NEW ORLEANS — Internal investigators for the New Orleans Police Department are formally looking into how officers handled a crash involving former White House adviser Cedric Richmond, a department spokesperson confirmed Thursday.
As WWL-TV and partner newspaper the Times Picayune first reported, Richmond was in a single-vehicle crash on Claiborne Avenue on April 23 in which he veered off the road and slammed into a tree head-on with his young son in the car.
NOPD Senior Police Officer Mark Miranda noted in his crash report that he detected slurred speech from Richmond at the scene, but the slurring later resolved at the hospital. A timeline pieced together using public records by WWL-TV's Katie Moore revealed anywhere from a 1 to 4.6-hour gap between those two interactions with police.
Despite the slurred speech and the circumstances surrounding the crash, a single-vehicle accident with no cause determined, Richmond was not tested for DWI or cited for the crash.
In fact, a spokesperson for the NOPD said the investigating officer did not believe he had the reasonable suspicion to call in the NOPD's DWI Unit or even to ask Richmond if he had been drinking.
The attorney who serves as the lead monitor for the Federal courts declined to comment about the crash investigation at a public hearing Wednesday after WWL-TV asked if they were also looking it.
"All I'll say about that is that the monitor has confirmed that the NOPD is looking into it. And we don't talk about investigations while they're happening," said Attorney Jonathan Aronie, the lead monitor for the NOPD consent decree.
The NOPD, the city of New Orleans and the US Department of Justice entered the agreement for federal court oversight of the department in 2012 after the DOJ issued a scathing report about unconstitutional policing by the NOPD the previous year.
Ronal Serpas was Superintendent at that time. He's currently a Professor of Criminology and Justice at Loyola University New Orleans.
The former superintendent was one of several policing experts interviewed by WWL-TV and partner newspaper the Times Picayune about how the investigation was handled. He urged the NOPD to order a full investigation by their Public Integrity Bureau into how the crash investigation was handled to determine whether more should have been done to rule out DWI and to figure out what caused Richmond to crash.
“Given the known contradiction in evidence, which surfaced weeks ago, it would be inconceivable that a full PIB investigation is not already underway," Serpas continued, "The federal monitors reported in the Vappie case grave concerns about PIB's ability. Will this be another high-profile case that further casts doubt on PIB?"
Serpas' comments referred to the NOPD's handling of a PIB investigation into Officer Jeffrey Vappie, Mayor LaToya Cantrell's one-time security detail officer. The consent decree monitors questioned the department about it Wednesday night after an audio recording surfaced of PIB investigators questioning Vappie.
WWL-TV asked the NOPD about an internal investigation into the Richmond crash Thursday and the department confirmed the Public Integrity Bureau is conducting a formal investigation.
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