COVER STORY One question about the 3rd District. When you were here last — during the ’90s — there was a cooperative endeavor agreement reached with the Levee District where the Levee Police were patrolling north of Robert E. Lee Boulevard. And NOPD was not — is not — patrolling there. Now that the Levee District is cutting back on cops, is NOPD — despite having fewer officers — ready to step in again to patrol those neighborhoods?
SERPAS Absolutely. They don’t have the same limits. When I joined policing 30 years ago, I was going to be here for 30 years. The people who join today do not see that. That’s not the way they’ve been raised. That’s not the way they’ve been educated. … Also, this will be the first time in American policing history where we have to change our models to meet the employee instead of the employee changing their models to meet us. That’s a fact.
SERPAS We have to. We don’t have a choice. I don’t think that we ever abandoned patrolling in general. … We’re responsible for everything at the end of the day. The Levee District’s decisions will complicate perhaps some of our deployment packages. And these budget questions are more daunting than I think we’ve ever faced in our time. I’ve never seen, as I have in these last two or three years, how state and local government budgets are just dramatically different than they’ve ever been. And it’s going to change the way we think.
What’s been your proudest moment — and your biggest disappointment — since you’ve been here as chief?
Let’s talk about salaries. What’s the salary range for patrolmen, sergeants, and lieutenants, and do you think that they need to be adjusted?
What’s the biggest reason all that came off the track?
SERPAS My understanding is we probably are very close to the state police right now with our pay. And the state police is the highest. So, by and large, our salaries are not completely out of whack like they were in the ’90s.
If police are paid more, what should the city expect to gain from that?
But those have always been the facts. What’s different about this generation? SERPAS The whole X/Y thing, that generation, they view the world completely different.
Their expectations are different?
SERPAS It’s about leadership. DOJ came here in the fall of ’96, and they investigated this Police Department all the way until March or April 2004, when they sent a letter, saying ‘You made changes we wanted, you made changes you wanted.’ No consent decree, no court order, nothing. Sometime between that date and 2010, in a very short period of time, a lot of things went wrong. So we had good leaders, but the system of leadership, I think, failed.
What’s been the department’s biggest success since you returned? SERPAS How many of these men and women come to work and work hard every day. I mean, I get to see it. I go to roll calls. I walk on Bourbon Street. I walk on the parade route. When I see these young men and women doing the things that we ask them to do every day and doing it with pride and dignity and respect, and you see the survey results showing 33 percent in August of ’09, 50 percent approval in August of ’10, 60 percent in February of ’11. And then you look at the individual officers’ survey data, which says 74 percent of the time it was a professional exchange. I mean, those things bring me tremendous pride.
What do you expect to be bragging about next year when we do this? SERPAS I hope by next year we would have a finalized consent decree that tells us exactly what it is we need to do. I’m hoping that the consent decree will have been in place and we start making measurable progress that people can have faith and confidence in.
when i joined policing 30 years ago, i was going to be here for 30 years. the people who join today do not see that. that’s not the way they’ve been raised. that’s not the way they’ve been educated. ★★★★★★★★★★
Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > JUne 14 > 2011
SERPAS A better quality candidate. There is a small number of people in America who want to be police officers now, and they’re mobile. And there’s even a smaller number that you really want. So if you’re not hiring quickly, if you don’t have a compensation package that’s strong, they’re going to go wherever they’re going to get hired. And then, on top of all that, the children we raised, the Xs and Ys … we get young men and women who come in for the police service, and then they find out we were serious about working at night. We were serious about working on weekends. We were serious about working on holidays. And, oh, yeah, by the way, you could get killed. And over a period of time a lot of these young people are going to move on to something else.
SERPAS The biggest disappointment has been how the system just really came apart. When Richard [Pennington] came, we had examples of very bad people doing very bad things. But we also had systems that were working. What’s different here now is that all the systems came off the track — the training system, the education of new employees, the education of existing employees, the disciplinary system, use of force, paid details.
37