April 3, 2023 But the mayor’s proposal to enlist a nonprofit group with no police marketing experience has raised questions about the plan to recruit officers to the New Orleans Police Department.
By John Simerman Source The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LL
Mayor LaToya Cantrell is pushing a plan to unlock $1 million in Wisner grant funds to fuel a marketing campaign to pump up the image of the New Orleans Police Department.
The mayor’s plan to enlist Total Community Action, a nonprofit group with no experience in police marketing or recruiting, has raised questions from members of the City Council and some business leaders over the game plan to draw new officers to a withered police force.
The mayor’s proposal, after a meager catch of new police cadets last year, has sowed doubts about the future of an arrangement between the city and the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation, the booster group that for a decade has led the search for new cops.
The foundation last year added a new role: writing checks to a group of retired New York police brass who were called in last summer to revamp the police force, bankrolled by a handful of local businessmen.
That opaque arrangement has rankled some City Council members. Cantrell’s proposed seven-figure Wisner grant, meanwhile, came after talks last year to funnel those funds to the foundation broke off, sources said.
Since 2014, soon after Mayor Mitch Landrieu lifted a police hiring freeze after three years, the foundation has served as the NOPD’s cheerleader and recruiting marketer, tasked with bringing new applicants in the door.
Last year, the city agreed to pay the foundation $900,000, an increase that has failed to produce much results. From a high of 7,450 applicants in 2017, the number fell to fewer than 2,600 last year.
Long-running plans to launch remote testing of applicants floundered for more than a year before the foundation switched vendors. It remains perhaps a few months away.
A paltry harvest
The foundation is tasked with getting applicants in the door. The share who end up in the police academy — after a process run by NOPD through the Civil Service Department — also has slid, to about 1%. The result was a paltry 25 new officers hired by NOPD last year.
The dismal effort left the police force barely above 900 officers, from more than 1,200 when Landrieu restarted hiring, according to City Council data analyst Jeff Asher.
The pace of new applications rose early this year, after the foundation hired two recruiters to help NOPD push applicants down the pipeline. The department is set to field the year’s second academy class soon. Still, civil service data show that applications slowed to a dribble in March, with fewer than five per day.
District E City Councilman Oliver Thomas, who chairs the criminal justice committee, has called foundation leaders to testify on Wednesday about the struggles finding qualified applicants.
“It seems like it’s time to move towards another model,” Thomas said.
Thomas and Councilman Freddie King III sit on the board of Total Community Action, a government-endorsed nonprofit that provides a variety of poverty-related services.
The organization’s president, Thelma French, said last week that the $1 million Wisner grant proposal was recent news to her.
“There is no (agreement). I’ve only had one meeting with them relative to serving as the fiduciary,” French said. “I have not presented to my board to even discuss it. We think it’s a little premature.”
The mayor’s proposal calls on French’s group to oversee a branding campaign to “shed a positive light” on the NOPD, contracting with firms to analyze attitudes toward the force and do public relations, marketing and advertising.
In a statement, Cantrell’s office said the grant was “to enhance current ongoing efforts to recruit and retain officers.”
Committing Wisner funds to “a trusted local nonprofit with a proven track record of getting things done in an efficient, effective and equitable manner is the best avenue to move this effort forward,” the statement added.
Council approval needed
Under the terms of a recent court injunction, the mayor needs to seek the council’s approval for the grant. The grant proposal was among a half dozen recently offered to the council.
Gregory Rusovich, who has served on several criminal justice boards in the city and is currently chairman of the watchdog Metropolitan Crime Commission, argued for pumping the brakes.
“Right now, frankly, the last thing we need is a new party stepping in to further confuse the issue,” he said.
Rusovich and others pointed to a lack of accountability between the foundation and the NOPD over new officer hires. Rusovich favored a review of what works nationally, and in the meantime, clear benchmarks.
“There should never be a year like last year where there was no metric, no real target, and then we get to the point where we only get 25 or 30 hires and there’s no one clear party accountable or responsible, and they have no clear answers of why that occurred,” Rusovich said.
District A Councilman Joe Giarrusso said he favored outsourcing police recruiting, beyond just the marketing.
The foundation may be too small to handle the volume, he said, and the Police Department “is still trying to build capacity and doesn’t have enough officers” to run a full-service recruiting outfit.
“Efficiency and speed,” Giarrusso said. “Being outsourced is probably better than living in a bureaucracy.”
Thomas harked to the 1990s, when police recruiting boomed with the help of federal dollars under then-NOPD Superintendent Richard Pennington.
“Everyone was in the room working together,” he said. “It wasn’t different organizations or different groups trying to take the lead on a law enforcement issue.”
Bottlenecks galore
The foundation’s president, Elizabeth Boh, said Friday that she knew little of the mayor’s designs for the Wisner grant, or how it fit with the foundation’s work, which includes advertising for NOPD applicants.
Despite the falloff, Boh argued that the failures aren’t in “the number of applications. It’s how many you convert to test-takers.”
That’s largely the NOPD’s job. Those familiar with it say the process has been beset by chronic delays in completing background checks, psychiatric exams, and other chokepoints.
Boh said the future of the foundation’s deal with the city, which comes up again in August, is up in the air.
“When we took this on 10 years ago, we didn’t ever anticipate that it would last this long,” she said.
How much longer it lasts is uncertain.
Jane Wiseman, a former federal and Massachusetts state justice official, said plenty of police recruiting work can be outsourced, including much of the backgrounding work.
“Outsource the stepwork. The things that don’t take judgment. Checking a box,” she said. “There are companies that do that for cheap: knocking on the door, ‘Did Jane actually live here?'”
Wiseman noted that NOPD is far from alone in grappling with manpower troubles.
“Pretty much every city in America is having a problem getting enough people in the door and keeping people from retiring,” she said. “The profession is really in a difficult spot. It’s the worst recruiting environment I can remember.”