Warren Riley finds out that there are corrupt NOPD officers

It takes one to know one.

More from WWL.

"... Only the odor of decomposition stirs them into action."

"The corpse of a murdered man can lie in a New Orleans street for three days without the citizens paying it the slightest notice. Only the odor of decomposition stirs them into action."

-1849 Visitor to New Orleans

Quote from Ready to Hang: Seven Famous New Orleans Murders.

Firey Debate over Crime Funding. Riley vs. Cannizzaro for more funding. Riley wants more police overtime. Cannizzaro wants more investigators to back up his prosecutors. The pot of money they are talking about using is from unused money in Riley's budget (he can't recruit enough qualified policemen, even given NOPD's minimal standards).

Warren Riley is constantly complaining about how the numbers are making him look bad. He wants credit for "reducing violent crime," but nobody puts any stock into the NOPD's numbers.

NOPD reports reduction in rapes. By reduction, we really mean an increase, including an increase in brazen rape-abductions. Silly maths. Maybe they forgot to include the rapist-cops in their numbers when they were tallying it up. Quality recruits Riley is getting.

Witnessed threatened from jail. "I would never be a witness again – never. "

Petty, vindictive Warren Riley sends NOPD veteran to Siberia (Police Academy) until he swallows the party doctrine that the sky isn't blue. Cannizzaro bails him out, though.

911 calls by kidnapped teens goes unanswered. What happens when you need the cops, and they aren't there. Talk about an 'Oh, Shit' moment. The message that sends is, 'you can't trust 911 and the police to protect you.' NOPD: When Seconds Matter, They're Only Minutes Away. Is it any wonder that Concealed Weapons Permits are once again through the roof?

Some good news: FBI looks at cases involving New Orleans Police Department officers. The FBI has to do it because NOPD's Public Integrity Bureau, arguably Pennington's greatest accomplishment as police chief, has been destroyed by Warren Riley. Keep in mind that Riley worked for Internal Affairs and got promoted, despite being disciplined for tipping off a crooked cop (Len Davis) about his wife's complaint, leading to her murder.

Riley For Mayor? Police Chief Issues Statement. More here. Scary thing is, you can't just dismiss his candidacy out of hand. Because there is no real frontrunner and New Orleans voters are crazy enough to vote for someone, just because people don't like him, he stands more than a snowball's chance in hell of winning. DO NOT WANT!

Algiers murder adds to bloody weekend. The article ends with this:
Police don’t have suspects in four of the five shootings.

This year is already on pace to top last year's murder total and the summer is just beginning...

UPDATE- Some more to add:

Business owner murdered on the job. Ambushed from behind, peppered with rounds while doing his usual routine of refilling ATM's.

"At first, after Katrina they were very much victims," said Normand. "As the population started to grow, now they are becoming perpetrators." BULLSHIT! Sheriff Normand, instead of protecting all in his charge, is trying to gin up fear against "the illegals" to help himself out when he comes up for reelection. He need to distract people about how ineffective his "chee-wee chasing" tactics are.

Man dies in crash on stolen motorcycle. Darwin Award on a donor-cycle. Maybe the first time when the no helmet law actually did the public some good.

Three arrested for alleged plot to kill witness. And you wonder why people are reluctant to testify. Good job catching them. Let's hope they go to jail for the attempt.

Crime Updates - 28 April 2009

Charges reduced against Mardi Gras trio. If these guys get "Eddie Jordan'd," it would be bad news for the city. You can't have people thinking you can get away with shootings along the parade route.

A Romantic Dinner, New Orleans-style. Recounting a home invasion.

Memo to junkies: don't brink the kiddies along when you buy smack.

13 Armed Robberies Reported. Lots are in the area. My favorite part of the article:

The New Orleans Police Department's major offense logs released Monday show armed robberies comprised the bulk of the city's violent crime Friday through Sunday. The weekend spike in armed robberies came just after NOPD officials announced that reported crimes, especially armed robberies, were down in the first three months of the year.

Keeping an ineffective police chief is starting to take an economic toll: Huge convention cancels (because Nagin/Riley can't keep a lid on crime).

Girlfriends Now Become Targets. The unarmed family members/girlfriends don't put up the fight that intended targets do and are easier to find. It reminds me about how in ancient times, they'd hunt down the children so they couldn't take revenge at a later date. Barbaric.

On Eddie Jordan: Defeated. An old post, but essential reading if you want to know how Warren Riley continues to hold a leadership position within NOPD (and not say, cleaning toilets with a toothbrush).

Army soldiers, contractors stole fuel, sold it on Iraqi black market . The fuel may have later been resold to finance the Iraqi Insurgency.

And to close with something entertaining:
Laughing Car Thief Steals Bait Car, Stops Laughing

From the Houston Chronicle. The first douchebag is priceless.

UPDATE - A couple more things to tack on the end:

Goth Kids Terrorizing New Orleans Cemeteries?

Solar Car Tour Hits Bump in French Quarter. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!

David Duke Detained on Holocaust Denial. Neo-Nazi that won the majority of the white vote in Louisiana when he ran for governor. Almost made it into the runoff for Vitter's Senate seat.

Woman Burnt to death in road rage incident. When someone tried to get her out of her burning vehicle (from the wreck she caused) here's what happened:

“I opened the driver’s door wide. It opened easily. The person looked at me, it was a big built woman. I said ’You’ve got to get out of the car. It’s going to burst into flames’.

“The person replied ’F*** off, just f*** off’ and she raised her right fist towards me in a threatening manner before slamming the door shut.

Self-immolation. See Republican Party behavior for more information.

Haunted by the Recent Past

Some fascinating reads out there recently. Don't miss these 4 articles:

Mystery surrounds post-Katrina death, and some point to involvement of NOPD officers Saturday's cover story on the Times-Pic. All about some shady shit that went down in the aftermath of Katrina. A bunch of cops allegedly killed a man, beat up the witnesses, stole a car, and tried to hide their crimes by burning the body in a car. I think articles like this will continue to leak out for a long, long time. Lots of incredibly sketchy shit went down after the levees broke and there will never be a full accounting of what went down.

Flashback to the Interoperability Grant. Out of everything the Nagin administration has done, nothing compares to what Meffert and crew did in this fiasco. After 9/11, it was learned that communications failures cost hundreds of lives, so the Feds set up a grant to several cities to purchase a fully inter-operable communications system on specially reserved bandwidth. Minnesota was one of those cities and so was New Orleans. Minnesota's system worked almost flawlessly and saved lives. What happened in New Orleans? Greg Meffert, the crooked muppet, tried to steer the contract towards one of his cronies. The Feds figured out what he was up to an yanked the grant. No grant, no radios, no bulletproof communications system. A year or so later, Katrina hits, thousands die, and communications failures were one of the biggest complaints after the storm. Out of everything the Nagin administration has done, from NOAH, to Tracie Washington, to Veronica White, to Chocolate City, nothing compares to the Interoperability Grant. That fuckup probably cost hundreds of lives. Someone deserves to get lethal injection for it, unfortunately it looks like Jim Letten is looking primarily into more recent activities. Too bad. I'd love to see Meffert indicted with a thousand cases of negligent manslaughter (Mass Murder?).

Reversal of something or other. Tracing Tracie Washington's history in Dallas. I'd heard some of this, too. I was also reading around the archives of the the archives of the Austin American Statesman and Austin Business Journal. I got beat to the punch on posting. The only other things that I'll add is Tracie Washington allegedly called one of the attorneys suing Cap Metro a son of a bitch in front of a huge number of media people (TV, paper, radio, etc.). That was the final straw that got her fired. Also, the parking lot that drew all the attention was owned by the Praise Tabernacle Church. Tracie Washington allegedly had some sort of connection to the minister. Wasn't really made clear in the articles I read, but they alluded to a connection. The point of the story is Tracie Washington has a very dirty history, but then, we already had indications.

Checkered Past Comes Full Circle. Eli exposes Warren Riley's past. Wow, you talk about some bombshells. Warren Riley was once suspended for hiding a domestic violence call from a cops wife days before the other cop kills the wife and dumps her body in the swamp. I'd always heard that Warren Riley knew where the bodies were hidden because of his days with IA, but never any details. Warren Riley/Eddie Compass/Ray Nagin have supervised the demise of what was once a model police force and its replacement with it's national-nightmare predecessor. The thing is, the people that should be the most afraid of this is the cops themselves. I'm betting it's 6 months until you get another Antoinette Franks (cop that kills another cop).

I'll end with a quote from when Pennington lost after losing to Nagin in 2002:

"Pennington professed to have information abut Nagin that ‘sickened him to the core’, without specifying its nature."

Cleaning up the Post-Mardi Gras Mess Part 2 of 2

The bigger part of the mess we now have to clean up is our most intractable opponent: crime.

In case you're living under a rock, there were multiple shootings yesterday. At least 5 by my count.

My twitter feed was clogged today with people who went back to work and were asked by coworkers, sometimes on the other side of the world, "so, you get shot yesterday?" The entire world read about the shootings. We're keeping "the brand out there" all across the globe. Well, I picked up today's Picayune and look:

The only mention of the shootings is a very brief note at the bottom to refer to the Metro section. I understand it was a busy news day, but come on. You're not the only source of news in the world. People are going to find out about it. It was one of the top stories on WWL. Here's Warren Riley's comments on a WDSU video. WDSU could have also done a better job holding the Chief's feet to the fire. Here's a Stormfront Nola.com puff piece about Warren Riley leading the shutdown of Bourbon Street. Great job, "journalists."

When news organizations downplay the shootings to avoid "hurting the recovery" the only person that benefits is our idiot police chief. The Times-Picayune really outdid themselves today by completely burying the abduction and rape outside Gibson Hall at Tulane. I can't find any mention of the incident in the dead tree edition.

Warren Riley continues to tear Pennington's "model police force" to shreds, but the good news is that NOPD quickly apprehended two suspects (one of which was actually wearing an ankle-bracelet monitoring device!). There are still good cops working hard out there and I salute their valiant efforts. I hope, for the sake of those police, that Warren Riley is removed before he recreates one particular piece of the pre-Pennington force: Antoinette Frank (a cop that murders other cops). The bad news is that someone had the audacity to try something like this. There's always a fair amount of crime around Mardi Gras, but it's rarely close to the parade routes. There's usually too many police/criminals don't feel the need (not sure which) to shoot at the parade routes. The St. Charles Ave. shooting sets a horrible precedent, though. Parade crowds are packed so tightly that even the worst gunman in the world can't help but hitting someone. That's part of the reason concealed carry is specifically prohibited along parade routes. There are so many people that a shooting is almost 100% guaranteed to result in innocent casualties.

We're extremely fortunate that nobody was killed in this incident, but that was purely luck. Next time we might not be so fortunate. Be sure to read how parents were throwing their children over fences to keep them out of the chaos in the first article.

So, now what? We're a poor city with a history of injustice, but there are plenty of places in the world that fit that description that don't have NEARLY the problem with crime, specifically murder, we do. I'm going to propose that our criminals have a very low respect for human life and specifically are very low on Kohlberg's stages of moral development. The best outcome now is to make an example of the suspects, should they be convicted. Charging them with 7 counts of first degree murder is a good start, but we need to try them in a timely manner. The alleged shooters need a competent defense and the DA's office needs to do their job within the rule of law. Justice must be served swiftly.

NOTE- Some edits. See comments.

UPDATE- Make that 6 shootings on Mardi Gras.