By Nell Gluckman, From The Am Law Daily

Four years after the Justice Department found that systemic problems at the New Orleans Police Department led to widespread human rights abuses, a court appointed monitor from Sheppard Mullin reports that progress has been made, albeit slowly.

Jonathan Aronie, co-managing partner of Sheppard Mullin’s Washington, D.C. office, wrote in his fifth and most recent report on the NOPD that new policing policies, expanded training, new body-worn cameras, updated in-car cameras and better record-keeping are all signs of improvement that his team has observed at the troubled police department.

But the overall picture is a “mixed bag of progress,” says the report, which was released April 28 and presented at a public meeting on Wednesday. Some police districts, for instance, still do not maintain adequate records. The report also found that many leaders within the police department do not effectively supervise officers and officer training has not sufficiently improved. It further notes that the police department has not made enough progress in the way it handles sexual assault and domestic violence matters.

As part of their probe, Aronie and other members of his team have ridden along in on-duty police cars and visited classrooms where officers are being trained. They have also reviewed the department’s numerous policies around policing.

Sheppard Mullin was hired in 2013 to help oversee a consent decree that is meant to fix problems identified by the Justice Department after an extensive investigation of the NOPD. Those issues—including excessive use of sometimes deadly force, discriminatory policing and unlawful searches—were part of a pattern of unconstitutional policing practices that had gone on for years, the Justice Department found. The consent decree, which was approved in 2013, highlights specific areas that the police department must improve upon. Efforts to comply with the consent decree will be assessed and reported on by the monitor under the supervision of U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan.

On the monitoring team are Sheppard Mullin partners Tracey Kennedy and David Douglass, as well as several criminal justice academics and a number of former police chiefs, including Robert McNeilly, who headed Pittsburg’s police force when that department underwent the first consent decree beginning in 1997.

The city of New Orleans will pay the consent decree monitor a fee that is capped at $8.5 million, according to the contract with the firm. Aronie and the other Sheppard Mullin partners started at an hourly rate of $425 for the first year of work, which will increase by 5 percent each year. Sheppard Mullin associates will start at $350 and hour, while other experts and paralegals started between $100 and $250, with their salaries also increasing each year, according to the contract.

The New Orleans Advocate reported last year that the cost of implementing the consent decree—including $2 million to be spent on an early warning system for problem officers and $670,000 on new Tasers—is expected to reach $55 million over five years. The process may be extended past five years.

Some community members are critical of the reports issued by Sheppard Mullin, saying they do not go far enough to remedy decades of unconstitutional police brutality.

“We have not been happy with the results that we’re getting from them,” says W.C. Johnson, co-chair of the group Communities United for Change, which formed at the time of the Justice Department’s intervention to advocate on behalf of the people of New Orleans. Johnson calls the reports “watered down” and says he hasn’t seen changes in police activity in the streets of New Orleans.

His co-chair, Malcolm Suber, says the monitors have not demonstrated the sense of urgency he feels the situation requires.

“I don’t know that the attitude is that they want this thing to get done so they can get out of here,” Suber says. “Why should they want to get out of here? They’re being handsomely rewarded.”

Though Aronie is not able to comment on his work outside the public meetings, his most recent report addresses complaints about the pace of progress.

“While the monitoring team shares the community’s concerns regarding the speed of change, the fact is that positive change is taking place. As noted, new policies have been developed, vetted, and approved. New training has been implemented. New leadership has been put in place.”

Samuel Walker, professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska who has studied police accountability, says changes departments like the NOPD must undertake are massive.

“We’re really talking about changing the culture of a police department, changing what officers do out there on the street,” he says. But he believes that consent decrees are a good way to start that process.

“The consent decree process really jumpstarts reform,” he says. “It might not be perfect but it really does set in motion a major change.”

Over 25 police departments across the country have experienced some form of Justice Department intervention in the past two decades, although the New Orleans consent decree is more far reaching than any others to date.

Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone principal Saul Green was appointed monitor of the Cincinnati police department in 2002. Saul Ewing partner Sheryl Robinson Wood was appointed police monitor in Detroit in 2003, before she jumped to Venable in 2009, though she was censured two years later for having “intimate contact” with former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

Ferguson, Missouri, has hired Winston & Strawn chairman and litigator Dan Webb to implement DOJ recommendations stemming from a recent report, which detailed unlawful police practices. However, the city, which entered the national spotlight after a policeman fatally shot an unarmed black teen, has not entered into a consent decree.

“This whole field has been developing out of nothing,” Walker says. “It may happen that this is seen as a field of opportunity for some major firms.”

IMAGE: Sam Camp/iStock

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