In early February, as the city geared up for Mardi Gras, attorneys in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court were still handling a case from the last one. Cameron Myles-Pratt, who was arrested by Louisiana State Police troopers on drug and weapons charges the Sunday before Mardi Gras in 2025, wasn’t in the courtroom for his scheduled trial date. But his attorney waived his appearance, and proceeded to a judge trial.
In a police report, state troopers claimed that on March 2, 2025 they “observed a Black male, later identified as Cameron Lee Myles-Pratt, wearing a black hoodie appear to be holding a hand rolled marijuana cigarette” on Bourbon Street. They further “observed his tongue to have a green tint further indicative of marijuana use.”
The troopers approached Myles-Pratt, patted him down and found a gun inside his pants pocket, according to the report. Prosecutors charged Myles-Pratt with possession of marijuana and for carrying a concealed firearm while under the influence. During his trial, one of the troopers who arrested him testified that Myles-Pratt looked sluggish, with slurred speech and bloodshot red eyes.
Law enforcement has been forced to find new strategies to get guns off the street since 2024, when a state law allowing people to carry concealed weapons without a permit went into effect.
Meanwhile, the arrests have raised persistent concerns from civil rights advocates and defense attorneys about racial profiling, the constitutionality of stops and searches, and the public safety benefits of policing focused on gun possession arrests.
An analysis by Verite News of gun arrests during the 2023-2025 Carnival seasons found dramatic racial disparities in those stopped by police, with the vast majority being Black men.
In Myles-Pratt’s case, his attorney Gregory Carter countered that the search was improper because the troopers had no way of determining if what his client was smoking was tobacco or marijuana, and thus lacked reasonable suspicion to detain him. He said they did not find any marijuana on Carter until he was arrested and transported to the police station. Carter also pointed out that the concealed gun law Myles-Pratt was charged with violating requires testing to determine if a person is inebriated. The troopers did not conduct any such testing.
A prosecutor with the Louisiana Attorney General’s office said that the trooper’s observations gave him legal justification to stop and search Myles-Pratt, even if he didn’t initially find the marijuana. He also argued that the statute does not require drug and alcohol testing. It only suggests it.
Judge Franz Zibilich disagreed. He declined to suppress the evidence, but found that because there was no drug or alcohol test he could not find Myles-Pratt guilty for carrying a gun while under the influence.
For the gun charge, Myles-Pratt faced the possibility of a $5,000 fine and up to six months in prison. But in the end, he was convicted only of the possession charge, a crime that the New Orleans City Council has sought to eliminate altogether. He was fined $100.
“Interesting set of facts,” Zibilich said after handing down his sentence. “I enjoyed the legal machinations.”
After the trial, Carter said that the Myles-Pratt case was part of a broader pattern in which he has seen police offering questionable justifications to stop people they find suspicious following the passage of permitless concealed carry.
“They’re making a distinction between people who they believe should have the Second Amendment right to carry, and people who they believe should not have that Second Amendment right,” Carter said.
In late February, the NOPD said that it made 185 arrests along the Mardi Gras parade routes this year, including 18 weapons arrests. Historically, law enforcement has touted proactive gun enforcement as a key component of ensuring public safety.
“These are not just numbers—they are real interventions that save lives and protect communities,” NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said in September. “Every gun taken off the street, every dose of fentanyl seized, every violent offender removed from a neighborhood represents a safer New Orleans.”
But the numbers do not account for the fact that there are a far larger number of guns on the street than could ever be reasonably seized by arrest.
“Let’s say conservatively at Mardi Gras there’s 30,000 people in New Orleans carrying guns and they talk about, ‘Oh, we got 98 illegal guns off the street,’” said crime analyst Jeff Asher, “That’s great but that’s a pin prick. It doesn’t reflect anything. If you got 150 guns the next year but 75,000 people are carrying guns, we have no idea what that denominator is — and that denominator is probably very large. You can talk about getting illegal guns and removing a gun that cannot be used in a shooting, that’s great. But as violence reduction strategy or metric for determining success in violence reduction, it’s a very flawed statistic.”
The brand of gun policing that ensnared Myles-Pratt during last year’s Mardi Gras — looking for people who appear to be carrying a weapon or are engaged in an act like smoking marijuana that would give officers probable cause to pat them down — are not unique to big events.
Law enforcement frequently publicizes large numbers of gun arrests as an example of progress in violence reduction in New Orleans. Last fall, the NOPD touted 100 arrests during a summer crime sweep. The multi-agency initiative, dubbed “Operation Golden Eagle,” yielded 35 firearm-related arrests and seized 39 illegal firearms according to the department.
Benjamin Levin, a law professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Missouri, agrees.
“I’m really skeptical about the efficacy” of traditional gun policing, he said. “In part because as concerning and broad sweeping as these policing approaches are, they can never really be as broad and totalizing as would be necessary to significantly make an impact on gun violence. Police are perhaps selectively removing some number of guns from the street. Maybe that approach reduces the likelihood of or the reality of homicides or gun violence by some percent, but there’s a question of what that percent actually is.”
Police departments argue, however, that patrols targeting illegal gun carrying can effectively reduce crime, a contention backed up by some criminologists.
Police are “making a distinction between people who they believe should have the Second Amendment right to carry, and people who they believe should not have that Second Amendment right.”
– defense attorney Gregory Carter
To analyze how gun policing works in New Orleans — particularly during large events — Verite News reviewed 100 police reports for gun arrests during the 2023, 2024 and 2025 Carnival seasons. The review included 15 gun arrests in 2023, 40 in 2024 and 45 in 2025. Verite News examined the 15 gun arrests in 2023 because they were the subject of high-profile refusals by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, and 85 arrests total in 2024 and 2025 because they occurred on days when the most gun arrests were made by law enforcement during Carnival.
Ninety-four of the 100 arrestees are Black men. Two of the arrestees were Black women and four were white men. Levin said that such extreme racial disparities in the enforcement of gun possession laws are common.
“If you want to aggressively enforce possession laws, it also means that you want to search a whole lot of people,” he said. “One of the huge worries in decades of litigation, is about bias, and particularly about racial bias with these stops. We know that enforcement can’t be universally enforced in any kind of realistic way, which means someone is making a decision, which means it’s going to easily lend itself to bias.”
The Verite News review of 100 police reports found similar details in them that could generate concerns about probable cause. Forty-nine of the 100 reports involved people arrested after they were observed with a “bulge,” “L-shaped object,” or other “characteristics of an armed person,” such as holding a waistband, adjusting a shirt, hands in a hoodie, or carrying a backpack. Some people were asked if they had a concealed carry permit. In other reports where people were stopped because of a “bulge” or “L-shaped object” seen under their clothes, officers stated in the report, without further detail, that the person arrested possessing a gun could “in no way [be] considered open carry.”
Sixteen gun arrests began because another crime was being committed—such as fighting, brandishing a weapon or other suspicious behavior such as wearing a mask.
Thirty-five began when police approached someone or a group of people they said were rolling a joint or smoking marijuana. State troopers were far more likely than NOPD to initiate a search based on smoking marijuana or the odor of it. All of the thirty-five gun arrests that began because of suspected marijuana use or possession were made by state troopers.
A former Orleans Parish assistant district attorney, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to press restrictions imposed by his place of employment, told Verite News that “basically, the cop could just almost literally say, like, ‘I have a bad feeling about the guy, so I patted him down, and he had a gun.’ And that would be fine. That’d be enough to have him arrested. But then it becomes far more complicated as it goes along.”
He said that he and other prosecutors who screened and prosecuted gun cases noted rote, repeated language in police reports. He said that prosecutors joked that someone should dress up as an L-shaped bulge for Mardi Gras, and doubted that police were actually observing the guns, and instead officers were simply patting down people they found suspicious.
“Nobody walks around with their waistband showing so clearly and their pants so tight that you can see an L-shaped bulge. I mean, it’s just like highly rare.”
– former Orleans Parish assistant district attorney
Still, he said he understood the pressure police and city officials were under to get guns off the street in crowded and chaotic situations.
“We understood why the cops were doing it, particularly in areas during hot times,” he said. “But, you know, for a cop, they’re looking for an arrest. For a prosecutor, you’re looking for a conviction. And the standard to arrest and detain and charge even, is so low, whereas the standard to convict is so high.”
NOPD and the DA’s office did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police, Ross Brennan, said that troopers “are trained in constitutional law, search and seizure, and probable cause, and are expected to evaluate each situation based on the totality of circumstances and articulate those facts in their reports.” State Police work with prosecutors “to ensure cases are properly documented and supported from arrest through prosecution, helping maintain accountability and consistency,” he said.
Chaotic 2023 Carnival yields gun arrest dismissals, civil rights lawsuit
During Carnival season in 2023 the DA’s office dismissed 15 gun arrests even before they got to a judge. Of the 15, 11 were for officers observing a “bulge” or other characteristics of an armed person. Four stops were initiated because of a marijuana smell or because the arrestee was smoking a joint.
These dismissals generated controversy largely because they came after a shooting during the Bacchus parade that left one person dead and multiple people wounded. Louisiana Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser told WWL-TV that there were “no consequences” for Mardi Gras gun carriers: “Shame on the people that let them go. When they kill someone, because they will, because they had no consequences for carrying a gun in the first place.”
Metropolitan Crime Commission President Rafael Goyeneche, also a critic of the dismissals at the time, said the cases should have been more carefully screened. “That wasn’t the place to refuse charges,” he said. “Magistrate is there to set bail, not to screen the case.”
But assistant DA Emily Maw, who was head of the office’s Civil Rights Division at the time but was sitting in for first appearances that Fat Tuesday, saw flaws in some of the reports she reviewed. “I am not sure that I would even be able to ask for probable cause on this one,” she told the Magistrate during the first appearance of Courtland Posey, charged with illegal carrying of weapons. “There’s no description of the gun that was alleged to have been found. But, regardless, if you’re willing to forfeit your gun, we will refuse the charges here on that.”
Maw did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Initially, the DA’s office said these arrests lacked probable cause and the charges were dropped based on arrestees agreeing to give up their firearms. “When faced with a no probable cause finding by the court, the ADA made decisions that would increase safety in our city like requiring defendants to forfeit their weapons,” the DA’s office said in a statement.
Months after the dismissals, the arrests were reviewed by District Attorney Jason Williams, who publicly criticized Maw for dropping the cases. Williams later attempted to bring charges against two defendants, but the charges were quashed by Orleans Parish Criminal District Court judges.
At least one of the cases was picked up by federal prosecutors and resulted in a guilty plea to possession of a machine gun.
The most high profile of the dismissals involved then-Louisiana State University wide receiver Malik Nabers, now a star receiver for the New York Giants. According to a police report, NOPD Officer Kristopher Devore observed Nabers in the 300 block of Bourbon Street around 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 20, 2023 walking “under the NOPD generator powered streetlight.” Devore said he saw “a L-shaped object protruding through the front right pocket” of Nabers’ pants. “This object was heavy enough to weigh down the subjects’ sweatpants,” Devore wrote.
Nabers did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment on his arrest.
Devore made a similar arrest early the next morning in the same location. At around 2 a.m. on February 21, 2023, Devore stopped Keaton Manghane on the 300 block of Bourbon Street as he walked underneath a NOPD generator-powered streetlight. Devore said Manghane was “holding the right pants leg” and he observed “a large object protruding through the front right loose shorts pocket.” Manghane was followed and eventually stopped, patted down, and arrested for having a handgun.
A few months later, on Nov. 24, 2023 a group of NOPD officers including Devore patrolled the same Bourbon Street block again. At around 7:30 p.m. the officers spotted a man in a puffy jacket walking towards them. According to body camera footage obtained by Verite News, one of the officers told another that “his front waistband looks weird on the left side.” When officers approached the man, he turned to run. Officers chased him down and tackled him, pinning him to the ground, as he protested that they didn’t have probable cause to make an arrest.
According to court records, the man they arrested, Darnell Lee, did have a gun on him. He later pleaded guilty in federal court to being a felon in possession of a firearm. In April 2025, Lee was sentenced to 30 months in prison. But a family of bystanders who witnessed the arrest said it appeared that NOPD used excessive force against Lee.
LaTonya and Zenny Williams were in town from Alabama with their two sons for the Bayou Classic when they saw the officers arrest Lee on Bourbon Street. In an interview with Verite News, LaTonya said they believed officers were too quick to assume the man they had arrested was illegally carrying a firearm. “Just because you see a protrusion or whatever, that doesn’t give you probable cause to go stop this dude that’s just walking on the road,” she said.
Zenny claims that when he yelled at the officers not to point a gun at Lee, they charged at his family. Zenny told Verite News that he mistakenly believed officers had their own guns drawn, and later learned that they had been clearing Lee’s weapon. He said that one officer shoved LaTonya, and that when he turned around to help his wife, who had fallen to the ground, he was “attacked and assaulted” by the officers. The family claims that LaTonya and her son Nasir sustained injuries including a strained rotator cuff, a laceration to an eyelid that required four stitches, and the bruising of forearms and shoulders.
LaTonya and Zenny were carrying guns as well — though both had concealed carry permits, they told Verite News. Still, LaTonya was charged with illegal carrying of weapons and obstruction of justice, Zenny with obstruction of justice, illegal carrying of weapons, resisting an officer, and battery of a police officer. Nasir was charged with resisting an officer. Their cases remained open for around two years. During that time, Zenny said, the family had to travel to New Orleans almost every month. “It was a nightmare,” Zenny said. “They kept dragging it out and dragging it out.” In January, Zenny pled guilty to one count of resisting an officer. Nasir pled guilty to the same charge in November 2024. Each received inactive probation, a form of unsupervised probation that does not require a person to regularly report to a probation officer.
The other charges against Zenny, along with both charges against LaTonya, were dismissed by the DA’s office. Their guns were seized by the police and, following the closure of the case, the family said they plan on travelling back to New Orleans to retrieve them.
Zenny and LaTonya filed a federal civil rights suit against the officers, the NOPD and the city of New Orleans for claims including false arrest, unlawful detention, and excessive force. Their lawsuit is ongoing, and was recently added to the trial docket by the judge in their case.
The NOPD and attorneys for the officers did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment on the allegations in the lawsuit.
The chaotic arrest of Darnell Lee and the 15 gun arrests dismissed by the DA’s office were not the only troubled gun cases in 2023.
A man named Mansour Mbodj was arrested and indicted on second degree murder charges related to the 2023 Bacchus parade shooting just before the DA’s Fat Tuesday dismissals.
But Mbodj’s lawyer argued it was self-defense, and the DA’s office came to agree that he had a “strong self-defense claim.” So, instead, prosecutors amended his charge from second degree murder to illegal carrying of a firearm at a parade with any firearm used in the commission of a crime of violence. He was sentenced to five years in prison, with credit for time served. Mansour was again arrested this year around Mardi Gras on drug and gun charges.
Gun arrests rarely result in prison time
Despite the focused enforcement by police, many gun cases brought during Carnival in 2024 and 2025 ended up with charges that were reduced, dismissed, or resulted in no jail or prison time. While the majority of the cases from those years reviewed by Verite News ended in a guilty plea, only two resulted in prison time.
In 2024, 28 out of 40 cases analyzed by Verite News involved people who pleaded to only negligent carrying of a concealed handgun, a misdemeanor that penalizes someone for carrying a gun in a bag or their pocket rather than a holster, increasing the likelihood of an accidental discharge. Twenty-seven of those arrestees were initially charged with intentional concealment of a weapon and one was charged with possession of a firearm in an alcoholic beverage outlet.
Guilty pleas for negligent carry were less common in 2025. Sixteen of the 45 arrestees analyzed by Verite News from 2025 pleaded to negligent carrying of a firearm, but six also pleaded to other charges — primarily for drugs and resisting arrest. Of 33 whose cases are closed, only four pleaded to more serious gun charges and only one went to trial.
For the negligent carry pleas from both 2024 and 2025, defendants primarily received probation, with the possibility of short stints of jail time if they violated their conditions
While prison time was rare, it appears prosecutors were more likely to move forward and obtain convictions on the gun arrests compared to felony arrests handled by the DA’s office as a whole. Just 16 percent of the 85 gun arrests analyzed by Verite News were refused or dismissed. Meanwhile, a report published in December by the Metropolitan Crime Commission found that prosecutors refused or dismissed 46 percent of felony cases in 2024.
Sarah Omojola, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office, said that the outcomes of the cases shows that police time and resources could have a greater public safety impact if they moved away from proactive gun policing and focused on more serious offenses — especially when taking into account the racial disparities in gun stops.
“The possession of a firearm is not use of a firearm,” Omojola said. “And we can really serve public safety in better ways with better use of police time.”
Looser gun laws lead to major changes
Gun policing changed during the 2023-2025 period in part because of a 2024 state law allowing people to carry concealed weapons without a permit. Conservative lawmakers, including Gov. Jeff Landry, celebrated the law as “an incredible victory for liberty.” But some in state and local law enforcement were reticent about the idea of more guns on the street with fewer tools to stop them. The Louisiana Fraternal Order of Police argued that permitless concealed carry “undermines the safety of both law enforcement officers and the general public.”
Under the new law, officers no longer asked people they stopped if they had a conceal carry permit because there was no longer a need for a permit. But police made more arrests for negligent carry. According to Courtwatch NOLA, negligent carry quickly became one of the most frequently charged crimes in the city, from 95 in 2024 to 134 in 2025.
After the new law was passed, the practice of stopping people for suspected marijuana use during Mardi Gras increased. From 2024 to 2025, the number of stops initiated because of marijuana went from 12 in 2024 to 19 in 2025.
Goyeneche of Metropolitan Crime Commission said that after the legislature passed permitless concealed carry in 2024, law enforcement has been finding new ways to engage in proactive gun policing — including making more stops for suspected negligent carrying, or when people appear to be using drugs or intoxicated.
“They have to enforce the laws,” Goyeneche said. “When the law is taken away from them, they look for some other laws. They may be more aggressive in trying to determine if individuals are drunk in public or, you know, if they see a smoke on a joint. That may give them the ability to go up to them.”
Stops that began because of observations such as a bulge or characteristics of an armed person decreased from 24 in 2024 to 14 in 2025.
The police reports examined by Verite News demonstrate that many people were aware of their rights as gun owners and were following the changes in gun laws in Louisiana, though they were sometimes confused by them. One man arrested in 2024 told police he did not have a conceal carry permit because in his home state of Georgia he did not need one. Another man had an out-of-state conceal carry permit police were unable to authenticate.
When police approached Coindell Bryant on the 1200 block of St. Charles Avenue around 5 p.m. on March 2, 2025 because they noticed a silver handgun in a holster at his side, he showed a security guard’s license on his phone. The police, however, said they were “unable to confirm the validity of the document.” Then officers ran Bryant’s name in a criminal database and allegedly identified several serious crimes. He was arrested for being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, carrying a weapon on school property, and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number. The charges were all later dropped.
Courts sometimes scrutinize police stops, some found reasonable
As gun cases have worked through the criminal justice system in New Orleans, both local district judges and higher courts have weighed in regarding what gives police the right to stop someone who they believe might be carrying a weapon.
In 2025, the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a case stemming from a 2022 arrest by federal marshals in New Orleans that it is unconstitutional for police to stop someone only for carrying a concealed weapon even when the state requires a permit for doing so.
That ruling would have seemingly rendered the New Orleans police tactic to “stop-and-check” a person who they saw had a gun unconstitutional even before gun laws changed in 2024.
In August, a panel of judges in a state appeals court, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal in New Orleans, ruled that police were within their rights to conduct an investigatory stop over Mardi Gras of a man named Arthur Coleman along the St. Charles Avenue parade route. Coleman was walking with two other people, one of whom was smoking marijuana. Though police did not see Coleman smoking, they asked if he was carrying a gun, and he told them he had one in his backpack.
Police initially arrested him for having a firearm along a parade route, but prosecutors amended it to negligent carrying of a handgun. He ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year of inactive probation.
In December, the same court ruled that police had reasonable suspicion to stop someone after seeing a concealed weapon in their waistband, in part because it was late at night on Bourbon street.
“Bourbon Street at 1:00 a.m. during Mardi Gras presents a setting where physical contact between pedestrians is frequent and unpredictable,” the judges wrote. “Officers patrolling such an environment are trained to recognize that firearms carried in the front waistband are often placed there without stabilizing support. An officer may reasonably infer that a firearm carried in that position could become dislodged if bumped.” The case is ongoing.
Conversely, in November the Fourth Circuit upheld a district court ruling that police did not have reasonable suspicion to stop someone after they were tipped off by a “concerned citizen” who allegedly told the officer that they had witnessed “an unknown Black male hand an open firearm to another Black male on the street.” After the ruling, the charges were dismissed by the Attorney General’s office.
Were the DA’s 2023 dismissals the right approach?
Some gun control advocates have argued that the DA’s approach in 2023—firearm forfeiture in lieu of incarceration—is a more effective, less harmful, and cost-saving approach to gun policing. The Giffords Law Center encourages prosecutors to “implement gun diversion programs” for those with nonviolent gun-related charges: “Society can better protect public safety without resorting to automatic and draconian punishment for every single person caught with an illegal gun, a policy that essentially criminalizes the fear and trauma that too often lead some young men of color to pick up a gun in the first place.”
Indeed, in a country awash in hundreds of millions of guns and where courts —including the U.S. Supreme Court —are scrutinizing restrictions on gun carrying, academics and crime analysts question the efficacy of simple gun possession arrests. “I think this is also one of the places where just the real ubiquity of guns, the fact that they are everywhere, that there are so many of them, that in different states and different cities and different counties gun ownership and gun possession is a thing that people don’t think about in the same ways,” Levin, the Washington State University School of Law professor, said. “With standalone possession, police need to somehow discover that a person possesses something. And that means that unless there’s another crime that has occurred, police need to know what’s in your pocket or what’s in your bag, which is impossible to do without searching. If you want to aggressively enforce possession laws, it also means that you want to search a whole lot of people. There is reason to be really worried about wide scale possession enforcement.”
To Asher, the crime analyst, law enforcement stopping and searching people for guns may get some weapons off the street, but the practice falls short of being a comprehensive violence reduction strategy.
“As an outcome, if you find somebody on Bourbon Street with a handgun in their pocket and a drink in their hand, taking that gun off the streets is a positive public safety outcome, but as a strategy? I don’t know what the strategy is, if there is a strategy,” Asher said. “You’re going to have a low success rate. You’ve probably already lost from a big picture standpoint because you’re never going to get everybody. It’s casting a wide net and hoping. Because imagine how many people they stopped where it was just the light playing or the shadows.”
This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
