Times-Picayune Editorial piece on City Ordinance

Focus New Orleans criminal justice system's resources on violent crime: An editorial

Published: Friday, December 10, 2010, 6:22 AM

Editorial page staff, The Times-Picayune 

 

Arresting people who've committed minor, nonviolent offenses and taking them to jail isn't the smartest use of police time or the best way to ensure public safety.

New Orleans has been moving away from that approach, by adopting an ordinance two years ago that allows police to issue summonses for petty municipal offenses. The Police Department now issues summonses for slightly more than half of municipal offenses that don't involve domestic violence.

Superintendent Ronal Serpas recently said that officers will no longer arrest and book people they stop who have outstanding traffic or misdemeanor warrants from neighboring parishes, saying the old policy "simply does not make sense, economical or common." That could mean a reduction of nearly 20,000 arrests in 2011.

Next week, the City Council will consider ordinances that would allow police to issue a summons in other nonviolent misdemeanors, and those changes should be adopted.

The ordinances would allow police to issue summonses for marijuana possession, prostitution, flight from an officer and interference with a law-enforcement investigation. As it stands now, police have to make arrests in those cases because there is no municipal code counterpart for state violations. This would give them the option of writing a summons for a court appearance, instead.

Creating a municipal version of the marijuana possession charge will have the added benefit of allowing those charges to be prosecuted by the city attorney rather than prosecutors from the district attorney's office.

Officials also are looking at ways to reduce the number of people who are jailed for public intoxication, creating a "sobering center'' where they can sleep it off rather than doing so in a jail cell.

Other cities have had success with sobering centers, and it certainly makes sense for New Orleans. Police officers make arrests in 88 percent of public intoxication cases because drunk people present a danger to themselves and others. Judge Paul Sens, chief judge of Municipal Court, stressed that if there are problems beyond drunkenness, jail is still the right choice.

But this option would further reduce the number of people taken to jail and also would provide a way for people who need help with alcohol abuse to start getting it.

Councilwoman Susan Guidry, who is on the council's criminal justice committee, said that jailing fewer nonviolent offenders will save money. "To quote the superintendent, 'It's not being soft on crime, it's being smart on crime','' she said.

She's right. Police need to spend most of their time and energy on violent crime, not hauling petty offenders off to jail.

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