Rat jokes

On most days, it's hardly surprising to learn that somebody might walk into City Hall and loudly proclaim that they smell a rat. It just isn't always quite so literal as this.

According to these sources, the city recently decided to exterminate the rodents in the hall. But while it may have succeeded in culling the rodent population, it also apparently left a lot of carcasses in its wake, which as they decomposed have apparently released a potent cloud of noxious fumes into the building.

According to one source, there could be thousands of rat corpses left behind in city hall and that some of the bodies may have "exploded," presumably due to the petrification process.

NOPD's stoner rats declined to comment.

That's Gambit's John Stanton sharing the scuttlebutt with us there. I think he means "putrefaction process" instead of petrification there. Don't worry. We'll get that cleaned up in copy editing before it goes to publish. 

I've been watching everyone's similarly labored attempts online to merge the previous popular rodent meme with the most recent one and I think I may have it. 

When you walk into City Hall and start to go woozy from the putrefied rat fumes, does that mean you are also high?

Right?

Folks?

Better?

Okay maybe not. 

Anyway, I'm sure it smells petty bad. But, as someone who has been around the block a few times, I should point out that this "thousands of dead rats in the walls" story is a common urban legend in New Orleans. (And probably in a lot of other cities too.) It's a tall tale I've heard a few times from different bosses or co-workers. There's always a story about a building downtown where so-and-so "used to work" when they opened up the walls for some reason and found the Khmer Rouge of rats in there. 

This doesn't mean there isn't some truth to it. Animals do die and rot in buildings sometimes and it is unpleasant.  I just think John's source on the "could be thousands of rat corpses" angle is probably repeating a version of the popular hearsay. 

Consider also that the culture at City Hall is very, well, anti-City Hall as a physical space.  In March, the city approved a land swap agreement with the state that should clear the way to construct a new building just across Perdido Street.  I don't think a construction timeline has been announced yet, though. And there are likely several steps remaining toward approving a budgetary allocation all of which will require continuing political pressure.  So any number of exploding rat carcasses can probably help with that. 

The more of those that can be conjured, the better. Which is another reason you are probably reading about "thousands" of them today.  Recall that dubious rat memes helped move NOPD into a suspicious deal for a new HQ this year. Might as well stick with what works.

Selling the public

Judge Morgan is making noises like she's finally ready to release NOPD from the consent decree. 

The prospect of reduced monitoring, on the way to ending oversight, came into focus this week. U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan, who has tracked the reforms since their start, heard a positive report on officer bias, then bluntly requested a plan to launch the NOPD into a two-year "sustainment" phase under the 2012 reform pact known as a consent decree.

"We need to begin putting the framework in place," she said Wednesday.

I don't know enough about their "officer bias" metrics to speak with much authority. Having said that, it's clearly all bullshit that can mean whatever they want it to mean whenever they want it to mean that.  Anyway if NOPD says they're doing a better job, there are reasons to remain skeptical.  

For example, we know the consent decree places limits on high speed chases that pose an unreasonable danger to life and property such as this one that killed two teens in 2019. And yet just this week we saw officers racing through Uptown in pursuit of suspects. And in a separate incident only a few days later, an NOPD officer crashed into a utility pole on St. Charles Avenue knocking out power for approximately 1000 residents. In what way is this progress?

We can look also at the several law enforcement agencies currently operating in New Orleans outside of the federal mandates. This week the 5th Circuit is hearing a case about two private patrol officers who held a teenager at gunpoint after he asked them for help looking for his lost dog. And, of course, many concerns remain about the newly installed State Troop NOLA.

U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan, who oversees reforms to the New Orleans Police Department under a consent decree, has expressed concern over the new troop’s role in the city and LSP’s transparency about it, though she has no direct say over how troopers operate within city limits.

Landry insisted Tuesday that officials had consulted with the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI regarding its activities and that troopers in New Orleans have acted “in the most professional manner.”

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been investigating the LSP to assess whether it uses excessive force or engages in racially discriminatory policing in the wake of the 2019 death of Ronald Greene.

All of which leads us to ask: if we have clear examples of police with no oversight behaving badly in New Orleans right now, why would we want to operate NOPD with no restrictions as well? The only answer we can come up with is politics. Morgan is a federal judge and certainly doesn't have to jump whenever the local electeds say jump. But, after a while, even the least credible bullying, like the Governor calling for her impeachment, starts to get the point across. Likely there is additional pressure from all business and political leaders in all corners wanting to get this all wrapped up now that the "Summer of Superbowl" is here.

The way the T-P writes it, you'd think the whole thing is just one big marketing challenge, anyway.

The contrast in tone, tenor and verbiage — optimism in the courtroom among deputy police chiefs, Morgan and the monitors, while community voices drip with skepticism — suggests a challenge in selling the public on the idea that the NOPD is ready to police itself.

"We want Black people to be acknowledged, because it was Black people who were maimed and murdered, who got the consent decree put in place," said Alicia Plummer, vice president of the New Orleans East Business Association.

"Who is speaking for us?...The police and federal monitors, they're in cahoots together."

Is NOPD "ready to police itself?" Not anywhere near as important as, "can we sell the public on the idea?"

Someone should stop the crime that is in progress

 I'd call the police but it looks like they are in on it.

The NOPD has lobbied for new space for years, and Kirkpatrick has made it a top priority since taking over the department in October. Initial lease terms were agreed to in January, but some council members said they had been blindsided when it was unveiled to them in March.

Now a revised lease, up for council consideration in a special meeting on Wednesday, would add significantly more space at a higher cost per square foot. The latest draft adds a third floor to the space at 1615 Poydras Street and increases the total square footage from about 45,000 to 69,000.

The lease rate increases from an average of $170 to $180 per square foot over a decade.

If the New Orleans Police Department occupies the space at 1615 Poydras for all 10 years, the city will pay a total of $12.4 million, an increase from $7.7 million under the initial deal for the smaller space earlier this year. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration did not immediately respond to questions on Tuesday as to why it wants to add more space and agreed to pay a higher rate.

Good luck getting an answer out of them. Maybe it will be on the next podcast. Otherwise maybe FOIA some emails. You know, while that is still legal. 

Anyway... previously on Flip This Office Tower we learned the city had been in talks over this lease for at least six months before Frank Stewart sold the building.  Not sure where this sudden escalator clause came in.  We keep hearing that downtown office space is a soft market. What happened?

Rats gotta eat

First of all we'd like to thank NOPD Chief Anne Kirkpatrick for choosing to drop this Weed Rats meme on us just after Mardi Gras.  It means that everyone who might have had to scramble for ideas a few weeks ago will now have a full year to really sit with the image and decide whether or not it is truly the costume for them. 

Heavy mold and deteriorating elevators, HVAC units and plumbing are some of the issues that have been plaguing New Orleans Police Department headquarters.

But those aren't the only problems at aging police facilities around the criminal justice complex near Tulane Avenue and South Broad Street. Don't forget the vermin, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told the City Council's Criminal Justice Committee on Monday.

"The rats are eating our marijuana," Kirkpatrick said. "They're all high."

The great thing about the weed rats is everybody immediately loves them. But also nobody actually believes they are a thing. I mean, sure, there are rats at police headquarters. That's easy enough to believe. But, if anything is being stolen from the evidence room there, it's far more likely the culprits are in uniform.*  Even more dubious is Kirkpatrick's claim that the rats are "high." Rats can and do get high. We learn that from this study where rats were observed with increased appetite and laziness after exposure to cannabis vapor.  The key bit, however, is the vapor. Could the rats get high from just eating the raw plants?  I don't think it works like that. 

Anyway, why is this colorful fantasy being brought to our attention now?  Well, you see, NOPD wants a new headquarters. Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  They aren't necessarily asking for a new building. We just know they want to move out of the one they have. 

A plan to relocate New Orleans Police Department headquarters into two floors of a downtown office tower is a large piece of a wider vision to leave behind the city’s crumbling justice complex in Mid-City, said chief administrative officer Gilbert Montaño on Wednesday.

About 400 police department staffers are slated to relocate with the pending move to the 17th and 18th floors of 1615 Poydras Street, called the DXC building, he said. The draft 10-year lease, which awaits City Council approval, calls for a May 1 move-in date.

The plan is to abandon the current HQ located in the (geographic) center of the city with its proximity to the criminal courthouse and central lockup and move, instead, into an office tower downtown with limited public access and practically no parking. Oh and also now the city doesn't control the building and is paying rent to a private landlord for at least 10 years. This is short sighted, minor league city type stuff. The police aren't even "allowed" to do police business in the police office. 

Lahasky said the lease will not allow NOPD to conduct interrogations or make arrests within the office building.

“Our agreement with NOPD is that the offices will be utilized as administrative offices, and that certain uses such as interrogations and lineups and things that outsiders perceive as maybe not the kind of uses you’d like to see in an office building” won't be allowed, he said. “Those particular uses are to be held off-site.”

Nothing about this makes any sense in terms of public service.  It does make sense if you come at it from the point of view that the city government exists solely to facilitate real estate deals that benefit the succession plans of fading oligarchs like Frank Stewart.  Which is precisely the sort of thing you might think if you are Gilbert Montaño. 

Negotiations began in earnest about six months ago, Montaño said, when the building was still owned by businessman and philanthropist Frank Stewart. The Monroe businessmen who bought it at the end of last year, brothers Eddie and Joseph Hakim, also own Orleans Tower, the former Amoco Building a few blocks away. The city leases space in that building for the Department of Safety and Permits, Civil District Court clerk and Civil Service Commission, among others. 

Frank Stewart, for those who need a refresher, is a billionaire investor whose fortune derives from his family's funeral home business.  The "philanthropist" descriptor he gets in articles like the one above is an inevitable result of owning lots of things (downtown office towers, for example) and making use of as many tax write-offs as possible.  In recent years, his "charity" work garnering the most attention was his leadership of the Monumental Task Force's attempts to maintain the city's Confederate statues. In 2017, he took out a full page ad in the newspaper denouncing Mitch Landrieu's efforts to have them removed.  Mitch was on his way out of office and working on his national profile at the time.  Because of this, he could afford to ignore Stewart's provincial concerns.  The same could not be said for Stewart's ambitious local ally in the monumental "lost cause," Councilwoman and soon to be Mayor LaToya Cantrell.

On Dec. 17, 2015, the day the City Council voted to remove the monuments, Cantrell, then a council member, gave a speech that must have been music to the ears of the pro-monument crowd, chastising then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu for bringing the issue to light. Amazingly, within the same hour she joined the majority of the council in voting for removal.

In early 2018, within a few months of being elected mayor, Cantrell empowered a secretive working group of Confederate monument supporters to decide the future location of the warehoused monuments. One of her spokesmen stated, “She believes that the future of the former monuments belongs in the hands of those who care about them.”

It’s highly likely that the only reason the mayor didn’t go through with the group’s relocation plan, moving them to another prominent location, was the exposure she received in an article by Kevin Litten published in The Times-Picayune. The article exposed Cantrell’s willingness to placate the side of the argument endorsed by some of the most moneyed and powerful people in the city — the side she voted against as a City Council member.

None of that was surprising. Both mayors (and a number of other state and local politicians) have done plenty of favors for Stewart over the years. In 2017, the same year the monuments controversy came to a head, they all helped swing the deal that gave Stewart's building its "DXC" moniker. That $120 million deal committed the city and the state to a package of subsidies and incentives including an agreement to rebate the payroll of software company DXC in exchange for its promise to occupy ten floors of Stewart's tower. The company and the politicians promised as many as 2,000 new "tech" jobs.

Of course, there were those of us who, just days after the announcement, observed that DXC appeared to be taking advantage of the state's generous corporate welfare offerings in order to facilitate its own global downsizing and outsourcing scheme to cut jobs and wages. But nobody ever listens to those of us who say such things. Anyway as time went on, it became clear that DXC was never committed to hiring locally. Over the following years, they would repeatedly miss the goals set forth in the original agreement. As of 2022, they had nearly scuttled the entire thing and were looking to sub-lease much of their office space in the tower.

In the meantime, The Cantrell Administration has spent plenty of time and energy trying to figure out ways to plug the hole in Stewart's revenue stream.  At one point they even considered moving City Hall into the building.  Which brings us up to last year when we find an aging Stewart trying to liquidate his asset portfolio in a slow market for downtown office space. At the time of the sale, the building was roughly 50 percent vacant. But its buyers, Eddie and Joseph Hakim were strangely bullish on its prospects. Likely the, by then, well underway negotiations over a guaranteed NOPD tenant had something to do with that.

All of this is typical New Orleans cronyism. But it also reflects the conservative ideology at the heart of the Cantrell administration. Gilbert Montano said recently that "the future" of city government should rely more on regressive user fee-based budgeting rather than a reliable tax base for dependable services. Under that kind of regime, there can be no real investment in social or physical infrastructure. City services will exist under continual threat of cuts. City departments won't own their own buildings.  Not even the police.  The only dependable revenue streams created go the other direction. Out of the public coffers and into the hands of corporate landlords.

For his part, (potential mayoral candidate) Oliver Thomas wants to put a pause on the NOPD lease because he doesn't feel adequately communicated toward.

“Not only was there a lack of communication about this viable move, but it seems like there was not a lot of thought put into multiple locations that would provide the best access to the men and women that utilize the headquarters, as well as the citizens to whom access is extremely important,” Councilmember Thomas said in his letter to Montano and Chief Kirkpatrick.

Thomas wants to “take a step back” to review other possible locations for the new NOPD headquarters.

He says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that is more “community-oriented” with easier parking and that could become a more permanent spot that would add “value to the community.” He also says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that would add overall access to residents in the city.

The kids are already joking that maybe Thomas will suggest putting the new HQ at the Six Flags site his friend Troy Henry is supposed to be redeveloping. But it occurs to us that this would put us a step closer to the New Orleans Cop City we've already speculated that Mayor OT might build one day. So maybe it's not that funny. In any case, it wouldn't represent a change in governing philosophy so much as a slight adjustment in the direction of the spoils.  It's never really a question of whether the rats are going to get a piece of the stash so much as it is which rats in particular.

 *That link references an evidence room scandal from 15 years ago.  When I started writing this post, I hadn't yet seen the latest one out just today.  Interesting that after the weed rats got their fifteen minutes of fame, NOPD has moved right along to blaming the conveniently deceased for what is clearly a systemic issue.

Does anybody remember Friedman units?

That thing where you definitely expect conditions to improve "within the next 6 months" or so and then keep pushing that ahead as needed.  Anyway, we might have one of those with the NOPD consent decree now. 

The mood in Morgan's courtroom was relatively convivial Wednesday afternoon at the first public hearing in more than a year on progress with the federal consent decree, and the first for NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick as the city's top cop.

It was a stark contrast to the last series of hearings, where Morgan found the department violated 10 provisions of the consent decree in its internal investigation of Officer Jeffrey Vappie and his work for the mayor. Morgan ultimately declined to hold the city in contempt and accepted a remedial action plan. 

Fulfillment of the plan's 95 actions is among the steps necessary for the department to reach compliance with the consent decree and enter a period of stepped-down monitoring. Of those 95 items, a little under half are done. 

"Our estimated time of completion is June 2024," said Deputy Chief Nicholas Gernon, who along with Kirkpatrick crafted that plan.

We'll check back then, I guess.

Also, here's a somewhat related aside.  On Mardi Gras morning, I got out to take my customary photos of high ranking New Orleans officials leading the Zulu parade on horseback.  Traditionally the mayor does this. But in recent years our current mayor's appearance there has been sporadic. Sometimes there's a councilmember instead. Sometimes it's the Sheriff.  And sometimes, like this year, it's just the police chief. 

Significant in this case, because it is the new Chief, Anne Kirkpatrick. It seemed like a big day for her. Later that night I watched her get interviewed by Errol and Peggy at the Rex ball. This isn't an exact quote below but it does capture the essence. 

 

THEY PUT ME ON A HORSE. I LOVE THE LITTLE HORSE. pic.twitter.com/5xUmStXfyN

— skooks (@skooks) February 14, 2024

Basically, she sounded like this whole gig is just a big fun cruise she's booked. Which might not be too far from the truth but we'll get back to that. 

Anyway, walking about 20 feet ahead of her was former interim Chief (and runner-up to Kirpatrick for the job) Michelle Woodfork.  We all noticed because a woman ran out of the crowd to greet her shouting, "That's MY chief! That's my chief right there!"  

And maybe she's got the right idea. Since we're in a world now where there are multiple police forces reporting to multiple District Attorneys applying multiple standards of justice and policing according to political whim, maybe we should all just pick whatever chief we prefer.

I believe this was a hearing about establishing law and order

I hear there were a  lot of fun public comments but I still was hoping I wouldn't have to watch the recording of this one. Unfortunately, now I may have to.  

A New Orleans City Council committee on Wednesday voted to move the nomination of Mayor LaToya Cantrell's nominee for police chief, Anne Kirkpatrick, to a full council vote, although the 4-1 vote was not technically an endorsement.

Kirkpatrick, a West Coast transplant and veteran police chief, seemed to garner support from committee members in a first-of-its-kind confirmation hearing. Council President JP Morrell's motion for "no recommendation" was something of a compromise after hours of virulent opposition from public speakers and a shouting match between Morrell and Council member Oliver Thomas.

Thomas said he had been leaning against voting to confirm but was open to changing his mind. He took offense when, in his view, council members seemed to presuppose a vote in favor of Kirkpatrick. Morrell and Thomas traded accusations of being out of order, and Thomas suggested they settle the argument outside before tensions cooled.

Imagine challenging someone to a duel right in front of the police chief. 

Anyway, it looks like the hearing and the public comment covered a lot of ground. The article doesn't catalog everything that might have been brought up. It does mention a little bit about Kirkpatrick's experience in Oakland although it isn't clear if that was addressed. 

In Oakland, Kirkpatrick took heat for what critics have called a lack of progress on that city’s court-enforced police reforms, and for her handling of discipline for officers involved in the killing of a homeless man, among other controversies. She was fired by a newly formed police commission. A licensed attorney, Kirkpatrick later won a $1.5 million settlement for wrongful termination after a jury ruled in her favor.

There's a little more to that story. I wrote a little about it a few weeks ago.  It seems to me like the candidate's actual record ought to have at least as much scrutiny as her promises to learn about "local culture" and so forth. But, honestly, this all seems like a formality at this point.

Who appoint-a da chief?

On Friday, Mayor Cantrell (apparently back from France) swore in the person she expects to become the next  "permanent" (at least until the next mayor takes over, anyway) Police Chief. It's Anne Kirkpatrick. As the only of the three finalists who wasn't either a guy who killed a man on a party bus or a politically un-viable interim appointee, she's the perfect fit.

If confirmed by a council majority, Kirkpatrick will make history in other ways. She would become the first female to become NOPD superintendent, coming after Woodfork opened the door as the first female interim chief.

Woodfork, who was one of the three finalists for the job along with Kirkpatrick and Thedrick Andres Sr., was appointed in December to succeed ex-chief Shaun Ferguson when he abruptly retired.

Kirkpatrick, a 35-year police veteran with 20 years in leadership position, last served as police chief in Oakland, Calif. Like Oakland, the NOPD has been laboring under a sweeping federal consent decree to foster Constitutional policing and usher in sound training and leadership.

A few notes here regarding Kirkpatrick's prior experience. There are issues one would hope City Council will address during the confirmation hearings. But the tendency with professional job-hoppers is they are granted a clean slate in each successive city they skip away to. There's always another sucker somewhere. Our city appears ready and willing to become the next.

Anyway, a NOLA.com article raised a bit of this a few weeks ago. One incident highlighted there was Kirkpatrick's role in covering for the cops who rolled a whole SWAT unit up on a homeless man named Joshua Pawlik. They found him sleeping in a park and murdered him.

Kirkpatrick endured intense criticism over her handling of discipline after five officers were involved in the 2018 shooting of a homeless man they’d awoken. The federal monitor over Oakland police wanted much heavier discipline than Kirkpatrick was willing to impose, calling her analysis “disappointing and myopic,” according to reporting by the East Bay Times.

Ali Winston, a journalist who co-authored a recent book on the Riders scandal and policing in Oakland, said Kirkpatrick was brought in to help “break up a frathouse atmosphere” but caved to the rank-and-file.

“She claimed to reverse culture in the department but basically rolled back serious discipline on a number of officers and didn’t follow through with a mandate to ensure consistency of discipline, that all cases are investigated thoroughly,” Winston said.

John Burris, a civil rights attorney involved in the Oakland police reform case, agreed that Kirkpatrick went light on the officers in the case.

“She really made an effort to cover it up,” he said. “She went out of her way to shade things and interpret them in a way that was designed to protect the officers.”

I decided to check out Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham's book this article mentions.  In addition to her mishandling of the Pawlik investigation, it finds several other points of criticism to consider. Here is a quick summary. 

1) At the beginning of the Trump Administration, Kirkpatrick violated the city of Oakland's promise to protect immigrants and instead cooperated with ICE to conduct deportation raids. 

In 2017 Kirkpatrick put her foot on this third rail by ordering several officers to close off a West Oakland street to help ICE agents raid a family's home and arrest two men. The OPD issued a statement afterward claiming ICE was pursuing suspects who were "sex trafficking juveniles." Kirkpatrick said later that her department hadn't violated Oakland's sanctuary policies because the officers were assisting in a criminal "human trafficking" case, and she claimed one person had been charged with a "crime."

In truth, the case had nothing to do with underage sex trafficking, and no one had been charged with a crime. Instead, one of the detained men was charged with a civil violation for being unlawfully present in the United States. He was sent before an immigration judge for possible deportation.

2) The Oakland Black Officers Association alleged that Kirkpatrick discriminated against Black officers and recruits in various ways saying her conduct "hurts our members and the public at large"

3) Under Kirkpatrick, the Oakland Police showed signs of backsliding out of compliance with the dictates of its federal consent decree. Most critically there were problems with use of force violations as well as failures to complete investigations within an appropriate time frame. 

Thus far, the press in New Orleans has shaded Kirkpatrick's "experience" working under a consent decree as a positive. The conventional line seems to be, she is well placed to finally complete the task of getting NOPD into full compliance. But that isn't what her record actually tells us. Rather than work to comply with the consent decree in Oakland, Kirkpatrick worked with outside consultants and PR pros to launch political attacks against the court appointed monitor and call the whole process into question. 

(Judge William) Orrick knew that behind the scenes, Kirkpatrick and other city officials, not just within the police department, were already criticizing (the federal monitor Robert) Warshaw, laying the narrative that it was the monitor's subjective judgments that were the cause of the recent problems, not the OPD's actual misdeeds. More pointedly, current and former officers were lining up to criticize Warshaw, claiming that his views on the OPD's backsliding were influenced by the hefty paychecks he collected from the city. Clashes with city officials and Department of Justice attorneys in Detroit, where Warshaw also served as court monitor over that city's police reforms, were cited as supporting evidence, and even and ex-NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton took shots via Twitter at Judge Orrick and Warshaw over the latter's alleged profiteering. 

Orrick made it clear he would have none of this in his courtoom: across sixteen years, the monitoring team exposed egregious scandals and reined in the OPD at crucial junctures, and it was trying to do this again. "I have complete faith in them and their ability, and they are the eyes and the ears of the court," he said of Warshaw's team.

Kirkpatrick's arguments before the judge in these hearings, though delivered with plenty of "we are doing progressive reforms here" type language, were little more than arrogant cynicism concerned primarily with political "narrative."  This, in Winston and Bondgraham's telling, is the moment where her insincerity became most clear. 

"So, your honor, the OPD is on the move," she said. "We are progressive. We are not regressive."

It was a presentation Orrick could appreciate, balancing the clear and obvious failures during the chief's twenty months on the job with some good work. But Orrick wanted a little more soul-searching from the police commander. "Before you go, Chief, what do you think is your biggest challenge?" he asked.

Kirkpatrick thought about it for a moment and answered: "the narrative."

An astonished look came over the judge's face for a split second before Orrick frowned and asked her if she meant to say communication. 

"No sir. The narrative that we are not moving forward," explained Kirkpatrick. 

"That's what you think your biggest challenge is?"

"I think that's a challenge," the chief replied. "I think there are other -- I think that's the challenge. I think that we do indeed have culture shift. I think that we have failed in explaining the proofs."

It was for these reasons that a citizen-led police oversight commission (no we don't have one of those in New Orleans) decided to fire Kirkpatrick.  Afterward, she remained defiant. Kirkpatrick held a political rally with the police union and their political allies denouncing the consent decree. She also filed a lawsuit against the monitor.  

While that T-P article cited above does acknowledge Kirkpatrick's politically framed attacks on federal police monitoring seem to be on the same wavelength as Cantrell's bucking of the NOPD consent decree, it also shrugs the notion off.  One would hope that City Council, proud as they are of flexing their muscles over appointment powers lately, might take a more critical view.  But something tells me they won't. We'll find out next week.

In the meantime, how about a movie?  That's right, Catch Basin Cinema is back. And in honor of the resolution of the city's police chief search, we watched a movie about another infamous episode in NOPD Chiefing history. It's 1999's VENDETTA, and it's a TV movie about the 1891 lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans following the murder of Police Chief David Hennessy. The movie stars Christopher Walken as sort of the Michael Hecht of his day, leading a Gilded Age NOLA Coalition to control the police department and keep working class communities in line for the benefit of business elites. Intrigue and mayhem ensue.  But what else is new around here, right?

"It's going to be perfectly fine"

Depends on how you define "fine," I guess

Facing a staffing shortage at the New Orleans Police Department that last year forced the city to shorten traditional parade routes, the city announced a plan last week to recruit help from outside sheriffs’ offices. 

To that end, the city entered into a cooperative endeavor agreement with the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office to recruit and manage deputies from outside law enforcement agencies to work Mardi Gras details. At a cost of about $1 million, the plan calls for between 100 and 200 deputies from sheriff’s offices across the state to help the NOPD patrol parade routes between Feb. 10 and 21. 

The plan raised questions as to whether these outside agencies would be required to abide by the terms of the NOPD’s federal consent decree, adopted 10 years ago to ensure that the department — which has a well-documented history of abuse and corruption — would police the city in accordance with constitutional standards. 

The consent decree is supposed to apply to agents of the city and the NOPD, though in the past, outside law enforcement agencies — even one that was brought in to police New Orleans under direct contract with the city — have not been subject to the reform agreement. 

And in this case, Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson’s office has provided a buffer between the city and the outside agencies being brought in for Mardi Gras. 

At a press conference this week announcing the new strategy, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city and the NOPD would “ensure that everyone is on the same page relative to policy, procedures.”

Woodfork said at the same press conference the arrangement was reviewed by the city Law Department, the mayor’s chief administrative officer and she expected it would also be reviewed by the consent decree monitors.

“I think it’s going to be perfectly fine,” she said.

The above is from a Verite story informing us that Deputy Consent Decree Monitor David Douglass has pretty much signed off on the supplemental police plan for Mardi Gras even though there's no way to ensure that they will follow the practices the decree holds NOPD to. The fact that our supposedly reform minded Sheriff is here as well to act as a "buffer" for them just adds to the irony. 

Anyway, the article goes on to explain that the contract the outside agencies sign makes it explicitly clear that they are not subject to the provisions of the consent decree. It also says the outside agencies are shielded from liability. Furthermore, the article cites a famous example from 2015 when Louisiana State Police attacked and falsely arrested a high school student on Bourbon Street in a case that legally established the consent decree exemptions. 

In their complaint, Dotson’s attorneys contended that the troopers were acting as agents of the NOPD and should be bound by the consent decree. When they tried to submit the consent decree and the NOPD policy manual as exhibits, attorneys for the State Police objected, arguing that the agreement applied solely to the NOPD. 

In a 2018 ruling, Morgan, the same judge who is presiding over the consent decree, agreed. She wrote that the exhibits could not be admitted as evidence because it was immaterial to the case. “The LSP is not a party to the Consent Decree, and the Consent Decree does not apply to the LSP,” Morgan wrote.

There are more examples of such abuses. They happen so frequently, in fact, that one almost begins to question whether there is any point to having a consent decree in effect at all. The mayor says this a lot, actually, but I don't think this is what she means by it. Insofar as she ever is saying anything coherent, she sounds like she'd like to see as many police cracking as many skulls as possible. 

And it seems most city councilmembers would agree with her.  In the most recent episode of JP Morrell's podcast, he and Leslie Harris pine for the return of the so-called TIGER "anti-gang" task forces. Federal monitors ordered those units disbanded in 2020 citing numerous violations including improper searches, failure to use body cameras, and reckless tactics like raids and car chases. There was also a case in which task force officers appeared to fabricate evidence for an arrest.

It should also be said that special units like TIGER deployed to so-called "hot spots" with special permission to terrorize residents are precisely the sort of tactics that bring about incidents like the recent brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by police in Memphis, among many others.

The specialized units have been popping up all over the country, proposed in response to reports of rising violent crime. Some of the anti-crime units have been accused of excessive force; in the killing of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor by Louisville, Kentucky, police in 2020, that force was deadly. In addition, the units, as in the case of SCORPION in Memphis, are expensive to maintain, rekindling a national debate about the funding of police departments.

“The SCORPION unit is what ‘fund the police’ rhetoric looks like in reality,” Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell said in a statement to The Intercept. “Instead of pouring more money into militarized forces that brutalize, terrorize, and even murder, we should fund libraries, after-school programs, good jobs, and other investments proven to keep us safe.”

But never mind that, says, JP. "We need all the help we can get," even if that means pulling together hundreds of unaccountable police from outside of the city and sending as many tactical death squads into our neighborhoods as possible. 

On the other hand, Chief Woodfork thinks it's going to be perfectly fine. And if not, hey maybe the robots will fix it. 

In a move reminiscent of former NOPD Superintendent Richard Pennington's COMSTAT strategy, which in 1996 leveraged computers and data to deploy officers to crime hotspots and helped slash the per capita homicide rate by 50%, Woodfork plans to use cutting-edge technology to strategically deploy officers.

That technology includes drones, license plate readers, the "Neighbors by Ring" surveillance program, real time crime cameras and a new fingerprinting system. The department is also considering robot cops, though Woodruff said the initiative is in the preliminary phases.

What could go wrong?

Hello, and welcome to a fabulous New Year of blogging yellowly

Unfortunately this new year is still among the 2020s which, as we all know, are categorically bad. Anyway, I know I've been saying it is time to get the Yellow Blog back into running shape for a while and I know that every time Twitter starts to die, it seems like that is the time to crank it back up over here. But I really do mean it. Maybe this will finally be the thing that does it. 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the character limit for tweets will increase from 280 to 4,000 characters early next month.

The feature, which was first proposed in December, is one of a number of changes to the social media platform that the tech billionaire plans to roll out over the coming months after purchasing it for $44 billion last October.

The increase in character length will be only the second time in Twitter’s 17-year history that it has changed the limit, having previously boosted the original 140 limit to 280 in 2017.

As the big social media sites have absorbed and siloed off the whole internet over the course of the past decade, so has Twitter eaten up more and more of my blog posts. That's mostly because I am incredibly lazy and it's easy to just tweet a half-baked thought out and let it go. But, when I'm doing it right, a blog post shouldn't be longer than one or two tweets anyway. Ideally, this is where the half-baked thoughts are supposed to go. 

But, also, this is supposed to be where I put stuff that I want to remember later. And a chronological, taggable, searchable web log of annotated bookmarks is far better for that purpose than the increasingly unreliable instant gratification machine currently being dismantled by a chaotic billionaire.  And if the tweet stretches out to blog post length anyway, (I just checked. So far this post isn't even over 2,000 characters.) it might as well be posted over here instead.  So this time, we mean it. We're gonna try and put the stuff that happens this year on the Yellow Blog so that it doesn't all blow by in a confusing haze this time. Besides, 2023 makes 20 years of posting here so we need to have a nice round archival number. 

I think what we'll do for a while is try to get at least one post up every day or so that collects some of those annotated bookmarks I mentioned. There are a couple of drafts of longer form writing that have been lingering for a while which I would like to finish but let's wade back into this a step at a time.

With that in mind, here is today's stuff I wrote down so I might remember it later. 

The Louisiana Democrats will need to find their own loser candidate for governor instead of borrowing a Republican loser

Late last year, there was a parlor game discussion going around trying to parse whether Dem-aligned power brokers and/or centrist establishment media would rally around a Bill Cassidy campaign for Governor in 2023. Cassidy is a "weird dude" and a perpetual darling of the Advocate editorial page. But that's not exactly an unassailable coalition to ride up against the Jeff Landry juggernaut. The last reporting we've seen has Landry wielding a $3 million war chest plus the official endorsement of the state Republican Party and multiple Super PACs all of which multiplies his fundraising capacity many times over. Anyway, Cassidy decided it wasn't worth it. Much better to sit around in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body doing nothing forever than to take on that headache. His fellow Senator John Kennedy (although he theoretically might have posed a stronger challenge to Landry) reached a similar conclusion last week.

When Bill said he wouldn't run, all of that speculation about Democrats and media picking a favorite Republican shifted over to Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser. For a long time it seemed like Billy and Jeff deserved each other.  For example, we know they both have a problem with librarians. Landry is on a typical "anti-woke" crusade to burn them all while Billy is retaliating against them for blowing the whistle on his corruption. Heck, since the day they were elected to their current positions, we've had them neck and neck in a pool to see which of the two would be the first one indicted and whose scandal would be the stupidest.  Maybe this is just a sign of the times, since despite the fact that each has had his share of doozies over this term, neither has yet landed in jail. Guess we should have bet the over.

And like any pair of like alpha dunces vying for the same space, Jeff and Billy clearly do not like each other.  Nungesser hasn't been shy about saying so. In December, Nungesser said that he had to run against Landry if Kennedy didn't because "Jeff is a bad person." That's was after a long summer of scrambling for endorsements and pre-announcing that he was planning to announce a candidacy.  

And yet, today, Billy says, nevermind all that. 

“But the worst pandemic in our lifetime and a series of devastating storms leaves me with unfinished business to bring tourism back to its peak performance, especially for the near 250,000 families who rely on this industry for their livelihoods. For that reason, and after much thought and prayer, I have decided to seek re-election to the Office of Lt. Governor"

Those devastating storms and the pandemic did not happen just this last month, though.  So who knows what really got Billy to back down? The upshot is the Democrats no longer have an easy way to just quietly sit out a Governor's election they had clearly been planning to just quietly sit out.  Can't wait to see what they come up with. They don't seem to be generating a lot of excitement these days, that's for sure. 

Ad-hoc garbage service

This Sunday morning, we were stunned to see a Richard's Disposal truck picking up on our block. Turns out they're dealing with a "backlog" maybe? What is going on here?

In a statement Monday night, Richard said the company is addressing the backlog with 70 additional personnel, pulling from crews in Baton Rouge and Jackson, Miss. Richard said he and the company "look forward to working cooperatively with the city council, mayor and all of city government to address the market conditions and other circumstances that affect timely trash collection,” according to the statement.

The statement did not address the administration's decision to turn over some routes to different contractors. 

Those "other contractors on some routes" is confusing. Apparently the city is juggling the routes that contractually belong to Richards among Waste Pro and IV Waste, the companies who recently took over Metro's territory. Now they're encroaching on Richards bit by bit as well. But it all seems to be happening according more to whim than a comprehensible scheme. 

Richard’s contract expires in March, 2024, though the city can terminate it for cause or "convenience," which essentially means it can be ended at the city's discretion. Officials have previously said they want to rebid the contract this year, but they have not laid out a time frame. 

Asked how long he expects his company to supplement Richard’s, Torres said officials had advised him “to be prepared to do it until they put it out to bid.”

Meanwhile, they're just making it up as they go. And paying a premium for it. 

My FNBC jury duty notice was sadly lost in the mail

 I didn't even get invited to the tailgate party.  Anyway, the trial is kicking off. 

A jury was seated Monday in the federal bank fraud trial of First NBC Bank founder Ashton Ryan, Jr., as lawyers readied for what is expected to be a weekslong trial probing the actions of Ryan, other executives and bank borrowers ahead of the institution's stunning 2017 collapse.

I have said many times there is probably a good book someone could put together centered around this bank collapse that might tell a broad story about the post-Katrina era of New Orleans politics, real estate, education, and non-profit corruption.  I don't really see this trial telling that whole story but... I may have liked to take a look at this list.

Lawyers involved in the case have said the prosecution's witness list initially was between 100 and 200, though it will call far fewer over the next few weeks. Witnesses are likely to include at least some of those who have taken guilty pleas in the case, including Gregory St. Angelo, the bank's former top lawyer.

Speaking of post-Katrina failures and corruption...

This is part of a series the T-P has been running about "changing streets" or some such. I think the idea here is to frame the massive displacement and dispossession New Orleanians have endured as just "inevitable progress" or whatever. But some of this stuff you can't gloss over. 

According to statistics from the New Orleans Data Center, since 2000, the area encompassing the Marigny, Bywater, St. Claude and St. Roch neighborhoods has gone from 61% Black and 32% White to 17% Black and 72% White. The number of households with annual income over $100,000 a year rose from 3% to 19%.

The article trots out familiar apologists CW Cannon and Rich Campanella to sigh and shrug but at least Cashauna Hill is here to point out that these aren't just natural forces at work. They are deliberate policy choices.  

Many of those pushed out crossed St. Claude Avenue, where the process continues today, said Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center. 

Hill said population changes and demographic shifts are often inevitable, and said opposing gentrification does not mean opposing investment.

The problem, she said, is that the city’s leaders have consistently favored policies that encourage gentrification — pouring millions into Crescent Park and the Rampart-St. Claude streetcar line and failing to rein in short-term rentals — while neglecting policies that would prevent it — primarily funding affordable housing.

No need to catalog all of the atrocities right now. But I will point out that the City Planning Commission is once again this month rolling out yet another round of STR regulation that looks on track to once again favor wealth over residents.  We'll catch up on that later. But seeing this picture of where our neighborhoods are today, reminded me of this remark from Mitch Landrieu when he took office as mayor. 

In August, when Mayor Landrieu announced his plan for spending New Orleans’ hard-won recovery dollars he warned a famously tradition-bound city that the time had come for change. “It’s especially important that we stop thinking about rebuilding the city we were and start creating the city we want to become,” he said, echoing his inaugural address.

This is the city we chose to become.  

When the "cyberattack" eats your homework

Amazing story from over the weekend. Let's see if we can sum it up in under 4,000 characters. I think we can. 

So, to start with a cop shot a dog. Apparently this was not the first dog this cop shot either. Which is why the owners of the dog that was shot (the second dog) requested the Public Integrity Bureau file on the first shooting as documentation for their lawsuit against the city. The city agreed to hand over the document. Except  WHOOPS it turns out the city cannot actually produce it because it is locked away in the Iron Mountain. 

Document storage company Iron Mountain is withholding hundreds of boxes of files it is storing for the city of New Orleans because of an ongoing financial dispute with Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration, a City Hall spokesman confirms.

So, according to this report, the city hands over "hundreds of boxes" of public records (which departments and types of records is unknown although clearly NOPD is one) to a private contractor who can, apparently, hold them up for ransom in the (seemingly inevitable) event that the city falls behind on its bill.  That's very interesting! We'd love to know more about that situation. But, WHOOPS guess what. 

But there is no record of a contract to store old paper files for the NOPD or any other department. Iron Mountain’s local administrator, Robert Leamann, spoke to a reporter in early December and declined to provide information about the company’s scope of services for the city. He also said at the time he was unaware of a dispute with the city or the subpoena. After being sent a copy of the court records, he referred subsequent requests for comment to a corporate email address, which did not respond to multiple emails.

The company’s local attorneys, Kellen Matthew and Kathleen Cronin, also failed to respond to emails seeking comment.

Joseph could not say why the city purchasing office could not locate a contract with the company, but noted that all contracts and purchase orders contained in the city's BuySpeed and AFIN databases were lost in a 2019 cyber attack.

Oh man that "cyberattack" sure did a number on public records, huh. Man that is a shame that nobody can get anything from those databases. Unless, somebody... looks it it up and gives it to them... wait.. what? 

What?

Here are Buyspeed purchase orders the city pulled for @misaacstein last year. https://t.co/jffDInLBzN https://t.co/KuGGmE7HWD

— Charles Maldonado (@Maldonado_CB) January 9, 2023

Sometimes the cyber attacks and sometimes it doesn't, I guess. Just a mystery we'll never fully get a grip on. I wonder if it is going to attack those unwritten garbage contracts next.

Keep Doing What You're Doing

Honestly, I have no idea what Saints fans are so upset about this week. They're all ready to fire Dennis Allen after one season as Head Coach even though that one season was the greatest of his entire NFL career to date. In three prior seasons with the Raiders, the dude had never won more than 4 games. This year he won three whole games more than that. That's a 75 percent improvement! 

I'm never clear on what it is Saints fans are really after these days. We already won football in 2009 so there's no need to stress over that anymore. From that point until the time when the brutal criminal enterprise that is the NFL collapses under the weight of its own contradictions,  I just want to see as many interesting things happen as possible. A lot of interesting things happened to the Saints in 2022.  We listed some of them here. Whether those things are "good" or "bad" is really a matter of taste. 

All pro football teams are pretty evenly matched talentwise. Most games are decided according to a combination of dumb luck and which team is the least injured that week. Most of the jawing about whose fault that is or is not is just how fans have fun. NFL fans are basically conspiracy theory hobbyists constructing grand bullshit theories to draw certainties out of what is essentially unknowable. You feel a lot better about it all once you understand this.  Not everybody wins the Superbowl every year. Most teams, in fact, do not! Hopefully fans of the teams who do not don't see this as a complete waste of their time. How sad, that would be if they did. 

Anyway, I can't have strong feelings about Dennis Allen one way or the other.  He seems like a pretty boring middle-management guy. That's probably why he's risen to this particular point of mediocrity.  I definitely don't think the Saints got the most out of their offensive players this year. That seemed like a coaching issue to me. But, again, I'm just spinning theories like anybody else there. Whatever they do, I hope they don't bring those awful black helmets back.  I don't think those helped matters one bit.

"Perfection is not the goal"

It's looking like the NOPD is closer to being released from the decade-long federal consent decree intended to clean up systemic abuse and corruption. Leaving aside the question of whether or not any police department that isn't characterized by systemic abuse and corruption can even be called a police department at all, let's just ask the judge how they're doing. 

At Wednesday's hearing, Morgan noted some of the department’s recent troubles, calling the allegations of double-dipping “quite concerning,” and recruiting struggles “troubling.” But she applauded what she described as a dramatic transformation that other police agencies now aim to emulate.

“The NOPD is a far cry from the NOPD of 2013. While not perfect, the NOPD is most definitely a changed department,” said Morgan, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

“Perfection is not the goal of the consent decree. Full and effective compliance is. The NOPD continues to make great strides toward that goal.”

Sooo... there's all kinds of problems. They've been skirting the rules intended to keep them from doing random stop and search.  They've been violating the city ban on facial recognition surveillance software.  They've been found engaging in widespread payroll fraud. You know.. problems.  But "perfection is not the goal" here. Let's be real.  Really you gotta hand it to them for not putting that kind of pressure on themselves. 

Anyway, it seems like the most critical metric, political momentum, is moving away from continuing the consent decree and so it's probably going away soon.  Once it's gone, will anyone notice the difference?  Hard to say. 

A longtime New Orleans police officer was arrested early Wednesday after federal agents and the department’s Public Integrity Bureau searched his home in New Orleans East and found more than 100 guns and a stash of crack cocaine.

Reginald Allen Koeller III, 38, is an 18-year veteran of the force and most recently worked as a patrol officer in the 4th District, police said. He was booked with possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine and the illegal carrying of a weapon while in possession of the drug.

I mean as long as they can keep recruiting young enthusiastic officers with a passion for the field, it should be fine. 

As a junior at McDonogh 35 College Preparatory High School, Koeller joined the NOPD Explorers program, which introduced young people to various facets of law enforcement careers, according to a story published in the Times-Picayune in 2008. He exhibited unusual passion for the field and later sailed through the police academy.

A little bit of fun's never been an insurrection

 

We are parking according to our own individual levels of risk aversion this year

These signs were eventually explained by the mayor, btw. Good luck figuring out what she means

I've been thinking a lot about the importance of rituals lately.  Actually let's call "lately" the last couple of years. Beginning around the time of 2020's Carnival of bad vibes and portents, and then throughout everything that followed that time, I think we've probably all become a bit more introspective spiritually.  Early on during that season, probably the first Sunday, (I have foggy memories) I received a talisman.

Surely the appearance of the jaguar, our city's adopted avatar of defiance in the face of oppression, was a sign.  Our spirit animal had come to give us strength in trying times. As it turned out we would need it. Carnival 2020 was a difficult tumult of bad scenes and bad vibes that played out under the shadow of a crumbled Hard Rock hotel, the husk of which still held the remains of victims trapped by its collapse. Throughout the season, the universe seemed to be signaling its disapproval.  The chaotic weather caused controversial cancellations and reschedulings of some of the season's main events. Not one but two parade goers were shockingly crushed to death by floats. The city was headed for a major reckoning over these events before the pandemic drew everyone's attention to even worse problems. 

I kept the jaguar around my neck through all of that.  Did it help?  Maybe. Valerio didn't stop the bad things from happening.  But that isn't how talismans work. Their magic is not so profane. We keep them close and observe their rituals for a higher purpose. They are objects of contemplation, inspiration or humiliation if necessary. The fable of Valerio is about our will to freedom and a warning of what happens when we are unprepared to win it. It also tells us that tragedies and ecstasies travel in each other's wake.  On Thoth Sunday, 2020, my bike ride back uptown after getting off the float took me through the Quarter. I go the long way around so that I don't have to cross over the parade route during Bacchus. As I passed near the Hard Rock sarcophagus, I stopped, clasped the jaguar figure around my neck and gave it a kiss.  The bad vibes Carnival 2020 was about wind down.  A few days later we would close it out watching a Rex parade titled "Omens and Auguries." 

Whatever it was we may have done wrong in 2020, the pandemic has forced us to wait a full two years before we've had a chance to break the spell. I have decided to treat this Carnival as more of a sacrament than a party. If we do it correctly, there will no doubt be some room for joy. But the fundamental focus is on performing the rituals. For me, thus far, this has meant paying homage to parade season's iconic totems as they roll down the street. I have dutifully visited and genuflected before the following:

 

 The Phunny Phorty Phellows streetcar

 

 

 

The fabulous Krewe Du Vieux

 

 

 

The enigmatic AllaGator 

 

 

 

The majestic Sparta helmet

 

 

 

And the mighty Pygmammoth

 

 

I have heard the rapturous sounds of the Southern University Marching Band leading the Krewe of Femme Fatale on a Sunday morning. I have been greeted by King Arthur.  I have taken communion a few times over in the form of consecrated moonpies handed down from the deacon riders.  I've met Elvis.

I even made my own king cake. 

 

 

A little bit, uh.. rustic looking, I guess. But home baking is more about the meditative process than it is about style. I'd never done this before and this seemed like the year to try. It's a simple recipe I can post it later. [Update: There it is!] The result wasn't as light and fluffy as your Gambino's or Randazzo's or what have you. But it also wasn't as dense and bready as Rouses so I think that's a success. And if we happened to exorcise any demons in the process, well, that's all the better.  There are still plenty more to face.  

 

The pall cast over 2020 still hasn't been satisfactorily vanquished. We never got to have the promised citywide discussion about parade safety. Instead the mayor and the police have made the summary decision to shorten most of the routes. The new routes emphasize only the most tourist-intensive parts of town and have been described as "ruinous for locals."

Many krewe members and parade goers said they have emailed and continue to email City Hall to request that their neighborhood parade continue without change.

“This whole plan is ruinous regarding Carnival for local residents and families,” said Richard Parisi, who has watched Thoth line up near his house for over 40 years. “Thoth is for locals more than for visitors — and this arrangement is going to ruin that.”

The Krewe of Thoth originally did not parade to Canal Street, Larson said. It was solely an Uptown parade until the early 1960s, when Mayor Chep Morrison requested the krewe extend its route to pass in front of his newly built City Hall.

Now, Larson said, the krewe is willing to go back to its roots and give up the downtown part of the route to keep Thoth on Henry Clay.

The city didn't take Thoth's offer to trade the downtown part of its route in order to keep its traditional pass in front of Children's Hospital and other uptown homes for "shut-ins."  No explanation was given.  Nor was it explained why similar favors were granted to Zulu and to Endymion each of which was allowed to maintain the unique traditional portions of their routes with minimal changes near downtown. Although, one could argue, in Endymion's case, that cutting out the Howard Avenue portion just makes sense given that it would take the parade by the troubled Plaza Tower. Why take the chance of anyone even having to think about a collapsing building during Mardi Gras this time around.  

It has been suggested by apologists for Cantrell and NOPD that the route changes are temporary. But there is little evidence for that in the actual statements made by either of them.

Officials stressed that these changes are temporary but did not say how much additional manpower the city would need to go back to the original routes.  

“If that traditional spot that you’re used to being on … has changed this year, just know that we will consider that again coming for 2023 and future parade years to come,” Police Chief Shaun Ferguson said. “But we must be real with what we have right now and work with the capacity in which we can to make sure that the city is safe.”

Meanwhile, the fix for 2020's other lingering issue could hardly feel any more temporary, or at least thrown together for the sake of expedience. The plan for avoiding a repeat of the horrific accidents that killed two parade goers last time out is to simply slap a little piece of netting along the gaps between tandem floats. 

In an interview earlier Wednesday, float builder Barry Kern said a City Hall representative asked him several months ago to design something to make tandem Mardi Gras floats safer. Kern, CEO and president of Mardi Gras World and Kern Studios, said he’s conceived a device that is “basically like a cargo net” strung between float segments on “heavy duty bungee cords.” The device, which is still being designed, will be translucent, flexible and “not super complicated,” he said.

Look, I really hope Kern's "not super complicated" solution is the right fit. I wasn't too happy with some of the more draconian ideas floated earlier such as barricading the entire route or having escorts walk along the floats to shoo people away. This idea preserves the experience much better. But is it actually any safer?  I saw a few of these over the weekend and I can see why some might doubt it. 

Probably the bright orange netting seen here during Cleopatra on Friday night...

 

 ...is a little bit better than the all black netting seen here during Sparta on Saturday night. 

At least at night, anyway.  Day or night, the thought also occurred to me that the netting might actually make the floats into more of a hazard if someone happened to get caught up in it.  Maybe that's unlikely.  I don't know. Just don't go tugging on it or trying to climb around like Spiderman while you're out there. I'll sleep better knowing you didn't. 

Anyway, that only covers matters of bad vibes left over from early 2020.  Since that time, new disturbances have arisen.  For example, one question on everyone's mind now: is there even such a thing as an ex-superkrewe? Or maybe the term is ex-so-called superkrewe.  We need a new word for this, whatever it is. 

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - This year will look different for the Mystic Krewe of NYX.

“We are rebuilding our sisterhood. We’re very excited about having a smaller group to just rebuild and restart and reconnect with each other,” said Julie Lea, Captain of NYX.

The dramatic decline in membership came after a controversial social media post by Lea at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. Some NYX members even staged a protest, calling for her to resign.

In 2021, former riders sued Lea in civil district court claiming a list of accusations including improper use of krewe funds. Her attorney denied those allegations.

Take a spin through our archives following the NYXcapades over the years and ask us if we could possibly have seen anything like this coming.  NYX always struck us as some kind of scam. The overt racism is really just the last straw. Of course, one of the things you do learn in the multi-level marketing game is that, sometimes losing 3,000 of your nearest and dearest suckers is really the best thing that could happen to you.  At least that's what Julie says. 

In 2020, NYX staged its largest parade ever with 82 floats and 3,400 riders.

For 2022, the krewe will present 17 floats with 240 riders.

“It is a big change,” said Lea. “And I think what we’re finding just moving forward is, again, those personal connections. When you’re over 3,000... 3,400, it’s very hard to make the personal connections.”

“Even though we did it, and everyone was very friendly with each other, it was hard to get to know folks on a one-on-one.”

Really looking forward to making a few one-on-one connections with the NYX rump this Wednesday.  They're rolling with 7 percent of the folks they brought along on their last parade but the odds that any one of them might throw you a confederate flag have skyrocketed. 

As the newly self-appointed spiritual adviser to Carnival 2022, my guidance to you, in case this does happen, is to just let it drop.  Kick it away if you have to, like the woman at Gallier Hall says she did in this story. But if you happen to catch any confederate flags or "Lee Circle" beads or anything like that what you should not do is post them. Do not put them on Instagram and tag the mayor in for comment. Do not call Doug MacCash to manufacture some cheap NOLAdotcom content out of it. These are evil talismans. They are anti-Valerio. Cycling them up through the media only gives power to them and to the trolls who choose to wield them.  Just look at the curses already conjured by their cult.

Co-chair James Reiss III, a representative of the Rex organization, warned against the tossing of "illegal/political” throws, perhaps heading off incidents of recent years such as distributing Confederate flag beads or beads advocating the preservation of the Robert E. Lee monument in New Orleans.

Reiss cautioned against the overly enthusiastic tossing of throws at the Gallier Hall reviewing stand, where visiting VIPs gather. And he said bands should pause to perform at Gallier Hall for only 30 seconds.

Have we ever seen anything like this before?  In over a hundred years of these style of parades have we ever had an official warning from the city government (well, it's James Reiss so it's from the shadow government but close enough) that the "VIP"s are worried about being beaned by "overly enthusiastic" float riders? This is bad vibes all around.  The antagonists on either side of it feed off of each other. 

Again, my advice, don't look at it, Marion. The only revelation to be found is destruction.  I mean, I don't think anyone ought to throw confederate flag beads either. But "political" can mean a lot of things. You see a lot of political commentary at Mardi Gras. There is political satire from the left (well, center-left anyway) in Krewe du Vieux or from the right in Chaos and Krewe D'etat. Muses is often politically themed although played straight down the conventional center for the most part.  You can agree or disagree with or be amused or offended by any of that. But what you really do not want is the likes of James Reiss deciding for you what kind of political is and isn't acceptable. 

There is an inherent politics in Carnival. But its appeal is more universalist than partisan.  Carnival rituals, most of the time, end up reinforcing existing hierarchies through the absurdist pantomime of their inversion. But they also serve to stoke the imagination and maintain the idea that subversion is achievable. In an early chapter of the recently published The Dawn of Everything the late anthropologist David  Graeber and his co-author the archaeologist David Wengrow have this to say about Carnivalistic traditions.

What's really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. In the popular Babylonian story of Semiramis, the eponymous servant girl convinces the Assyrian king to let her be "Queen for a Day" during some annual festival, promptly has him arrested, declares herself empress, and leads her new armies to conquer the world. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers' holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at "turning the world upside" would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

Carnival offers people a dream of a different world. These are rituals of hope. There is something political buried in them but it is politics of a deep spiritual nature. The city's attempts to restrain it, over-police it, and reduce it to a wholly commercial product are an act of sacrilegious political repression. They're a strike at the civic soul. 

How do we defend ourselves from this kind of spiritual warfare?  Well we have our mantra supplied by the (occasionally lapsed) priest Arthur Hardy. Every year his Mardi Gras bible publishes the same Mardi Gras FAQ. Our favorite call and response verse:

Q: Is Mardi Gras staged for visitors?

A: Not really. While the "greatest free show on earth" draws hundreds of thousands of visitors, that is not its purpose. Mardi Gras is a party the city throws for itself.

We have our Sentinel supplied this year by the artist Simone Leigh. This is her Prospect 5 installation at the circle we once named after Robert E Lee.

The text below the sculpture reads:
 

Simone Leigh’s bronze sculpture Sentinel (Mami Wata) is sited at the base of the pedestal that once held a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The title of this work means “guard” or “watchman,” and it honors the work done by activists, citizens, and New Orleans city officials to remove symbols of white supremacy from public view, while also suggesting the possibility for a new protective spirit at this central downtown location. Sentinel (Mami Wata) takes the diversity of African cultures in New Orleans as a starting point, evoking African folklore and spiritualities. Mami Wata, a water spirit or deity, is known under many names across the African diaspora, including Yemaya, Yemoja, and Iemanja. Leigh’s sculpture holds forms of knowledge that have been passed down through spiritual and masking traditions in the city and beyond, wherein masking signifies transformation, not simply concealment.

Celebrating rituals and practices throughout the African diaspora that includes New Orleans, Sentinel (Mami Wata) marks a new chapter in the history of the renamed Egalité Circle, wherein the site represents one point in a larger constellation of public art, conversation, and historical memory. This constellation decenters whiteness and the legacies of colonialism, renewing access to knowledge and culture that has been suppressed by the falsehoods of white supremacy. Rather than perched atop the imposing multistory column that served as the pedestal for the Lee monument, this new work of art sits at ground level, not looming over people but emerging from among us. Leigh's sculpture is a temporary proposal for what could stand in the place of the previous monument—Sentinel (Mami Wata) will remain at Egalité Circle for a brief period before making space for other histories and narratives.

And, of course, we have our patron St. Valerio. Ready as ever to guide us through another ordeal as we solemnly seek to purge the demons of past seasons of misrule.

Putting St. Valerio out in the kitchen to protect our home from bad vibes this Carnival season pic.twitter.com/sPvLexCUPL

— skooks (@skooks) February 18, 2022

 It's Carnival time again. Meet me on the other side, another direction.