New Orleans Police Department officers stand at attention. (Image courtesy of NOPD)
NEW ORLEANS — After she began to wonder if her own sexual assault case would ever be solved, Julie Ford decided to look into how the New Orleans Police Department handled other crimes of sexual violence. In 2018, she came across a national news story on clearance rates for rape cases and proceeded to request data for NOPD’s own rates. What she found surprised her.
At the time, NOPD’s clearance rate for such cases was barely above the single digits, according to data the department submits to the FBI each year. The numbers didn’t give Ford much confidence in her own case, which she declined to discuss in detail. But the statistics did lead her to ask more questions. She started to spend long hours looking at crime data, reading through government reports and trying to figure out what was happening in the department’s sex crimes and child abuse unit — the Special Victims Section — all in hopes of improving experiences for other survivors of sexual violence.
Six years later, Ford is perhaps one of the city’s most knowledgeable watchdogs on how the NOPD investigates sex crimes. She’s monitored the ebb and flow of reforms ushered in under the department’s long-running federal consent decree; earlier this year, she caught an error in which NOPD underreported hundreds of rape crimes to the FBI. And she’s still tracking NOPD’s rape clearance rates, which have plummeted even further over the past several years.
In 2013, the year the department first entered the consent decree, an all-encompassing reform agreement the city made with the U.S. Department of Justice, the clearance rate was at 40%. By last year, with 681 rape cases reported and 46 cases cleared, the rate had sunk to 6.75%. For comparison, the recent national average for peer agencies is about 35%, Ford found.
For Ford, the declining clearance rate, along with other numbers she has crunched, are indicators that the department’s sex crimes unit remains severely understaffed and underresourced. NOPD officials recently told Ford that detectives in the Special Victims Section are each handling 74 cases on average, nearly double the NOPD’s caseload goal. Half of the 12 detective positions in the sex crimes unit are vacant, according to Ford. And in a report submitted as part of the consent decree last year, NOPD acknowledged that the division has been forced to “constantly triage cases.”
“We should be thoroughly investigating every case,” Ford said. “And unfortunately, all of the context clues here tell me that they probably just don’t have the capacity to do that because of the caseloads.”
In 2022, Ford met civil rights attorney Mary Howell through a mutual friend. Howell, who has represented plaintiffs in civil rights and police misconduct cases in New Orleans for decades, was struck by Ford’s command of numbers. She began working with Ford to put her research in front of elected officials, federal court monitors and other institutions.
“She wants this system to work,” Howell said of Ford. “She wants people who have been harmed to feel like they’ve been listened to and they’ve been heard.”
Now, as the NOPD and the DOJ are trying to wind down the police agency’s decade-long consent decree, Ford and Howell have drawn up a list of questions and suggestions aimed at resolving “many of the critical issues which for decades have plagued and undermined effective policing in the investigation of sex crimes,” as they write in a lengthy comment submitted to the judge overseeing the reform agreement.
“Many of these issues are chronic; if they are not dealt with now and resolved, this historic effort to transform the department and to secure and maintain effective policing in the investigation of sexual assaults will not succeed,” Ford and Howell write.
Ford still isn’t entirely certain why NOPD’s clearance rate is so low. That’s in part because the sensitive nature of these crimes often limits the amount of public information available about the division, she said. She and Howell want the NOPD to take a deeper look at staffing and other issues in the Special Victims Section, improve its data reporting and transparency measures, put existing reforms the department has made in writing and bring in an outside expert to evaluate the unit.
An NOPD representative did not respond to questions for this story.
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‘Everybody knows that these numbers aren’t good’
Through her research, Ford became familiar with a section of the consent decree titled “Policing Free of Gender Bias,” which governs the NOPD’s handling of sexual assault and domestic violence cases. The reforms followed a 2011 DOJ report, which found that New Orleans police were misclassifying sexual assault cases and conducting “seriously deficient” investigations rife with “stereotypical assumptions and judgments” about victims.
Under the consent decree, NOPD has made progress over the years on the handling of sexual assault cases, including hiring social workers, establishing a dedicated sexual assault response team and staffing the Special Victims Section with civilians to help lessen detectives’ workloads.
A 2016 report by a mayoral committee found that victims were reporting cases to NOPD at much higher rates, demonstrating increased trust in the department. At the time, the committee had already identified that the number of cases was outpacing available resources, leaving detectives with “untenable” caseloads.
Though declining clearance rates could have once been attributed to improved reporting and classification of cases under the consent decree, that rates are still going down — instead of leveling out — is cause for concern, Ford said. So are other statistics she’s calculated. The 2023 rate places NOPD “near the very bottom” of nearly 500 other law enforcement agencies serving large populations, Ford found. And last year, the city had the highest rate of reported rapes per capita compared to those other agencies.
The NOPD has previously acknowledged that recruitment and retention issues have affected its recent clearance rates, though the department has said technicalities in how the FBI counts “cleared” cases are also a factor. The department’s practice of keeping inactive cases open has also deflated rates, “making them look worse than they are,” according to a 2023 report by the consent decree’s federal monitoring team.
In 2023, court-appointed monitors, who measure the department’s progress in meeting the terms of the consent decree, also identified backsliding on NOPD’s progress on sex crimes policing, flagging in particular problems with long response times to sexual assault-related crimes. That led to a rise in calls being marked “gone on arrival,” where involved parties have left the scene by the time police arrive. Monitors also noticed that police were downgrading calls from emergencies to non-emergencies because of a lack of officers available.
Survivors and other advocates have also spoken out in recent years about frustrations with NOPD’s sex crimes unit. In 2022, the support group Sexual Trauma Awareness and Response, or STAR, told the New Orleans City Council that survivors were sometimes having to wait long periods of time to make reports; that investigation timelines were often unclear; and that investigations seemed to stall when suspects couldn’t be found or refused to be interviewed.
Ford and Howell see the consent decree as a chance to make change in “a meaningful and lasting way,” they write. Ford points to reforms emerging elsewhere in the country, such as in Austin, Texas, where lawsuits have led officials to overhaul the city’s sex crimes unit to follow best practices, as potential models for NOPD to look at as well.
Howell said she’s noticed the department has become receptive to feedback on sex crimes policing ever since NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick took the reins last year.
“My sense is that everybody knows that these numbers aren’t good, and that we need them to be different and better,” Howell said. “The detectives in this office are struggling under terrible caseloads. They’re really just impossible. And it’s not enough to just say, ‘Well, we can’t hire new people or get enough people. We’re all understaffed.’ We have to find creative solutions.”
Should consent decree end?
Ford’s and Howell’s comments are among hundreds received by U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan, who signed the consent decree in 2013 and has since overseen it, on whether to move NOPD into a two-year “sustainment” period, in which the department is expected to maintain reforms with less federal involvement.
Those who have written to urge Morgan to wind down — or even terminate — the consent decree include business leaders around the region, the city’s largest police union and, in a rare alignment of city and state, Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill. Those in support of exiting federal supervision have listed a decline in violent crimes, the burdensome nature of the consent decree and its multimillion dollar price tag as reasons to exit the agreement.
Other commenters remain wary of the department’s stated progress on central problems like racial profiling and police brutality. They’ve written to Morgan about privacy concerns over predictive policing; officers committing payroll fraud; ineffective community advisory boards; the growing local presence of the Louisiana State Police, which isn’t beholden to the consent decree; potential conflicts of interest on the monitoring team; problems with the Public Integrity Bureau; and racial disparities in use of force, among other issues.
Another set of recommendations comes from civil rights attorney William Most, who represented the family of a teenager who was sexually assaulted by former NOPD officer Rodney Vicknair in a civil suit that led to a $1 million judgment against the city of New Orleans earlier this year.
In that case, Vicknair was fired after molesting the teenager, who he first met when he drove her to the hospital for a different sexual assault she had reported; he died earlier this year while serving a federal prison sentence. But the department hasn’t made any structural changes following the Vicknair revelations, according to Most.
“We were extremely disturbed to learn in the course of the child sexual assault case that an NOPD representative did not know of anything that NOPD has done differently to prevent another officer predator like Officer Vicknair,” Most said in an interview. “For that reason, we came up with some specific things that NOPD could change to reduce the risk of another officer predator.”
Most wants the NOPD to re-run background checks for some officers, use GPS tracking data on officer vehicles to help identify suspicious patterns of behavior, train officers to identify and report grooming, and develop other policies and procedures that could have helped prevent Vicknair’s abuses. Most has submitted these recommendations directly to Kirkpatrick, he said.
‘It doesn’t seem like it has been prioritized’
Ford and Howell plan to attend a court hearing Tuesday (Dec. 17), where members of the public will have a chance to tell Morgan what they think of NOPD and the DOJ’s plan for sustainment.
Before her own encounters with the legal system, Ford considered herself to be sheltered and naive about sexual violence in general, and on how police handled such cases, she said. Her research began to reshape her life; she left her career as an architect and returned to graduate school, aiming to hone her data analysis skills. Ford said her work was also driven by a worry that what had happened to her might happen to someone else. Her own case was ultimately resolved, she said, “but not before the same person went on to harm others.”
Now, in her work, Ford is particularly attuned to the sensitive nature of these cases for survivors. She notes how audits of sexual assault investigations often rely on police documentation, leaving out survivor voices. And she’s concerned about how overworked detectives might handle the addition of cold cases with new DNA hits as the city works through a backlog of hundreds of rape kits: “The worst thing to do would be to contact a survivor and tell them there’s been a [DNA] hit in your case and then to not have the capacity to pursue that investigation.”
Ford and Howell have observed how sexual violence — which primarily affects women and children — is often overshadowed or left out in conversations about crime in New Orleans, especially as violent crimes overall have trended downward recently.
“It doesn’t seem like it has been prioritized in the way that it would if it were a different type of crime,” Ford said.
For years, Ford kept her name separate from her research; she still shies away from taking credit. “Mostly I just don’t think that what I’m doing is particularly special,” she said. “It’s just that I have the privilege to do it.”
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This article first appeared on Verite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.