The Shield That Shattered Itself: Reform & Resistance in the New Orleans Police Department
By: Jed Bethea
On October 14, 1994, Richard Pennington was sworn in as superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). His selection came after months of deliberation on the part of newly elected mayor Marc Morial.[1] Pennington’s performance as assistant chief in Washington, D.C. impressed Morial and his allies, who hoped he would introduce major changes at the NOPD.[2] Expectations for Pennington were high, as were the stakes of his mission. At the time, the department had a reputation as perhaps the worst major police department in the nation.[3] Things would get worse before they got better—for Pennington, for the NOPD, and for New Orleans. The same day that Pennington was sworn in, a contract killer shot Kim Groves—a New Orleans resident and mother of three—to death near her home.[4]
Pennington soon learned how much work was ahead of him. The reforms implemented over the following months and years were met with fierce opposition from rank-and-file police and police unions—a reception that was consistent with the history of reform in the NOPD. But advocates for reform were encouraged by the fact that both the new mayor and the new police chief seemed to recognize the dire need for change. Despite this recognition on city leadership’s part, the reforms of the mid- to late-1990s were as ineffective in transforming the department as the attempts that preceded them.
The historiography on policing and reform is extensive, but precious little focus has been afforded to the New Orleans Police Department. Furthermore, what academic attention has been paid to the NOPD is largely contained to the periods between the Civil War and World War II and, more recently, the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Historian Leonard Moore’s Black Rage in New Orleans provides an extensive history of the intervening years, and I draw heavily upon it for this paper. For a majority of my secondary sources, I use works focusing on other American cities and works which discuss American policing generally.
There are several competing theories of police reform, and their respective proponents have often butted heads. In Los Angeles, Chief William Parker and his successor Ed Davis successfully resisted liberal reformers’ calls for civilian oversight in pursuit of the police professionalism model, advocating police autonomy in all matters. In New York, Chief William Bratton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani championed quality-of-life policing, in which petty crimes (e.g., fare-jumping, public urination) were punished harshly in the hopes of deterring more serious crime. Both overcame challenges from advocates of the community policing model, which stressed the need for direct (and ideally amicable) contact between police and citizens. However, unlike many of his peers, Richard Pennington embraced the community policing model as NOPD chief. Unfortunately for Pennington and New Orleans, his efforts to reshape the department were not nearly as effective as had been the efforts of other models’ advocates.[5]
The NOPD of the Twentieth Century
Many of the problems facing the NOPD when Kim Groves was killed in 1994 began at least fifty years before. Reform advocates in the 1940s typically prioritized either the integration of the department or the suppression of pecuniary corruption, and both groups resented the department’s complete indifference to civilian input. Where even upper- and middle-class whites considered police corruption a problem, the group championing police integration largely comprised Black press and activists. Despite this power imbalance, the NOPD was integrated in 1950 as efforts to purge the department of corruption stalled. Two years later, an independent investigation by the civilian-led Special Citizens Investigating Committee (SCIC) exposed a criminal conspiracy within the (still overwhelmingly white) NOPD, in which even high-ranking officials knowingly permitted vice, prostitution, and other criminal acts in exchange for payoffs. City and department leadership, along with the rank-and-file, resisted this investigation through stonewalling and a countersuit. In doing so, they participated in a long-standing NOPD tradition and successfully thwarted the implementation of most of SCIC’s recommendations.[6]
If integration gave the Black community and activists hope for a better relationship with the police, the police response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s effectively disabused them. When the movement reached New Orleans, police officers and racist white civilians worked in tandem to brutalize demonstrators with the tacit approval of a series of white mayors (none of whom were particularly sympathetic to the demonstrators, and some of whom were actively hostile to them). Notably, civil rights activists’ interests increasingly aligned with the interests of reform advocates frustrated by the department’s intransigence in the face of widespread and obvious corruption. Before the end of the decade, both camps concluded that a civilian review board completely outside of the purview of the department itself was necessary to effect change of any form or degree. Several such bodies sprung up and made recommendations but, acting in an unofficial capacity and lacking any means to enforce their decisions, accomplished little.[7] In 1969 and again in 1973, disillusioned Black officers created organizations in the hopes of highlighting disrespect and inequality within the department. The formation of these organizations was made necessary by the exclusionary and racist policies of the Police Association of New Orleans (PANO), the whites-only rank-and-file police union, as well as by the exclusionary and racist actions of its individual members. These organizations released statements concurring with the growing demand for civilian review, marking a significant gesture of dissent from the first generation of Black police in New Orleans.[8] But the fact that officers within their own ranks now felt such a measure necessary did little to sway police leadership. They again resisted any change and successfully fought off efforts to subject the department to civilian oversight.[9]
The 1970s saw two episodes of intense violence which indicated that tensions between the NOPD and the Black community had yet to be resolved. Not ten months into the new decade, police engaged the local chapter of the Black Panther Party in a prolonged shootout, provoking the dissolution of the chapter and outrage within the poor Black community among which the Party resided and worked. Over the span of a few weeks between late 1972 and early 1973, a Black nationalist killed several police officers and white civilians before being cornered and killed by police. While the Black community of New Orleans had not completely abandoned hopes for reform, these events made it clear that some had embraced mutual antagonism.[10]
Decades had passed since the first Black officer was recruited to the NOPD, but incidents of brutality remained plentiful. Rank-and-file representation may have failed, but some anti-brutality activists allowed themselves tentative hope in 1977 when Ernest “Dutch” Morial became the first Black mayor in the city’s history.[11] Three years into his term, a group of more than two dozen white officers waged a campaign of terror, torture, and murder against the Black residents of the Algiers neighborhood, effectively demonstrating that even a Black mayor was not enough to prevent the police from tormenting and brutalizing the Black population as they saw fit.[12] Morial passed a bevy of reforms under renewed pressure from the Black community and civil rights organizations, including an Office of Municipal Investigation. The OMI was charged with investigating police complaints but existed within the purview of the NOPD. Despite several such compromises, the police unions and rank-and-file officers resisted even these mild changes as they had in the past. Their efforts, helped by the indifference of Morial’s successor Sidney Barthelemy, neutered the OMI. Morial’s reforms fizzled out by the 1990s. The OMI stopped filing complaints completely a few years into the twenty-first century.[13]
As the War on Drugs intensified, so too did the involvement of NOPD officers in the drug trade and other illicit activities. Between 1992 and 1994, over forty officers were arrested for a litany of crimes ranging from bribery and robbery to sexual assault and murder. At the same time, the Justice Department declared the NOPD the national leader in brutality complaints.[14] Corruption and brutality in the NOPD had become intertwined phenomena by this time—cops engaged in corruption for financial gain had no qualms about brutalizing civilians to that end. As criminologist James Fyfe put it, by the 1990s, “some departments [had] reputations for being brutal (like Los Angeles) or corrupt (like New York), and still others [were] considered incompetent; the New Orleans department [had] accomplished the rare feat of ranking high nationally in all three categories.”[15] This effectively summarizes the culture which pervaded the department when Marc Morial, son of Barthelemy’s predecessor Ernest Morial, became mayor in May 1994. Unbeknownst to him and virtually everyone else within city leadership and the NOPD, the scandal that would define his first year was just around the corner.[16]
“We’re Done”: The FBI Finds a Powder Keg
The largest scandal in NOPD history at that time began under unusual circumstances. On Christmas Eve 1993, a drug dealer named Terry “Skaboo” Adams contacted the local FBI office in New Orleans. Adams claimed that two NOPD officers, Len Davis and Sammie Williams, had threatened to kill him if he did not bring them ten thousand dollars. When Davis repeated the threat to Adams on a monitored line, the bureau began ‘Operation Shattered Shield’ and sent Agent Juan Jackson to New Orleans. Once there, Jackson posed as a drug kingpin and was introduced to Davis and Williams by Adams. The FBI purchased a warehouse, which was used by Jackson to store large quantities of cocaine. Jackson asked that Davis and Williams recruit corrupt, “alpha male” cops to provide a 24/7 guard for the warehouse. Before its conclusion, Operation Shattered Shield implicated more than twenty NOPD officers who knowingly participated in the paid protection of this drug warehouse.[17]
But Operation Shattered Shield uncovered far more than the FBI expected. In October 1994, a New Orleans civilian named Kim Groves witnessed Davis assault two young boys (sources differ as to whether the two boys were Groves’s nephews, family friends, or complete strangers) as Williams stood by. Groves promptly filed a brutality complaint against Davis. This was nothing new to Davis, who had “an internal affairs jacket as thick as a telephone book,” according to one NOPD officer. Mary Howell, a lawyer specializing in brutality cases, claimed she found twenty complaints against Davis after combing through police records. Additionally, journalist Michael Perlstein uncovered four suspensions and two reprimands in Davis’s past.[18] Davis learned of Groves’s complaint from a connection in the internal affairs division within hours of her making it. Less than a day later, Groves was shot to death in her neighborhood.[19]
Groves’s murder had implications far uglier than anything yet discovered by the FBI. After a more careful review of wiretap transcripts containing hundreds of hours of conversation between the officers being investigated, the bureau concluded that Davis and Williams had enlisted a criminal contact of theirs to murder Groves.[20] Jackson and the rest of the FBI agents involved in the sting were immediately called to Washington, D.C. for a meeting with FBI Director Louis Freeh. There, the directive was to solve the murder and then shut the entire operation down. “Your job is to identify them and that’s it,” Jackson later quoted Freeh as saying in the meeting. “I don’t care if there’s a hundred more cops out there, that’s it. We’re done.”[21] Of the over twenty NOPD officers implicated in the scheme, only nine were ultimately charged.[22] According to U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan, Jr., “There’s no question that perhaps as many as fifteen or twenty more officers could have been apprehended [which] tells us that corruption in the [NOPD] is pervasive, rampant, and systemic.”[23] Elsewhere, Jordan said that “It leaves a bad taste in your mouth when you know there are bad cops still out there on the street.”[24]
The FBI began investigating the NOPD in the hopes of rooting out a handful of corrupt cops. As the scope and severity of the crimes committed became clear, the bureau lost its stomach for aggressive pursuit of police corruption. Though the FBI did not give up completely on addressing corruption within the department, their tack changed significantly after October 1994. The federal government had played the central role in exposing the depth of the crisis, but they made it clear that their subsequent involvement would be in a strictly advisory capacity. For the time being, New Orleans was on its own.
“On a Crusade”: Pennington’s Reforms & PANO’s Resistance
Local government and police leadership scrambled to get ahead of what the press was calling “the largest case of police corruption in the city’s history.”[25] Incoming NOPD chief Richard Pennington, chosen with the expectation that he would implement widespread reforms, was sworn in and first learned of the FBI probe the same day that Kim Groves was murdered. Pennington was clear from his first statement regarding corruption in his ranks: “I will not tolerate it.” Mayor Morial echoed this sentiment, adding that his administration was “on a crusade … a holy war … to clean this department up.”[26] Shortly after the scandal first became known to the public, Pennington “vowed to weed out bad officers through aggressive internal investigations.”[27] A couple of weeks later, Pennington laid out his new initiatives for the NOPD, including the establishment of “mini-stations” in areas with particularly high crime-rates, updating obsolete technology, significantly stricter regulations on moonlighting, and a “beefed-up” internal affairs division.[28]
Pennington’s slate of reforms approached police misconduct from several angles. Plans for greater civilian oversight, external venues for complaints, and a stronger internal affairs division did not need to distinguish between brutality and corruption. This was because, at least in theory, these reforms would apply to the entire complaint process regardless of the nature of the complaints. Other changes, such as pay raises and restrictions on moonlighting, purported to address corruption but were irrelevant to the issue of brutality. And then some reforms, like the introduction of mini-stations, increased patrols in the projects, and new technology, had precious little to do with either. Which of these reforms a given party emphasized provided insight into their priorities in reforming the department.
Less than two weeks after Davis’s involvement in Groves’s murder first became public knowledge, the city council uncovered the case of a police recruit who had previously been fired for stealing a coworker’s paycheck. The council was presumably eager to seem proactive on the issue of police corruption. “The public [was] waiting, hungering and thirsting for leadership,” as one councilwoman said. “We would be derelict if we did not respond.” Though chief administrative officer of the NOPD Marlin Gusman implored the council not to allow “an all-out war on the Police Department,” the council ultimately approved several resolutions pressuring the NOPD to cooperate with the district attorney and FBI and disqualify anyone with a criminal record from the police force. It also requested an official explanation of the NOPD’s background check process. Echoing reforms of the past, the council recommended that the NOPD work toward pay raises. Their logic was that higher wages attract better cops.[29] Discussions, especially among government and police officials, following the revelations of Operation Shattered Shield and the murder of Kim Groves were rife with nervous appeals to the solidarity that upstanding citizens were expected to share with the police. Chief Pennington himself echoed this sentiment when he argued that “higher hiring standards will come with a higher price tag.”[30] A few days later, President Clinton’s omnibus crime bill afforded New Orleans a grant for just shy of two million dollars, with which the city was to hire three dozen new officers. The Times-Picayune reported that the Clinton administration planned to fund the hiring of hundreds more in the years to follow.[31]
Though local and police leadership were largely on the same page, PANO and the rank-and-file strongly resisted Pennington’s reforms.[32] As Pennington told Paul Keegan, a journalist for the New York Times a year later, “If you took a poll today, probably half the officers will tell you they don’t like me.” In the same article, one NOPD officer said that “Pennington thinks everybody on the police force is a crook,” while another (who also believed that anti-white prejudice cost her a promotion) called him an “idiot” and a “yes-man for the Mayor.” Even a supervisor, speaking under anonymity, believed that Pennington was a puppet of Mayor Morial, widely considered ‘anti-cop’ among the rank-and-file.[33] As Mary Howell put it, Pennington was “swimming in shark-infested waters.”[34] For many officers, the implication that misconduct needed to be investigated at all was a direct insult.
Some went further, blaming the increased recruitment and promotion of Black officers for the issues plaguing the department. According to Lieutenant David Bennelli, the second-highest ranking member of PANO in 1996, “[t]hey wanted a police department that reflected the city of New Orleans … Well, they got it.” But Keegan noted, “[Len] Davis was actually following a long entrepreneurial tradition at the department.” This “tradition” was first practiced by white officers, who had long since monopolized avenues of “’clean corruption’” such as extortion and shakedowns, leaving “the new crop of black officers … with ‘dirty corruption’ of the lucrative but deadly drug world.”[35] When viewed in tandem with incidents of police brutality like the Algiers terror campaign, this history of “clean corruption” belies the notion that either phenomenon can be attributed to integration. Despite the assertions of PANO, the early history of the all-white NOPD offers ample precedent for police misconduct, be it physical abuse or pecuniary corruption.
Perceptions of the Press & the Public
The Times-Picayune provided relentless coverage of this scandal and its fallout, beginning in December 1994.[36] The newspaper’s coverage at this time was highly critical of the NOPD and conscious of its position in the context of decades of corruption and stalled reforms. But it was also cautiously optimistic about Pennington’s reforms.[37] Columnists providing their perspectives on the unfolding scandal did not mince words. According to Iris Kelso, the murder of Kim Groves “[raised] the possibility that any other citizen who makes a charge against police could face a death sentence.” She dismissed Morial’s “holy war” as “a good sound bite” devoid of content. To reinforce her point, Kelso suggested several specific reforms: “mov[ing] the Internal Affairs Division out of police headquarters … suspend[ing] the IAD from handling citizen complaints … set[ting] up a police hotline for anonymous complaints [and,] order[ing] the software for an early warning system on officers against whom complaints are piling up.”[38] The Times-Picayune‘s emphasis on civilians’ ability to report police misconduct without fear of reprisal suggested that it was concerned with both brutality and pecuniary corruption. That Kim Groves’s murder composed so much of their coverage in comparison to the related drug sting reinforced this.
Other writers investigated the department attempting to discern whether certain divisions or districts were more susceptible to misconduct than others. In one article, James Varney interrogated the history of New Orleans’s fifth district, the district in which Len Davis and a majority of the other officers charged in the case operated. In doing so, he quoted the district’s very own commanding officer, who allowed that his district had been “used as a dumping ground by the department in the past,” but insisted that it was “in the process of change.” At the same time, he worried that “this activity could be anywhere [throughout the NOPD].” Varney also pointed to the incident, almost a decade earlier, in which ten cops were implicated in a string of armed robberies, nine of whom were from the fifth district. District Attorney Jordan and NOPD critic Rafael Goyoneche were less sympathetic to this argument. Goyoneche said that, “[i]nstead of excising the cancer, [NOPD leadership] just shifted it around and let it infect other areas,” implying that corruption was no easier to isolate within the NOPD than cancer within the human body. Jordan believed it possible that “there [were] other cells with just as many corrupt officers as the fifth district.” For the most part, Times-Picayune coverage argued that corruption was not particular to one district, even if the fifth was a stronger example than most.[39]
Nor was there a shortage of civilian critics willing to express their outrage to the press. Howell, a lawyer specializing in police brutality cases, first appeared in the Times-Picayune a day after Kim Groves’s murder made headlines. Seconding the Times-Picayune’s argument that the problem affected the entire NOPD, she called Len Davis “an example of the complete dysfunction of the department and the inability of internal affairs to police itself.”[40] Roughly one week later, she asked “[w]here is the urgency?” and suggested removing citizen complaints from the purview of internal affairs and setting up an anonymous hotline where citizens may report abuses. Howell lamented that “Kim Groves has just been lost in all this.”[41] For his part, Reverend Brown spoke of helping citizens file reports against Davis, who he described as “very brutal.” But this accomplished nothing.[42] One week later, Brown used even stronger language, suggesting the creation of a civilian review board and highlighting who it was suffering the brunt of police abuse and exploitation in New Orleans. He claimed, “The black community here is under attack from the [NOPD]” and “Complaints have gone nowhere for years because the police have covered them up.”[43]
While the Times-Picayune, professionals like Howell, and community leaders like Brown attempted to balance concerns over brutality with concerns over corruption, everyday citizens were far more preoccupied with the former. If the drug sting indicated that the police could not be trusted, then Groves’s murder indicated that they could be deadly. Those who knew Groves attempted to establish her as the face of the crisis, sometimes literally, such as when they printed out T-shirts bearing her likeness to be worn to indicted officers’ court dates. Few citizens quoted in the press made mention of the drug sting, its memory almost entirely overshadowed by the murder. Groves’s great-grandmother saw her murder as a sign that “You never can tell what might happen next.” A friend of Groves’s and one of the last people to see her alive said that “find[ing] out it was the police” who murdered her friend led her to conclude that “it’s not just the people on the street causing all this murder” and speculate that Davis was responsible for other unsolved murders. A neighbor told the Times-Picayune that Groves’s murder left her “afraid to call the Police Department and say anything.”[44] This was a common sentiment among residents at that time, including those who feared being robbed by police more than being killed by them. Explaining why he decided against reporting a robbery, one small business owner reasoned, “Hey, we’ve got a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment here. Those cops make about sixteen thousand dollars a year. No way.”[45] Someone at a meeting of concerned citizens remarked, “We’re going to have to hire some criminals to protect us from the police.”[46] Residents did not need to see the statistics to know that the problem could not be reduced to a couple dozen ‘bad apples.’
Cui Bono: Reform & Retreat, Recidivism & Restitution
Going into 1995, everyone in New Orleans seemed eager for police reform, save the police themselves. Less than two weeks into the new year, Pennington introduced his new “reform package” which included the replacement of the existing Internal Affairs Division with a new Public Integrity Division situated away from police headquarters, stricter hiring standards, an “early warning” system to track patterns of misconduct by individual officers, the establishment of neighborhood substations (a core aspect of Pennington’s model of community policing), greater police presence in “high-crime areas,” and severe restrictions on the widespread moonlighting that weakened the chain of command and encouraged corruption.[47] These reforms were unpopular with rank-and-file police, many of whom already believed that they were all corrupt in Pennington’s eyes and had come to take unregulated secondary incomes for granted.[48]
But these officers were certainly the minority within the city. The overwhelming approval of these reformswas articulated concisely in one Times-Picayune article whichsaid, “If [Pennington] doesn’t reshape the NOPD into an honest, effective, and up-to-date force for the battle [against crime], it won’t be because New Orleans is not ready for reform.”[49] Anxieties among those still outraged by the revelations of Operation Shattered Shield that a majority of the officers implicated would walk free were temporarily assuaged by the steady trickle of additional indictments that began in the new year.[50] Similarly, those who suspected Davis would escape justice like so many murderous cops in the past may have been comforted by U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan, Jr.’s aggressive prosecution and recommendation that Davis receive a death sentence if convicted.[51]
However, civilian oversight remained elusive. Though its separation from police headquarters and the direct involvement of the FBI in the new Public Integrity Division raised hopes for more impartial judgments, the division was largely under the purview of the police much like its predecessor.[52] This compromise followed from the reasoning initially offered for abolishing the Internal Affairs Division, that “cronyism and leaks” had made it possible for Len Davis to learn about Kim Groves’s complaint against him in the first place, but nevertheless disappointed those who considered total independence a crucial aspect of effective civilian oversight.[53]
Pennington began 1995 at a gallop, but another hurdle was not far ahead. In March, not quite five months removed from Groves’s murder, NOPD officer Antoinette Frank and a criminal associate were charged with the murder of two civilians in a family-owned restaurant, as well as Frank’s own partner, who was moonlighting as security there.[54] But Pennington addressed this scandal with far more confidence than the one which met him upon appointment. “The time where things like this would happen and nothing would occur [is] gone … It’s evident and apparent that, when we get complaints about police officers, we’re going to act.”[55] The Times-Picayune coverage expressed far more faith in Pennington’s reforms than they had the year before, now demanding that “Mayor Marc Morial and every City Council member … take a new vow to stay out of police affairs and let Pennington do his job.”[56] This was a somewhat confusing statement, as Morial and the city council had effectively been in lockstep with Pennington since he was appointed, but it also hinted at a contradiction that appeared sporadically in contemporary discourse. Calls for civilian oversight sometimes co-mingled with demands that politicians leave the police to their devices, their originators neglecting to explain how civilian oversight would be implemented if not with the input of the civilian government. Even members of the civilian government themselves struggled at times to locate the exact source of the dreaded politicization. One member of the city council warned Chief Pennington not to “tolerate the slightest political influence to be exerted on the department.” For his part, Mayor Morial simultaneously urged the city council to abstain from involving itself further in police affairs and swore to do so himself.[57] Local government officials agreed that the police department must be reformed and knew that the public did too. But statements like these spoke to their fears of being perceived as interfering with—or, worse, ‘politicizing’—the police department.
Read through Murakawa’s lens, this is indicative of a greater contradiction in the logic of late-twentieth-century police reform, in New Orleans as in other major American cities. This logic positioned the police as both the root cause of corruption and one of its victims. Most police scandals of this period began with crimes committed by rank-and-file officers, often in large numbers, typically necessitating direct interaction with the public in their capacity as police (e.g., beatings, torture, drug trafficking, murder, extortion). And these officers, the logic of reform dictated, had to be dealt with harshly for their crimes. Simultaneously, crimes like those committed by Len Davis and his associations were the consequences not of the police failing in their duties to the city but of the city failing in its duties to the police.
In this instance, police reform undoubtedly worked for police, not that many of them were cognizant of that fact. NOPD officers ultimately received their pay raise, as well as new uniforms, new cars, and new weapons.[58] However, this did little to improve Morial or Pennington’s reputations with the rank-and-file or PANO. For one, the new uniforms and cars were accompanied by stricter requirements for their use; officers were no longer permitted to report for duty in their own clothes or to use their own cars, a restriction many resented. Additionally, few officers expressed gratitude for the pay raises because the ubiquitous practice of moonlighting was handled much more strictly now, with each detail requiring Pennington’s personal approval and an absolute ban on officers working second jobs anywhere alcohol is sold. Pennington and his allies reasoned that widespread, unregulated moonlighting had created an unofficial, secondary chain of command, in which well-connected officers were able to manipulate their superiors with promises of secondary incomes. This further aggrieved the numerous officers who benefited from the existing arrangement, especially those who occupied the top rung of the moonlighting hierarchy. And, finally, they categorically opposed even the mild gesture in the direction of civilian review that the new Public Integrity Division represented.[59]
But it would not be fair to say that Pennington’s reforms exclusively rewarded the police. Assessing his first year as chief, Pennington pointed out that murder rates had dropped, especially in public housing areas, and civilian complaints also dropped after the initial spike encouraged by his reforms in the process. In its first eight months, the Public Integrity Division initiated over nine hundred investigations, resulting in “thirty-eight arrests, indictments, or summonses; eighty-nine suspensions; eighteen dismissals; and twenty-four resignations or retirements from officers under investigation.”[60] By the end of his time as chief, Pennington had “arrested, fired, or replaced” over three hundred NOPD officers.[61]
Mary Howell, the lawyer who so adamantly argued the case for reform a year prior, was encouraged by Pennington’s performance thus far but added a prescient qualification. “What he’s done is the easy stuff, but it’s a breath of fresh air,” she told the Times-Picayune. “This next phase is going to be much more difficult, because now Pennington has to deal with the culture that has been allowed to exist [in the NOPD] that tolerates corruption and brutality.”[62] Howell’s distinction between operational and cultural transformation predicted Worden and McLean’s warning against the “superimpos[ition]” of reforms “on the existing structures.”[63]
With the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, it would be difficult to argue that Pennington was successful in addressing the culture that Howell (and so many others) distrusted. In 2002, Morial’s term as mayor ended, as did Pennington’s tenure as chief. They were succeeded by Ray Nagin and Eddie Compass respectively, two men who would be made infamous by their statements and actions amid the chaos of Hurricane Katrina three years later. Under Compass, many of Pennington’s reforms were rolled back, marking what Leonard Moore calls a “return to the NOPD’s decades-old tradition of lawlessness.”[64] Instances of police misconduct gradually climbed back to pre-reform rates, exploding in what could accurately be described as a deluge of police scandals that followed the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.[65] In 2013, New Orleans was finally placed under a federal consent decree, requiring further federal oversight of the department.
Nor did the Public Integrity Division, Pennington’s small step toward legitimate civilian review, succeed long-term in separating misconduct investigations from the misconduct being investigated. In 2006, twelve years after its creation, investigations by the division (now the Public Integrity Bureau) resulted in fifteen arrests and over one hundred officers were fired or encouraged to resign. While these numbers indicated that the bureau was not totally ineffective, it managed to investigate fewer than four hundred complaints of the over eight hundred made that year.[66] In recent years, the bureau has proven to be a potential source of corruption in its own right. In 2022, officers at the bureau, including a former commanding officer, were included among over forty officers the FBI believed to be involved in a scheme to falsify timesheets and thus inflate paychecks.[67] When federal and city authorities began flirting with ending the consent decree, opponents to this proposal insisted that such a move must be predicated on increased civilian oversight.[68] The consent decree entered a two-year “sustainment period” in January 2025 despite concerns that the system of internal investigation at the NOPD had made no noticeable improvements in the intervening twelve years.[69] As of April 2025, the Public Integrity Bureau continued to operate with the direct involvement of the police department itself.
In 2002, a task force (including Mary Howell among its members) was formed to address police brutality and recommended the creation of a third body dedicated to investigating police misconduct.[70] This proposal foundered quickly; it was submitted to the city budget committee where it, according to Howell, “vanished.”[71] But frequent police scandals renewed the discussion several times over the next few years.[72] In 2009, this “independent monitor,” as it was termed, was finally created but stymied from the jump by its lack of enforcement power and the NOPD’s refusal to provide access to its internal affairs database.[73] According to the head of an equivalent body in Los Angeles, “The idea that the independent monitor would not have full and complete access is an odd notion.” His Denver counterpart went further, saying that this limitation made it “impossible to monitor what internal affairs is doing.”[74] Certainly familiar with disappointment by this time, Howell recalled, “We have had waves of reform before and right now we are in the midst of one … It’s a time to be enthusiastic and cautious. We’ve had reforms before that have not lasted. The question now is how do we have reforms that can be sustained.”[75] When Howell spoke of feeling a mix of enthusiasm and caution, she likely spoke for many New Orleanians.
Operation Shattered Shield shares many commonalities with the Los Angeles Rampart scandal that began to unfold less than three years later, in which dozens of police with the CRASH anti-gang unit were implicated in a network of crime and graft, including but not limited to drug dealing, bank robbery, evidence-planting, and perjury. But the scandals differed on at least one significant point. In the years following Rampart, courts overturned more than one hundred criminal convictions made possible by acts of perjury, evidence-planting, and witness-tampering committed by LAPD officers.[76] It has been credibly argued that this is a fraction of the number of people serving prison sentences due to LAPD misconduct,[77] but even this was considerably more effort than any contemporary New Orleans officials made for those wrongfully convicted in New Orleans thanks to Len Davis and his cohorts. In 2022, twenty-eight years since Len Davis’s crimes became public knowledge, three men had their convictions overturned after almost thirty years in prison. They had been found guilty of a murder committed only a few months before Groves’s murder, thanks to witness-tampering by Davis and a possible violation of the Brady rule (which requires the prosecution to release all potentially exculpatory information to the defense).[78]
Much like in Los Angeles, there was an obvious anxiety among city and police officials in New Orleans that the review of all cases touched by corrupt cops would result in mass exonerations and damage the department’s image even more. These men lost nearly three decades of their lives thanks in part to city officials’ indifference and hesitance to begin pulling that particular loose string. Mary Howell, still invested in the Davis case after all these years, called this “an example of system failure.”[79] As these three men filed lawsuits against the city and the district attorney’s office, the stories of others wrongly convicted thanks to Davis came to light.[80] For these men and the unnumbered others characterized by reporter Brian Fairbanks as “hidden victims … still behind bars because of [Davis’s] corrupt or shoddy police work,” reform in the New Orleans Police Department was effectively a moot point.[81]
Conclusion
Reform is necessarily a temporary measure. This applied especially to police reform in the twentieth century, the most promising instances of which were snuffed in the crib or otherwise neutralized well before their stated goals were fulfilled. There are aspects of the New Orleans Police Department ten, twenty, thirty years after their crimes that would seem foreign to Len Davis and Antoinette Frank, as well as the other cops convicted or otherwise dismissed amid Operation Shattered Shield and Pennington’s subsequent house-cleaning. But there has remained plenty in the department that might make them feel at home. Pennington’s reforms failed to make a lasting impact on the culture of the department, dependent as they were on the approval and support of subsequent leadership. Brutality and corruption remained a central characteristic of the NOPD going into the new century, as evidenced by the scandals of Hurricane Katrina, the consent decree eight years later, and the various smaller instances of misconduct that mark the last twenty-six years. The NOPD has continued to make headlines for its failure to discipline abusive and corrupt cops. In April 2025, a local news investigation discovered that more than two dozen NOPD officers remained on the force despite previously being found guilty of crimes ranging from drunk-driving and hit-and-run to assault and interference in a federal investigation.[82] Nevertheless, in November of that year, a federal judge ended the consent decree (one of several consent decrees terminated in the first year of the second Trump administration), removing the NOPD from federal oversight over the objections of community organizers.[83] Despite what these moves toward renewed departmental independence may suggest, the reforms implemented in the 1990s failed to effect radical change, and there ultimately remains very little to distinguish the NOPD of 1994 from the NOPD of 2026.
[1] Frank Donze, “Sources: D.C. Cop Tops List,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 7 October 1994.
[2] Christopher Cooper, “Serious Reform Likely to Be First Order of Business,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 14 October 1994.
[3] Michael Perlstein, “Rank-and-File Cops Greet News with Optimism, Apprehension,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 14 October 1994; Paul Keegan, “The Thinnest Blue Line,” The New York Times, 31 March 1996.
[4] “N.O. Woman Is Fatally Shot,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 15 October 1994; Michael Perlstein and Walt Philbin, “Cop, Two Others Charged in Death,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 6 December 1994; James Varney, “Trust in Police Vanishes as Horror Stories Unfold,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 14 December 1994.
[5]For literature on the history of reforms in the LAPD, see Erwin Chemerinsky, “The Rampart Scandal & the Criminal Justice System in Los Angeles County,” Guild Practitioner 57, no. 3 (July 2000); Edward J. Escobar, “Bloody Christmas & the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police Department, Mexican Americans, & Police Reform in the 1950s,” Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 2 (May 2003); Paul Kaplan, “Looking Through the Gaps: A Critical Approach to the LAPD’s Rampart Scandal,” Social Justice 36, no.1 (Spring 2009); James Lasley, Los Angeles Police Department Meltdown: The Fall of the Professional-Reform Model of Policing (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2013); Max Felker-Kantor, “Liberal Law & Order: The Politics of Police Reform in Los Angeles,” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 5 (2017).
For literature on the history of reforms in the NYPD, see Judith A. Greene, “Zero Tolerance: A Case Study of Police Policies & Practices in New York City,” Crime & Delinquency 45, no. 2 (April 1999) and Themis Chronopoulos, “Police Misconduct, Community Opposition, & Urban Governance in New York City, 1945-1965,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 4 (July 2018). See also George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows: The Police & Neighborhood Safety,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1982, which heavily influenced Bratton’s quality-of-life model of policing.
Finally, for literature not specific to any city or covering multiple cities, see Lawrence W. Sherman, Scandal & Reform: Controlling Police Corruption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Eric H. Monkkonen, “History of Urban Police,” Crime & Justice 15 (1992); Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberal Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Robert Worden and Sarah McLean, The Mirage of Police Reform: Procedural Justice & Police Legitimacy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Robin S. Engel, Hannah D. McManus, and Gabrielle T. Isaza, “Moving Beyond Best Practice: Experiences in Police Reform & a Call for Evidence to Reduce Officer-Involved Shootings,” Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science 687, no. 1 (2020); Max Felker-Kantor, “To Protect & to Serve: Police, Power, & the Production of Inequality in the United States,” Crime & Justice 53 (2024).
[6] Leonard N. Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality & African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010): 18-36; Kyle P. Willshire, “Aaron Kohn Attacks Corruption in New Orleans: An Intersection of Media & Politics, 1953-1955,” master’s thesis (University of New Orleans, 2013): 22-42; Fernando Rodriguez, “Lewd & Lascivious: French Quarter Clean-Up Campaigns by Business & Civic Organizations in 1950s New Orleans,” PhD diss. (Louisiana State University, 2021): 135-141.
[7] “Plan ‘Public Airing’ of Police Brutality Charges – Victims to Tell Story First Hand,” Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans, LA), 2 July 1966; “CCOPM Meets with Mayor, Police Chief,” Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans, LA), 24 September 1966; “Citizen-Police Body Proposed – Procedure for Handling Complaints, One Aim,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 24 September 1966.
[8] Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans, 43-69; “Black Policemen Seek Full Equality, Submit Eight Point List of Proposals,” Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans, LA), 18 January 1969; “New Orleans NAACP Raps ‘Shoot to Kill’ Order,” Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans, LA), 23 September 1972; “Black Legislators Call for Police Review Board,” Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans, LA), 7 October 1972; “Black Policemen Organize to Get Public Cooperation, Vow to Put an End to Brutality,” Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans, LA), 13 October 1973.
[9] Don Lewis, “Drake Opposes Citizen Board,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 16 November 1972; Nancy Weldon, “Magri Is Honored at Party,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 25 April 1975.Ben Young, “Ad Hoc Committee Backs Davis Resolution,” Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans, LA), 29 January 1977.
[10] Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans, 70-116.
[11] Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans, 138-142; “Morial to Face a Task,” Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans, LA), 19 November 1977.
[12] Brendan McCarthy, “Glover Case Echoes Era of Algiers Seven—Lessons of Thirty Years Ago Were Never Learned, Some Say,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 7 November 2010; Keegan, “The Thinnest Blue Line;” “Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality & Accountability in the United States: New Orleans,” Human Rights Watch, June 1998, www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/police/uspo93.htm.
[13] Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans, 184-196; Bruce Eggler, “Independent Monitor Urged for N.O. Police—Brutality Complaints Revive 2002 Proposal,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 28 April 2006.
[14] Jim Mustian, “A Murder Twenty Years Ago Marked Low Point for NOPD,” New Orleans Advocate, 11 October 2014; Perlstein, Philbin, “Cop, Two Others Charged in Death,” 6 December 1994.
[15] James Fyfe, paraphrased in Keegan, “The Thinnest Blue Line,” 31 March 1996.
[16] Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans, 219-220.
[17] Jerri Williams, interview with Juan Jackson, FBI Retired Case File Review, podcast audio, 19 June 2017; Michael Perlstein, “Drugs & Death Discussed on Tapes – FBI Bugged Indicted Cops,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 13 December 1994. Most of the minute details of the FBI operation are taken from. these two sources.
[18] Michael Perlstein, “Officer Had a History of Complaints – Sources: Probe May Lead to Arrest of Eleven Other Cops,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 7 December 1994.
[19] Iris Kelso, “Morial Should Make NOPD Changes,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 15 December 1994.
[20] Perlstein, Philbin, “Cop, Two Others Charged in Death,” 6 December 1994.
[21] Williams, interview with Jackson, FBI Retired Case File Review, 19 June 2017.
[22] Williams, interview with Jackson, FBI Retired Case File Review, 19 June 2017; Michael Perlstein and Walt Philbin, “Nine Cops Charged in Drug Sting,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 8 December 1994. Jackson put the total number of cops targeted by the probe at twenty-six.
[23] Eddie Jordan, Jr., quoted in Perlstein, Philbin, “Nine Cops Charged in Drug Sting,” 8 December 1994.
[24] Jordan, Jr., quoted in James Varney, “District Known for Bad Cops,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 9 December 1994.
[25] Perlstein, Philbin, “Nine Cops Charged in Drug Sting,” 8 December 1994.
[26] Richard Pennington and Marc Morial, quoted in Perlstein, Philbin, “Nine Cops Charged in Drug Sting,” 8 December 1994.
[27] Perlstein, Philbin, “Nine Cops Charged in Drug Sting,” 8 December 1994.
[28] Michael Perlstein, “Miles to Go – City’s New Top Cop Calmly Begins a Monumental Rebuilding Task,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 18 December 1994.
[29] Alfred Charles, “Police Told to Explain Hiring – Council Angry Over Cop’s Past,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 16 December 1994.
[30] Richard Pennington, paraphrased in “More Cops, More Responsibility,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 21 December 1994.
[31] “More Cops, More Responsibility,” 21 December 1994.
[32] Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans, 232-236; James Varney, “Report Blames PANO – Main Obstacle in Reform, It Says,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 18 October 1995.
[33] James Varney, “Police Chief Hails Progress – First Year Was Full of Changes,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 11 October 1995.
[34] Keegan, “The Thinnest Blue Line,” 31 March 1996.
[35] Keegan, “The Thinnest Blue Line,” 31 March 1996.
[36] Perlstein, Philbin, “Cop, Two Others, Charged in Death,” 6 December 1994. “N.O. Woman Is Fatally Shot,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 15 October 1994 first announced Kim Groves’s murder, but this article is brief and makes no mention of Len Davis’s involvement, which was not public knowledge at that point.
[37] Varney, “District Known for Bad Cops,” 9 December 1994; Varney, “Trust in Police Vanishes as Horror Stories Unfold,” 14 December 1994; Kelso, “Morial Should Make NOPD Changes,” 15 December 1994; James Gill, “Could Murder Have Been Avoided?” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 23 December 1994; “NOPD Reforms: Time to Just Do It,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 2 January 1995.
[38] Kelso, “Morial Should Make NOPD Changes,” 15 December 1994.
[39] Varney, “District Known for Bad Cops,” 9 December 1994.
[40] Perlstein, “Officer Had a History of Complaints,” 7 December 1994.
[41] Kelso, “Morial Should Make NOPD Changes,” 15 December 1994.
[42] Perlstein, “Officer Had a History of Complaints,” 7 December 1994.
[43] Varney, “Trust in Police Vanishes as Horror Stories Unfold,” 14 December 1994.
[44] Varney, “Trust in Police Vanishes,” 14 December 1994.
[45] Keegan, “The Thinnest Blue Line,” 31 March 1996.
[46] Brian Fairbanks, “The Last Shall Be First,” The Atavist, April 2024.
[47] “Police Reforms: Good Start,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 14 January 1995.
[48] “Sweeping Change Ahead for Police,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 15 January 1995.
[49] “Sweeping Change Ahead for Police,” 15 January 1995.
[50] Bill Voelker, “Ex-Cop Added to List from FBI Drug Sting,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 23 February 1995.
[51] James Varney, “U.S. Might Seek Death Penalty for Cop,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 11 January 1995.
[52] Michael Perlstein, “FBI Agents Assigned to Probe N.O. Cops,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 24 January 1995; Elizabeth Gleick, “The Crooked Blue Line,” Time, 11 September 1995.
[53] Christopher Cooper, “Internal Affairs Unit Open for Business,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 11 February 1995.
[54] Michael Perlstein and Calvin Baker, “NOPD Officer Charged in Slaying of Cop, Two Others,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 5 March 1995.
[55] Pennington, quoted in Perlstein, Baker, “NOPD Officers Charged in Slaying of Cop, Two Others,” 5 March 1995.
[56] Iris Kelso, “The Coming Apart of the NOPD,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 9 March 1995.
[57] Alfred Charles, “NOPD Work in Bars Is Out, New Anti-Corruption Unit Is In,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 13 January 1995.
[58] James Varney, “Department Cleaning Up Act, Pennington Tells Commission,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 30 June 1995.
[59] Varney, “Department Cleaning Up Act, Pennington Tells Commission,” 30 June 1995.
[60] Varney, “Police Chief Hails Progress,” 11 October 1995.
[61] Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans, 224.
[62] Mary Howell, quoted in Varney, “Police Chief Hails Progress,” 11 October 1995.
[63] Worden and McLean, The Mirage of Police Reform, 182.
[64] “Richard Pennington Made New Orleans a Safer Place,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 7 May 2017; Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans, 255.
[65] Ronnie Greene, Shots on the Bridge: Police Violence & Cover-Up in the Wake of Katrina (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015).
[66] Brendan McCarthy, “Policing the Police—Public Integrity Bureau Tries to Keep Cops on the Straight & Narrow,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 13 April 2007.
[67] John Simerman, “Eleven New Orleans Police Officers Now Under Federal Investigation Over Details Pay,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 6 May 2022.
[68] John Simerman, “Federal Overseers Praise NOPD’s New Push for Civilians & Defend Reforms at Public Forums,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 29 September 2022.
[69] John Simerman, “After Twelve Years, Federal Judge Moves NOPD to the Exit Ramp of Court Oversight,” New Orleans Advocate, 14 January 2025.
[70] Frank Donze, “Council Backs Police Monitor—Committee to Work Out Details of Plan,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 21 February 2003.
[71] Mary Howell, quoted in Bruce Nolan, “Police Chief Open to Change After Shooting—Hiring an Independent Monitor, Buying Safer Weapons Considered,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 30 December 2005.
[72] Bruce Eggler, “Independent Monitor Urged for N.O. Police—Brutality Complaints Revive 2002 Proposal,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 28 April 2006; Laura Maggi, “N.O. Police Watchdog to Focus on Big Picture—Citizen Complaint Trends to Be Analyzed,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 9 August 2008.
[73] Michelle Krupa, “Forty Apply for N.O. Police Monitor Position—Post Should Be Filled by Middle of Summer,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 1 June 2009; Laura Maggi, “Police Monitor’s Function Remains Clouded—New Agency Is Still a Work in Progress,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 26 December 2009.
[74] Merrick Bobb and Richard Rosenthal, quoted in Maggi, “Police Monitor’s Function Remains Clouded,” 26 December 2009.
[75] Mary Howell, quoted in Gwen Filosa, “Monitor Assume Key Role at NOPD—Victim’s Daughter Marks Milestone,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 11 November 2010.
[76] Chemerinsky, “The Rampart Scandal & the Criminal Justice System in Los Angeles County,” 128; Kaplan, “Looking Through the Gaps,” 61. For additional sources on the Rampart scandal, see note 5.
[77] Russell Covey, “Police Misconduct as a Cause of Wrongful Convictions,” Washington University Law Review 90, no. 4 (June 2013).
[78] Jillian Kramer, “A Corrupt New Orleans Cop Accused Them of Murder—Now They’re Being Freed from Prison,” New Orleans Advocate, 19 October 2022. A joint motion filed in 2022 reported that the prosecutor had failed to share proof of inconsistencies in the testimony of its sole eyewitness. Seven witnesses corroborated the defendants’ alibis.
[79] Mary Howell, quoted in Jillian Kramer, “A Corrupt New Orleans Cop Accused Them of Murder,” 19 October 2022.
[80] Jillian Kramer, “Bad Cop, Bad System: Wrongfully Convicted Men Sue DA’s Office, City, Alleging Widespread Neglect,” New Orleans Advocate, 17 October 2023.
[81] Fairbanks, “The Last Shall Be First,” April 2024.
[82] Stephen Stock, Dannah Sauer, and Jon Turnipseed, “Officers Accused of Misconduct Remain in NOPD,” Fox 8 (New Orleans, LA), WVUE, 28 April 2025.
[83] John Simerman, “Federal Judge Terminates NOPD Consent Decree, Ending Twelve-Year Oversight of Police Force,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 19 November 2025; Gloria Oladipo, “The U.S. Cities Left Behind as Trump Ends Key Police Accountability Reforms,” The Guardian, 25 July 2025.
