Eighteen-year-old Calvin Cains III was killed by JPSO deputies on Tuesday in front of his mother, who says deputies didn’t announce themselves or give him a chance to surrender.
Category: Criminal Justice
Posted inCriminal Justice
Back to ‘the lion’s den’ – violence interrupters to re-start street gun-violence interventions, as city partners with University Medical Center
The city’s proposed new contract with UMC — which goes before the City Council on Thursday — summarizes its purpose very simply: “New Orleans faces a severe epidemic of gun violence. Hospital-based violence-interruption programs are evidence-based interventions that can reduce shootings and preserve health and life.”
Posted inCriminal Justice
State Supreme Court declines to take up case about Louisiana kids jailed out-of-state
The state’s highest court refuses opportunity to resolve long-standing dispute about whether shipping detained kids out of state violates Louisiana law.
Posted inCriminal Justice
City rolls out non-police 911 mental-health response
People experiencing a mental-health crisis could be more frequently stabilized and treated, not arrested.
Posted inCriminal Justice
A group of ‘violence interrupters’ worked the streets of New Orleans to prevent retaliatory shootings — until they were sidelined 2 years ago
For nearly a decade, Calvin Pep used what he’d learned on the streets to stop bloodshed through Cure Violence, a city-funded effort to prevent violence. From his teen years on, Pep had been “both a victim and a perpetrator,” as he describes himself. He’d been shot. He’d faced a murder charge. His co-workers had similar […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
Neighborhood security stopped 3 young Black males; A federal judge is weighing a lawsuit over it
Lawyers representing police officers who are accused of racially profiling and pulling guns on several young Black males who were searching for a lost dog argued in federal court Wednesday that the officers didn’t violate the constitution and are entitled to qualified immunity from the civil rights claims. The case, brought as part of the […]
Posted inAudio
Behind the Lens Episode 204: ‘Some of the most shocking things we heard about were medical and mental health care’
Our guests this week are reporter Nick Chrastil on what deficiencies monitors found at the Orleans Parish Jail and reporter Marta Jewson on racial diversity in the city’s charter school system.
Posted inNews
Orleans jail monitors disclose for first time issues found under Hutson’s leadership
Monitors tasked with overseeing the New Orleans jail and tracking its compliance with the long-running federal consent decree said staff falsified suicide-watch documentation, rubber-stamped investigations to justify uses of force, and that the facility is dangerously understaffed.
Posted inCriminal Justice
Louisiana leads nation in percentage of people in adult prisons for crimes they committed as kids
A new report by the national non-profit Human Rights for Kids has found that the degree to which the United States punishes crimes committed by kids is far out of line with international standards, calling the mass incarceration of children as adults “one of the largest government-sanctioned human rights abuses against children in the world […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
After 23 years in prison for killing her abuser, she hopes no one in Louisiana has to do that again
On Dec. 2, 1996, Beatrice Taylor hobbled out of her apartment complex to a nearby payphone and dialed 911. She told a Gretna police dispatcher she needed officers to come out to her home for the second day in a row, according to court records. Her ex-boyfriend had become violent again, stomped on her foot and broken […]