NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans Police Department’s SWAT team had to respond Thursday night to a disturbance at the city’s juvenile detention center, but officials differed on their descriptions of what happened Friday.
After an initial police radio call stated there were seven youths armed with knives at the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said she rushed to the center and “beat the negotiators to the scene.”
She said three of the inmates had locked themselves inside a cell and caused a “disruption,” but police were able to restore order without any violence.
“Once there was an officer on the scene, we were able to really get a sense of what the true, existing conditions were,” Cantrell said at a Friday afternoon news conference. “And no, they didn’t have any knives. It was not a riot at all, but it was disruption and the staff’s inability to address the inmates at the time.”
But earlier Friday afternoon, Cantrell’s newly appointed director of the Juvenile Justice Center, Kyshun Webster, said the three inmates who were holed up inside a cell had fashioned homemade weapons and threatened the staff.
“We had an incident where three youths locked themselves into a facility and made homicidal threats to the staff, and we had knowledge that they had homemade weapons that could pose a danger to themselves and the staff,” Webster said.
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District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s description of events differed even more. He said police sources told him there had absolutely been a riot.
“The disturbance was dangerous and out of control, and not quickly quelled,” Cannizzaro said in a press statement.
Emergency call records indicate police were dispatched to the scene at 9:00, arrived at 9:02 and remained on the scene almost three hours, until 11:58 p.m.
The DA said the Cantrell administration asked prosecutors to get a judge’s order to transfer two of the inmates, who were both facing charges as adults, to the city’s adult jail, the Orleans Justice Center.
Latrell Alexis, a 16-year-old who turns 17 in October, was being held in the Juvenile Justice Center on second-degree murder charges. Criminal Court Judge Karen Herman ordered Alexis moved to the adult jail Friday morning.
Alexis was charged in June with shooting 14-year-old JaMichael Frith in Hollygrove last February.
The DA has not identified the other boy slated for transfer to the adult jail because Judge Laurie White was not in court today and the transfer request was pushed back to Monday.
But later Friday afternoon, Webster and Emily Wolff, Cantrell’s director of the Office of Youth and Families, said the request to transfer the two inmates did not come from the administration, but from the DA. That drew a rebuke from Cannizzaro.
“It is disturbing that these members of the city administration either are uninformed about the actions taken by their superiors and colleagues or are deliberately misleading the public about them,” Cannizzaro said. “We stand by our version of events, both in relation to the seriousness of last night’s disturbance within the youth center and the request made by a high-ranking City Hall official asking that we seek the necessary court orders to transfer two of these violent detainees into the custody of the Orleans Justice Center.”
Cantrell then called her own press conference late Friday afternoon and contradicted her staff, saying her criminal justice commissioner, Tenisha Stevens, agreed with the assistant DA early Friday to have the two youths transferred to the adult jail.
That’s significant because Cantrell has made safety at the Juvenile Justice Center a priority, and juvenile justice advocates are against housing anyone under 17 at the adult jail.
“While we don’t yet know the details of last night’s incident, we do know that these incidents have happened before and that sending kids to OPP has not prevented them from happening again,” said Aaron Clark-Rizzio, executive director of the advocacy group Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. “Recent efforts focused on making sure the facility is operating in a therapeutic, trauma-informed manner need to continue, in addition to fixing any remaining issues so that every child and staff member is safe and protected.”
Cantrell acknowledged that there was another incident at the center Saturday, and said the city needs to increase staffing and crisis training.
“There seemed to be a gap of a crisis intervention team on site at the center, which is a priority and I’m actually working on that,” she said. “And we have to make that happen.”
She said the city cannot continue to rely on NOPD every time there’s a disturbance at the Juvenile lockup.
This all comes amid a huge spike in violent crime by juveniles. Felony juvenile arrests more than doubled from 2016 to 2018… prompting Cantrell to direct NOPD to step up curfew enforcement in May.
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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the director of the Juvenile Justice Center as Kyshun Watson. His name is Kyshun Webster. WWL-TV regrets the error.
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