On Saturday, November 15th, 2014, Women With a Vision’s Executive Director Deon Haywood appeared on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry Show to discuss a new report detailing how the New Orleans Police Department failed to properly investigate hundreds of reports of sex crimes.
The new report, released last week by the city’s inspector general, found that of 1,290 sex crime “calls for service” assigned to five New Orleans police detectives from 2011 to 2013, 840 were designated as “miscellaneous,” and nothing at all was done with them. Of the 450 calls that led to the creation of an initial investigative report, no further documentation was found for 271 of them.
A long pattern of misconduct, civil rights violations, abusive behavior, and corruption also led the U.S. Department of Justice to issue a damning 158-page report on the NOPD back in 2011 that found “deficiencies that lead to constitutional violations span[ning] the operation of the entire department.” In the 2011 report, investigators found that it was also routine then to ignore sex crimes — to discourage sexual assault victims from pursuing prosecution and that reclassifying rapes as miscellaneous charges was so common that it had the effect of shutting down investigation for a significant proportion of possible sex crimes. In 2012 the NOPD went under federally-mandated oversight when the police department and the Department of Justice signed a consent decree, a court-enforced list of reforms that the NOPD must carry out to overhaul its policies and practices.
With this latest news and inspection report, it is clear that the NOPD still has a long way to go. As Deon explained to viewers, while this sort of NOPD misconduct is not new, it is still shocking. She says that community groups will have to work together to hold the police department accountable.
Women With a Vision understands that the NOPD’s routine ignoring of victims of sexual assault and the devaluing of the lives of women and children, adds to the distrust many survivors have of the police. In fact, for many of the populations we work with, sexual assault goes unreported due in part to the the problematic role law enforcement has played in many communities historically, with officers carrying out behaviors steeped in sexist and racial biases. At WWAV we see every day how the devaluing, ignoring, and erasing of women’s experiences of sexual and gender-based violence, such as the discounting of rape as a crime, becomes another form of violence against women and families.
For more info on this report, watch the segment below!