NEW ORLEANS — Four months after Mayor Cantrell created the Violent Crime Reduction Task Force, the City Council asked for an update of the task force’s progress. Wednesday, Chairman of the task force, Tyrell Morris presented the council with updates on the group’s initiatives.
Morris’s presentation included initiatives like wrap-around services, efforts to remove or fix blighted properties, faster and more towing of hazardous and abandoned vehicles and more.
Morris used data to show violent crime is down this year compared to last, but some council members disagreed.
City Council President JP Morrell said the data Morris used isn’t accurate and shows a skewed picture of reality.
“What I dislike vehemently is when we try to have a political rosy picture without the caveat the picture might not be as rosy as people think,” Morrell said. “Violent crime as we understand it has not necessarily gone down substantially, it’s just that you don’t have a lot of people that are willing to wait.”
Morrell says the data Morris presented doesn’t include crimes that happened but weren’t reported or followed up on, citing many crimes are “gone on arrival,” meaning the person who called, or the victim is not at the site of the crime when the police show up.
With the NOPD struggling with retention, Morrell points out that police response times have significantly increased.
“We should not mislead the public to believe they are necessarily less likely to [...] an aggravated assault, battery, armed robbery…or simple robbery this year than last year. It is more likely that if one of those things happens you have to wait longer for a police officer and depending on how traumatic that incident was you might not be willing to wait that extra 15 20 30 45 minutes,” Morrell said.
Morris says he uses data from the NOPD but is willing to work with other departments to get on the same page.
“I think as sometimes as systems change strategies change we don’t always reset the definition of what the data is. Also, I presented publicly available information nothing I presented today was in secret,” Morris said.
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