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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOne in 7 adults in New Orleans have a warrant out for their arrest, new data shows
Its Monday morning in the Municipal and Traffic Court of New Orleans misdemeanor rush hour in a city that traffics more heavily than most in public drunkenness and disturbing the peace.
Fifty-two arrestees, outfitted in orange and maroon jumpsuits, await their first appearance before a judge. Most are black. All require a public defender. And more than half of them are here, their hands chained against their stomachs, because they missed a court date for a minor crime, triggering an arrest warrant.
Lauren Anderson, a public defender and attorney supervisor for Municipal Court, is furious as she looks over a list of their names. It doesnt make any sense, she says. Were not making the city any safer. Were only hurting these people, and we just keep doing it over and over. Its infuriating.
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Cirque du So-What
(25,808 posts)on so many levels. A supposedly progressive city can and must do better than that.
dalton99a
(81,062 posts)...
Lisa Foster, co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center in New York, worked for the Justice Department at the time of the Ferguson report. She said that most people miss court because they simply forget, do not have reliable transportation or child care, or cannot afford to miss work. And many are unable to pay their fines, so they stay away out of fear they will be arrested.
We criminalized a lot of conduct over the last few decades that we may want to go back and think about, Foster said. We also know everybody speeds sometimes or rolls through a stop sign, but who gets caught tends to be people where there are a lot of police. And thats overwhelmingly communities of color.
Kelly Orians, co-director of the First 72+ nonprofit in New Orleans, which provides legal services and case management to people returning from prison, said she sees this issue play out nearly every day.
One of her clients, Kendell Morgan, 33, was pulled over in February for a broken taillight. The officer ran his name, saw he had an outstanding warrant in St. Charles Parish for a $219 speeding ticket and arrested him. Morgan was held in the New Orleans jail for seven days, then extradited to the St. Charles Parish jail. He was released only after his wife scraped together enough money to pay the ticket.
Morgan, who was employed as a restaurant manager at the time, was fired a short time later, having missed more than a week of work.
They started looking at me different, he said of his employer. I was a different person to them.
To Orians, it doesnt make sense. The city is expending scarce resources, and the threat of incarceration leaves a large, vulnerable segment of the citys population in fear of chance encounters with the police, she said.
Ive had two incidents where people called the police when they were a victim of a crime one had a scooter stolen, one saw people popping door handles and both were arrested when the police arrived because they had attachments, Orians said, referring to warrants. You think they are going to call the police again?