New Orleans police dept. agrees to reform strategy accepts federal decree.

Taking aim at a long history of civil rights abuses, corruption and slipshod oversight within the New Orleans Police Department, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu unfurled a bevy of sweeping reforms Tuesday afternoon in the nation's most expansive consent decree to date. The long-awaited agreement, to be overseen by an appointed monitor and U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan, amounts to a 492-point, court-enforced action plan for overhauling NOPD policies and practices -- from when officers can pull their weapons to the kind of data they track. The announcement at Gallier Hall on Tuesday afternoon featured Holder, Landrieu and other federal and city officials, including Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas and City Attorney Richard Cortizas.

The document signed Tuesday calls for landmark change in the department's policies, philosophies and practices and seeks to make the police force more transparent, its officers and leaders more accountable.

The NOPD, which doesn't have recent crime statistics posted on its website, will be forced to make voluminous reports on all aspects of its operations available to the public. Its own policy manual, with numerous parts of it long shielded from full public view, will be posted for all to see; so will reports outlining statistics on arrests, searches, seizures, police misconduct and more.

Data collection and regular audits are a key component of the decree.

Federal and city officials plan to meet with residents Wednesday at noon and 6 p.m. at Gallier Hall to hear their concerns and suggestions.

The consent decree calls for numerous benchmarks that the police must meet, some as soon as 90 days.

For example, the NOPD must analyze the usefulness of stops, finding out whether the more than 70,000 field interview cards filled out each year after civilian stops are resulting in arrests or contraband seizures.

Within the next year, all officers must undergo 40 hours of use-of-force training; 24 hours of training on stops, searches and arrests; and four hours on bias-free policing. Officers in specialized units, such as homicide and internal affairs, will have to take part in even more training.

The federal oversight mandated in the 124-page agreement will stick for at least four years. To break away from federal scrutiny, the agency must be free of violations for two consecutive years. If the NOPD fails, a federal judge can extend the oversight or impose other penalties.

Despite the wide-ranging scope of the agreement signed Tuesday, four years is short compared with other consent decrees imposed on police departments. That's because the department got a head start, Serpas said, implementing more than a third of the 147 recommendations in the federal report.
"I think we should shoot for four years," he said. "We don't want to miss this opportunity. Let's not have artificial, long timelines."

Several of the reforms are exclusive to New Orleans and have never been included before in a federal consent decree. They include reforms and measures dealing with how police investigate and handle sexual assault and domestic violence cases, as well how officers deal with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/07/federal_consent_decree_outline.html

The consent decree filed July 24, 2012, in the case of US v. New Orleans:
http://media.nola.com/crime_impact/other/Federal%20Consent%20Decree.pdf