The following was recently received from a retired NOPD officer in response to our recent Letter to the Editor regarding the planned changes to the NOPD detail system.

I would like to invite and encourage anyone who would like to share their thoughts on police details to submit something to be published. It can be about these so-called “reforms” or it can be your personal experience working paid details with how the detail impacted the community we serve. It could also be about how working paid details has impacted your family.

I would also like to strongly encourage anyone who works details to ask their detail employer to contribute their personal experiences with paid details and how it effected their business or event.

I will be happy to give the author credit for the article or post it anonymously at the author’s direction. Furthermore, I will refrain from editing (except maybe spacing for readability). You are welcome to submit something even if you do not work for NOPD. Email me or call me about submitting something — Donovan Livaccari dlivaccari@gmail.com; dal@livlaw.com; 504-905-8280; or click Contact Me.

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I have taken an excerpt from a comment of an anonymous Officer regarding the detail situation. The reason being that these comments perfectly describe the conditions upon which our Officers have to work Mission Two. Working an area that you may only see once a month or less frequently, puts one clearly in a disadvantage. It would be like taking an Officer from a district and assigning him to work in the Juvenile Office and telling him he has to learn how to fingerprint offenders without any training. And performing this duty only once a month at a time.

“This newly formed office will take officers who have worked neighborhood details providing security for years, out of those neighborhoods and different officers will be in their place. An officer who was working the same detail for years knows the neighborhood such as who lives there, what vehicles belong where, and they would know what is out of place. Whereas an officer new to the detail would have to learn this and meet the neighbors. This doesn’t make sense for community oriented policing, which I thought was a strategy the department was in favor of.”

On the subject of the new detail system, imagine what message could be sent to the city, if on the first home Saints’ game, no one showed up for the detail. Better yet, if no one showed up to work any detail for a week.

— NOPD Retired

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