"What this says is the partnership and emphasis of the Police Department and the district attorney's office is taking root." -- Rafael Goyeneche
Cooperation between New Orleans police and prosecutors has led to more felony convictions across the board and rising incarceration rates for those convicted, according to a report released today by the Metropolitan Crime Commission. The report presents a picture of a criminal justice system rising from malaise and a plague of mistrust between cops and prosecutors that left many criminal cases with gaping holes.
But a sharp rise in small-time arrests, often on out-of-parish warrants, has drawn concern from the commission that the NOPD may be backsliding on a policy by Superintendent Ronal Serpas to spend less time booking minor offenders and focus more on the city's crippling violence.
The semi-annual report also found that Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro has become far more willing to reach plea deals with defendants on lesser felony charges.
Cannizzaro, whose 2011 challenge to the criminal court judges to conduct 600 jury trials a year was met with a rebuke from the judges, has shifted tack. This year's tally is expected to number only about 180, Cannizzaro said. That's down from 329 last year and well below the 278 jury trials in 2010.
Cannizzaro credited the growing coordination with police for producing better cases, and more success by his prosecutors. That has led defense attorneys, he said, to deal.
Disregarding hung juries and mistrials, a review by The Times-Picayune in August found that Cannizzaro's office won 81 percent of the cases his prosecutors brought to trial in the first half of the year, compared with 65 percent for 2011.
"We have done better trying cases. Defense lawyers know our lawyers are prepared, and there's an 80 percent chance we're going to be successful," said Cannizzaro, who took office in 2009 and said he and his prosecutors have learned on the job.
"You're starting to get a staff that's getting acclimated. Turnover is not as great for people we brought in," he said. "If anything, we're probably getting a little tougher on the deals now then we were two years ago."
Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, credited the rise in incarceration rates to police and prosecutors working together, but also to the judges for stiffer sentencing. The report found that incarceration rates for weapons, property and drug offenses all have risen in two years. Overall, 55 percent of felony convictions led to incarceration in the first half of the year, up from 49 percent in the last half of 2010.
"I think we're seeing judges recognizing a serious class of offenders getting processed by police and the DA's office, and they're responding accordingly. If they're getting jail time, it's because they're repeat offenders," Goyeneche said.
The numbers, Goyeneche said, show that when Cannizzaro's office "is plea-bargaining a lot of these cases, they're plea-bargaining to jail time."
The number of defendants found guilty of reduced charges, whether by trial or by plea, rose to 783 in the first half of the year, up from 457 in the previous six months and 300 in the first half of 2011, when Cannizzaro was aggressively pursuing trials.
The numbers rose across the board, with the most dramatic increases in weapons and drug cases -- crimes that often have proven difficult to convict at trial.
Cases of defendants pleading guilty as charged, or getting convicted at trial, also rose, but not to the same extent. Also notable: The report found that Cannizzaro's office is dismissing far fewer cases after they have been accepted, which the DA chalked up to police bringing better cases.
"What this says is the partnership and emphasis of the Police Department and the district attorney's office is taking root," Goyeneche said.
In a bit of a surprise that Serpas said he couldn't explain, total arrests by NOPD cops took a sudden turn north in the first half of the year, with the number of arrests rising for the first time since 2009.
All of the increase can be credited to more "other state arrests," which increased 39 percent from the earlier six months. The bulk of those arrests are for out-of-parish warrants, mostly for minor offenses such as old traffic violations. Such arrests, in the past, have helped cops goose their statistics.
But Serpas has called them "a waste of time," because other parishes often declined to take in the suspects. "They're never going to be held accountable," Serpas said.
From 2009 to 2011, those arrests dropped by more than half, a decline of more than 11,000 arrests. Serpas offered no explanation for the recent uptick, saying: "We recognize the trend. We're going to watch it.
"It's not a policy shift at all. Our instruction to the officers ... is that the weight on arresting those people is too high," Serpas said. "I told them to be smart, be more thorough in making arrest decisions, but if you've articulated it, I'll support them."
He cautioned that the report's numbers don't tell the story of individual arrests. "What the report doesn't show is what the recidivist behavior was of those people," he said. "Low-level offenders do not mean low-level lifestyle."
Michael Cowan, chairman of the New Orleans Crime Commission, said the reversal of the trend on minor arrests was "the thing that concerns me most." He said he expects Serpas to reinforce the policy among the rank-and-file.
"I know he did have a concern about not being so blanket in letting those folks go with a summons -- that some dangerous people slipped through the net there," Cowan said. "I don't know if it's swung in the other direction."
Still, Cowan said the report seems to confirm what Serpas and Cannizzaro have been touting as a growing bond. "That's a big plus," Cowan said. "It wasn't that long ago that we were very far from there."
Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/12/in_new_orleans_bad_guys_losing.html
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