June - December 2023

Second District Commander

I felt like I was on a roller coaster in June when I got another call from Chief Ganthier. This time he laughed. Captain Nolan was going out with shoulder surgery, and they needed me to fill in at the Second District. My office was already there, so it was convenient. BACK to attending MAX meetings, fielding calls from city council members, crime, fleet, blah blah blah.

On Monday, when I got the call, I was prepared to go to work that night. I threw on a uniform and headed to the district at about 1:00 P.M. after I hung up with the chief. When I got there everyone was in a weekly district crime meeting, district MAX. These are meetings districts hold to prepare for the Big MAX the next day. (I know… a meeting to get ready for a meeting.)

Nobody was wondering what I was doing there. It seems the only person who didn’t know I was getting the Second District was me.

Getting right into the meeting and keeping in mind I had just been assigned to the 5th District, and the 1st District before that for a year, and in-between responding to all manner of peril during the night, I was ready for the crime meeting. Hit me with it...

Overwhelmingly the most important issue, commented on by more than one detective and ranking officer, was the cat taken from Camelia Grill. I couldn’t believe what I heard. Like the ANIMAL cat? Not a Caterpillar construction machine? Meow? That kind?

Evidently this was the level of thing we were worried about here in the Second District. At the weekly violent crime meeting (VCM), I began to remember, we would always tease the Second District captain and DIU lieutenant that their response was always, “Nothing to report”. That teasing came rushing back to me in this meeting. Oh, I wasn’t complaining, but I simply couldn’t believe the lengths this detective unit went to solve the mystery of the homeless man taking what appeared to be a stray cat from the area near Camelia Grill.

Weeks would go by and although we had an armed robbery here or there, they were immediately solved with either an instant apprehension or swift detective work resulting in warrants. I believe there were three total armed robberies. In later weeks there was an exchange of emails with very persistent residents in the Audubon Park area and Councilmember Joe Giarusso regarding a couple of car burglaries. I know personally how pissed off I get when my car is burglarized, but the level of attention demanded here was off the charts, bordering on funny.

Naturally I appeased them with a quick email and promises to pay closer attention to that area. And we did. Just after this another email exchange with other citizens and the same city council member documented the outrage of a citizen having to wait OVER A MONTH for resolution of the crime they suffered. It seems their plants had been stolen and the Air Tag was showing their location. When will the NOPD assist them?

I was glad not to have to learn the names of all the bad guys and the groups they belong to and who is and isn’t in jail or on probation or who has a beef with who like I had to do in other districts. “Nothing to report” is just fine with me, with mere months remaining on the calendar for my time at NOPD.

I began to really like this speed. I always have encouraged people to report crime, no matter how trivial they thought it was. “Why?”, they would ask. “It’s not like it’s going to be solved.” The answer is that if crimes are reported, they develop a pattern. Then we can plot those patterns on a map (pin map in the 1990’s, Analytics Unit produced computerized heat map in the 2020s) which would drive response in the form of deployment of resources. No report = nothing criminal happens in that area ever.

During my time in the Second this go-round, several annoying things came to light which annoyed me before, but I was too engaged in controlling and solving extreme criminal activity to really complain much about it. I’m listing these things I think are stupid in a later section called, “Stupid Stuff at NOPD”.