told the media it represented his “commitment to strengthen and rebuild the department.”

  He told me later that was his highest priority when he took the job. “You have to have the right leadership team to change. We grew up in this department. I had to find people who were willing to be ridiculed by the people they grew up with in the department. That is the most critical aspect of being a transformational police chief.”

  Harrison has been aided by a change in the personnel rules approved by the Civil Service Commission and pushed through by the New Orleans mayor that gives him greater flexibility in hiring, evaluating, promoting, and rewarding employees. Within two years, he had promoted 41 officers to the position of sergeant and 37 sergeants to the position of lieutenant, and had made even more high-level changes.