As crime continues to spike across the U.S., the New Orleans Police Department is hiring civilians to help with the force’s staffing issues caused by liberal law enforcement policies.
New Orleans Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said on Thursday that the department is hiring civilian police to monitor phones at the department and replace administrative police officers.
“The goal is for our officers to feel safe, so they can make our citizens and visitors feel safe,” Ferguson said at a press conference.
The department will also hire around 50 to 75 civilians who will respond to incidents that do not require the presence of a police officer, such as loose animals, medical calls, and auto accidents on private property.
“As we take calls over the phone, there may be some evidence that needs to be collected with that call,” Ferguson continued. “We’ll have civilian investigators to go out and collect that evidence instead of an officer having to go out there and collect that evidence.”
Civilians will receive basic training and undergo background checks before they can join the police department.
This comes after New Orleans overtook St. Louis, Missouri, as the murder capital of the country this month, hitting 52 murders per 100,000 population this year. Homicides began surging in the city in 2020, jumping to 201 from 119 in 2019. That number rose again in 2021 to 218, an 83 percent increase over 2019’s number.
“My message to you — to those of you [who] may have been disqualified in the past, I’m urging you to resubmit your application because some of our hiring criteria has changed,” Ferguson said. “This is also to reduce some of the workload currently placed on our patrol and district personnel but most importantly to reduce response times.”
Business owners in The Big Easy are also fed up with the rise in crime and have expressed concerns over public safety.
“I think there is a lot of people that have worked in the French Quarter and loved to work in the French Quarter, but they just don’t feel safe coming down here anymore,” said Christian Pendleton of the Louisiana Restaurant Association in July.
New Orleans has been hit particularly hard by a violent crime surge, with experts pinning the blame for the rise on pandemic-related restrictions and protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020 that fueled the defund the police movement.
