Kill and maim as many innocent people as members of the New Orleans Police Department have, kidnap and sexually assault and menace women with guns, beat up civilians and generally run roughshod over the Constitution, and the people living amidst such corruption might come to believe they're the only ones dealing with crooked cops.
That's never been the case, of course. From Cincinnati to New York, from Oakland to Chicago, residents have complained about unchecked police aggression. Zoom out and look at police misconduct from a national perspective, and one sees that New Orleans has never stood alone.
Zoom in to our metro area, however, and it may have seemed that other police forces are innocuous compared to the sometimes predatory corruption in New Orleans.
No more. There's a troubling accusation that last year a multi-agency task force put the squeeze on a local drug suspect and stole his money. That suggests that the New Orleans Police Department isn't the only local jurisdiction that ought to cause us concern. The problem seems more pervasive than that.
There are those who cannot handle the power, who can't be given unsupervised access to the bounty they might encounter during routine police work without yielding to the temptation to help themselves. How do we figure out who those people are? Is it possible to root them out before they begin preying on the public?
Special Agent Sheila Thorne confirmed Wednesday that the FBI has opened an investigation into the West Bank Major Crimes Task Force, a multi-jurisdictional collaboration that includes officers from the New Orleans Police Department, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office, the Gretna Police Department and the Westwego Police Department.
In January 2011 members of that task force arrested 25-year-old Stefen Daigle on the suspicion of several drug charges outside the ArtEgg studios near Broad Street. But the relevant news now isn't what those police say Daigle did but what Daigle and his attorney say police did to him: rip him off to the tune of $3,500.
The Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office was pressing a case against Daigle for possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine and Ecstasy and possession of GHB, which is often described as a date-rape drug. But prosecutors dropped their case against Daigle right before a scheduled trial last month. Their decision to drop those charges came after Daigle's attorney says he showed prosecutors footage of two police officers walking Daigle into a French Quarter apartment and carrying a bag with them on their way out.
The bag, defense attorney Roger Kitchens said, contained $3,500, money that apparently none of the officers reported as they booked his client on the drug charges. Kitchens said that one of the officers involved, Detective Ray Veit, had previously denied under oath even going to the St. Peter Street apartment, and an incident report makes no mention of a visit to the French Quarter.
None of the officers from the task force has been charged with a crime, but multiple agencies are reportedly looking into the allegations: the Public Integrity Bureau of the New Orleans Police Department, the Gretna Police Department, the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office and now the FBI.
Assuming the video footage does in fact capture police corruption, one is forced to ask how such crookedness coalesces across jurisdictional boundaries. If corruption emerges from a single department, we might blame the culture of that department, but when it comes about as part of a collaboration, one becomes even more worried and might ask if there's something about the job itself that makes such abuses inevitable.
And just how often does it happen? It's doubtful that anybody would have believed Daigle's story if he didn't have corroborating video evidence, but he does. That's reason enough for us to question how the task force has behaved when arresting people who weren't able to record them in action.