Federal oversight of the New Orleans Police Department, which began nearly 13 years ago under a wide-ranging federal consent decree, has been terminated, following an informal “final proceeding” in front of U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan, who has presided over the sweeping reform agreement through its entire run.
“The NOPD is a transformed agency and serves as a national model for other agencies. This is not meant to suggest NOPD has finished its journey,” Morgan said at the proceeding on Wednesday. “There is much work to be done.”
On Wednesday afternoon, after the proceeding ended, Morgan signed the order dissolving the NOPD consent decree.
The final proceeding for the consent decree — a court-enforced agreement between the city and the U.S. Department of Justice that was meant to bring the department into compliance with constitutional policing standards — did not happen in federal court, but rather in a packed Loyola Law School conference room.
Those in attendance included Mayor-elect Helena Moreno, District Attorney Jason Williams, Sheriff-elect Michelle Woodfork and other members of the New Orleans City Council. Also in attendance were former NOPD Superintendents Sean Ferguson and Michael Harrison. Mayor LaToya Cantrell was not in attendance.
Also notably absent from the invitation-only proceeding were any voices critical of the move. Outside the building however, a group of protesters slammed the termination of the consent decree, saying the department was not ready to be freed of federal oversight.
‘New Orleans was known as a troubled agency’
The agreement, introduced in 2012 and approved by Morgan in 2013, followed a scathing Department of Justice investigation identifying a pattern of unconstitutional practices, including racially-biased policing. That review was requested by then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu, in the wake of revelations about wide-ranging NOPD abuse in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, including the Danziger Bridge shootings, which claimed the lives of two Black men — Ronald Madison and James Brissette, who were both unarmed — and left four other unarmed civilians injured.
Speaking before the judge on Wednesday, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said the department has been transformed over the past decade.
“New Orleans was known as a troubled agency. … Just watching CNN and the aftermath of Katrina confirmed that reputation,” she said. “Transformation is more than reformation. It occurs when there is a change of thinking and when there is a change of thinking there will always be a change of culture. That is what makes the NOPD a model for 21st century policing today. It is not only reformed, it is transformed.”
The city of New Orleans, under Cantrell, has been trying to exit the consent decree for years, arguing that the department has shown enough progress to get out from under the oversight of Morgan and a team of court-appointed federal monitors. But things are coming to an end sooner than the city would have hoped just a few months ago, due to the Trump administration’s distaste for such police-reform agreements.
Early this year, Morgan, finding that the department had made significant progress toward compliance, even if it was still short of full compliance, approved placing the department on a two-year “sustainment period” toward ending the consent decree.
Prior to that decision, the city had pushed for an immediate termination, but civil rights attorneys with the Biden Justice Department would not agree to it, insisting on the two-year offramp. At the time, Morgan agreed.
Since then, the DOJ, now under Trump, has changed its position. The current administration has repeatedly criticized such reform agreements as overly broad, saying they keep local police departments from being able to properly do their jobs. DOJ lawyers earlier this year moved to dismiss similar agreements in Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, only months after they were negotiated.
Where the Biden DOJ had assented to a two-year soft landing for the NOPD, the Trump DOJ joined the city in asking for the immediate end to the consent decree. With both parties to the consent decree now in agreement about immediate termination, Morgan said in October that she would grant the request.
On Wednesday, DOJ attorney Jonas Geissler, who co-authored a motion requesting Morgan to approve the two-year sustainment period in late 2024, disputed that national politics brought the consent decree to an end more than a year early.
“Some may say the national political change is a reason for the completion of this consent decree. Couldn’t be further from the case. NOPD has done the work,” Geissler said.
Jonathan Aronie, who has led the court-appointed monitoring team that oversees the department since 2013, said when he first visited New Orleans in 2013, many people in the community told him the consent decree would fail because the police department would fail, as it always had. The stories they told about police abuses continue to haunt him, but the critics were wrong, he said.
“The consent decree empowered the good, hardworking, forward-thinking officers of the department to police the way they always wanted to police. It gave them the leverage to push back against destructive norms and unfair systems,” he said Wednesday. “The consent allowed the good kids to take back the playground, and they have.”
At the time of its 2012 unveiling during a press conference at Gallier Hall, then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder described the agreement as “one of the most wide-ranging” in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The consent decree was initially expected to last five years at a cost of $55 million, former Mayor Mitch Landrieu estimated in 2013, when he was pushing Morgan to reject the agreement. (Landrieu initially supported the consent decree. He changed his mind after a second consent decree, over the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, was making its way toward adoption — citing the burden to the city of paying for both agreements at the same time. The Sheriff’s Office remains under that consent decree today.)
As it turned out, it would last nearly 13 years. The total cost is a moving target. State Attorney General Liz Murrill, who has opposed the consent decree, claimed in a letter to Morgan last year that the agreement has cost the city more than $150 million. The city, on the other hand, pegged the cost at closer to $61 million, according to a report from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor last year. (Morgan said on Wednesday that one component, fees for the monitoring team, has cost the city about $20 million over the course of the consent decree.)
The primary source for Murrill’s figure appears to be a Gambit article from 2012, before the consent decree went into effect, detailing the city’s estimate at the time for annual costs. That estimate — $11 million per year — was based on a five-year timeline for the consent decree and included several large one-time expenses for setting up new systems, rather than expenses that were expected to be ongoing over the entire life of the agreement.
“I congratulate the City of New Orleans on reaching this milestone, which I have been advocating for since I was elected. Federal consent decrees are expensive, have limited utility, and should end as soon as possible,” Murrill said in a statement, adding that the consent decree imposed indirect costs on the city, along with the direct costs included in the Legislative Auditor’s 2024 report. “These costs are imposed throughout the system, including the overtime required to police a city with an understaffed department and to pay for the judicial and administrative bureaucracy that profits from extended oversight.”
Questions about consent-decree policies as court oversight ends
The 130-page agreement was intended to completely reshape the department, covering everything from off-duty police security details — which were described in the DOJ report as the “aorta of corruption” within the NOPD — to procedures for investigating police shootings.
The consent decree demanded the adoption of a new policy book for the department. Some of the new policies proved unpopular with the rank-and-file, such as restrictions on paid details for officers; or criminal-justice hawks, such as a prohibition on high-speed pursuits in non-violent cases. In 2017 and 2018, one policy, which places limits on NOPD personnel assisting in federal immigration enforcement, drew negative attention from immigration hardliners in the federal government, including then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Sen. John Kennedy.
Some have pointed to policies enacted under the consent decree as a cause of the dramatic drop in officers the department has seen in the past several years.
It’s not clear what will happen with the policies. Members of the New Orleans City Council have recently indicated an interest in codifying at least some of them into law.
The immigration policy, in particular, may prove to be a major point of debate in the near future, as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is deploying a surge of Border Patrol agents to the New Orleans metro area, echoing recent efforts in Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina. The operation, called “Swamp Sweep” is set to begin next month.
In a radio interview with WBOK, previously reported by The Times-Picayune, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said she would be a “partner” to the federal agents. But, she added, NOPD officers will not be conducting immigration arrests or asking people about their immigration status.
Outside the college of law, a group of protesters made their dissatisfaction with the end of the consent decree known, with some pointing specifically to the imminent Border Patrol surge. One of the protesters, Toni Jones of the New Orleans Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression, said the decision was “entirely political.”
“Donald Trump doesn’t want any legal barriers to ICE agents running amok in the streets,” she said. “This is part of Donald Trump’s declaration of war on America, especially its Black and brown cities.”
In an interview prior to Wednesday’s proceeding, Aronie declined to comment on the immigration policy or the Swamp Sweep operation. An NOPD spokesperson said the department “will not change anything with regard to immigration.”
Progress under consent decree, but problems remain
The department has demonstrated progress under federal court oversight. Late last year, the consent decree monitoring team reported that between 2015 and 2023, serious uses of force by NOPD officers had decreased by 47%. The department has also reported decreases in car chases that resulted in property damage and complaints alleging bias.
NOPD Major Precious Banks, who is Black, said Wednesday that she grew up in parts of New Orleans where opportunities for people of color were rare, and where she witnessed abuses by the police department and how some officers targeted people because of how they looked.
She said she understood why some people were wary of the police. But she believed that policing could be done differently, better, which is why she joined the department. She described the consent decree as a “turning point” that made officers listen to the citizens of New Orleans, reinforce the importance of compassion, implement accountability systems and prioritize ethical policing.
“Doing the right thing isn’t always easy but it is always necessary,” she said.
But some civil rights and police-reform advocates say the department has not yet made enough progress — questioning whether this exit is premature. Investigation of sex crimes remains a persistent issue, with the department at a decade low in clearing sexual assault cases. In a lengthy comment submitted to the court last year — when Morgan was first considering putting the department on a multi-year sustainment plan — civil rights attorney Mary Howell and Julie Ford, a sexual assault survivor who has closely studied the department’s data on sexual assault investigations, wrote that the consent decree was a chance to make change in “a meaningful and lasting way” when it comes to sex crimes.
Additional public commenters said at the time that they were wary of ending federal court oversight due to other ongoing problems in the department. Some pointed to privacy concerns over predictive policing; officers committing payroll fraud; ineffective community advisory boards; and problems with the Public Integrity Bureau, NOPD’s internal affairs unit.
Departmental data shows that officers continue to disproportionately use force against Black men. After reviewing NOPD use-of-force numbers, a data analyst from the ACLU of Louisiana last year said that racial disparities remain a “stark and persistent issue” in the department’s use of force practices.
“For the people of New Orleans, federal oversight is imperative for ensuring accountability, safeguarding vulnerable populations and fostering equitable treatment within the NOPD,” the organization said in a statement following Morgan’s October announcement that she would allow the city to exit the consent decree.
Though he said he believed the consent decree has been a success, Aronie added that it is important to remain mindful of the people who are not celebrating the end of the consent decree and federal oversight.
“While the NOPD has every reason to celebrate this moment we also know that some in the community have had difficult even traumatic experiences over the years, experiences that have left scars that won’t simply vanish because I say the NOPD as an institution has changed.”
Katie Jane Fernelius contributed reporting.
This story was originally published by Verite News and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
