Feds: New Orleans Police Department has ‘serious, wide-ranging, systemic and deeply-rooted’ problems

Even before Hurricane Katrina shined a national spotlight on the New Orleans Police Department, the NOPD was notorious for being among the most corrupt, renegade law enforcement agencies in modern U.S. history. It's numerous failings in the aftermath of the storm only served to exacerbate the department's growing reputation as a modern-day outpost of Wild West justice.

So when he took office last May, newly-minted Mayor Mitch Landrieu took unprecedented steps in an effort to reform the NOPD once and for all -- an undertaking scores of past promise-making New Orleans politicians have failed at doing. Landrieu invited the Justice Department to essentially embed itself within the NOPD to try to search and destroy its cancers from the inside. Today, ten months later, the feds issued an initial report on what they've found, and their findings are about as grim and chilling as anyone familiar with the NOPD's pock-marked history could have imagined.

In a letter to Landrieu accompanying the report, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez essentially said that the department is so rotten that complete reform will take nothing less than a Herculean effort.

"As devastating as Hurricane Katrina was, our investigation has revealed that these serious deficiencies existed long before the storm," Thomas Perez wrote in the 115 page report. "Despite the Department's prior and recent efforts to implement reform, our investigative findings, which focused on officer conduct during the past two years, indicate that problems persist and sustainable reform will require a substantial period of significant and difficult work."

Perez indicated that his team's findings not only included aspects of corruption typical to other police forces, but also other corrosive elements that they'd actually never seen previously. "New Orleans has every issue that has existed in our practice to date, and a few that we hadn't encountered," he said.

Among the Justice Department's more striking findings, not including the at least nine federal criminal investigations already underway -- done so that the feds can keep a wall between those individual cases and the larger investigation on the department as a whole:

• The NOPD's black to white arrest ratio is 16 to 1. In all of the 27 instances where an officer fired a weapon over a period of 17 months, all of the fired upon were black.

• The Department did not find fault with any officer involved in a shooting over the past six years. Its in-house investigations have been nothing short of a joke; poorly conducted investigations that were "so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects." Many investigations involving officer shootings were not, in fact, turned over to the Department's internal affairs unit, as they should have been, and the findings of some investigations have mysteriously disappeared into thin air.

• The report states that the "basic elements of effective policing" have been non-existent for years in the NOPD, leading it to be "largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its officers."

• The Department routinely violates citizens' Constitutional rights protecting them from unwarranted searches and seizures, in addition to using excessive force, even on those in handcuffs, that is at times "deliberately retaliatory," with "officers even encouraging each other to use force as retaliation."

• The NOPD canine unit was so poorly managed that it had to be shut down completely.

• Calls into the Department made by non-English speaking callers were routinely ignored.

• The NOPD frequently mishandled crimes of a sexual nature, resulting in a "sweeping failure to properly investigate many potential cases of rape, attempted rape and other sex crimes."

• The Department's process for recruiting and training new officers is deeply flawed, to say the least.

With the report now complete, the Justice Department and local officials will now work together to formulate a plan for reform that will be enforced by a federal judge. At a press conference today in New Orleans, Mayor Landrieu sounded an optimistic tone.

"There is nobody in this room that is surprised by the general tenor and the tone of what this report has to say," said Landrieu. "I look forward to a very spirited partnership and one that actually transforms this police department into one of the best in the country."

(Photo of Landrieu and Perez at press conference: AP)