Adopt A Criminal
January 19th, 2007
This morning I was on on the theNew995fm.com on the Jim Brown morning show. Jim Brown wanted to talk about what we could do to follow up on the anti-Violence march, or as I like to call it, the March of No-Confidence. I suggested that we “adopt a criminal”.
It was an off the cuff suggestion, so here’s what we need to do to make it work:
- Leave a comment in this post if you want to help, or email alan@thinknola.com.
- Set up a blog for the pioneers. Make it a group blog, we’ll work together on the research.
- Gather up a page that has all the insturcitons on how to participate. Information on the court system. Websites were you can find information.
I’m runing around the rest of the day. Please, get this rolling by hashing it out in the comments.
Update: By adopt a criminal, I really mean, watch the courts, to make sure that a case goes to trial. Maybe it’s better to call it Adopt and Indictment?
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I would definitely like to adopt a criminal or two. My friend in the DA’s office can give me the skinny on the post arrest process.
I think it should be kept to murders, and we should actually adopt a victim and follow what happens with the case. Many murderers are never caught, and it’s important for people to know that. Perhaps we can figure out why they are not caught.
We should assign each of the 2007 murders to someone. The “catagories” on the blog should be the victim’s names, so people can click on the name and get all the posts related to that murder.
The first post for each victim should include the date and place of the murder, and any known facts, especially about the suspect. The person following the murder should make an effort to get face to face with the investigating officer, and respect confidentiality if there is a chance that our public blogging will endanger the investigation.
If we work to help the police and DA, rather than work against them, it would be good for all concerned.
Do you want me to set up the blog? Where? Can you buy a domain name, Alan? What should it be? I don’t think “Adopt a Criminal” is good. It will make people think we are baking cookies and taking them to OPP.
If this is a mentoring type of initiative, I would like to offer assistance.
Research has been done and I have a best practices mentoring leader who is scheduled to come to New Orleans for a Restorative Justice presentation in March.
In fact, there was a volunteer mentoring program for ex-offenders that was scheduled to be started prior to the hurricane. This idea may be closer to fruition than one thinks, if we can get it back on track.
Cory Turner
coturner1@aol.com
One of my neighbors has been down and out sincce his wife left him just before Katrina, and he was drinking heavily. now he’s out of rehab and just today he asked me to ‘adopt’ him and be his friend because he needs postive people and human contact in his life. I said ok, so he’s going to come back over later and tell me his story and i’ll encourage him i guess. Unfortunately from experience i don’t think i could befriend a crack user in this way and I am ensuring someone else is here while he’s here so i’m safe. Maybe we’ll take him to pizza.
Anyway, I like both of the ideas above and i don’t think they’re mutally exclusive, i think they’re complimentary. if someone mentors the victim and the perpetrator both, then 4 people can be walked through a restorative justice program where applicable, prolly not so much for murders but for other crimes, each party has a support person, they are all learning intensive conflict resolution and forgiveness, then the “how to” eventually becomes cultural knowledge.
From the John McDonough meetings I know there are grown men and ex-cons in the community that want to mentor young men also.
instead of ‘victims and citizens against crime’ its like ‘ victims and criminals and caring people healing each other’
or something
The Orleans Parish Prison Docket Master is a searchable database of defendants.
Who do we start looking for in Docket Master. I tried one of the Parasol’s robbers, but could not find them.
Most pre-trial people are sent to out of Orleans Parish for detention.
There must be something in the air because I was thinking about this sort of thing just a few hours ago. Collective consiousness anyone? I have a Web domain I bought a while back but have done nothing with other than design a logo. Perhaps it could be used for this. It’s below. Anyway, I’m in. You have my e-mail addy.
http://www.careforgot.org/
Varg, I like that a lot.
Cory and Amy
This is not a mentoring program, I’m sorry for the confusion about the post.
This is a program to track failures in the procedures of the criminal justice system. We are watching the courts, not the criminals. We want to catch the horrible mistakes that put violent criminals right back on the streets.
Dangerblond and Varg
That’s a project that Ray in New Orleans is developing. He’s done research on some of the recent murder victims for a memorial.
I strongly believe if the program you are suggesting is to track the failures of the court system, the name should reflect that.
I find the name ‘Adopt a Criminal’ problematic on many levels. Whether we like it, or believe it, arrested folks are innocent until proven guilty. Blanketing all arrested folks with the label ‘criminal’ is incorrect, regardless of whether or not they are prior convicted offenders.
Besides, if you are tracking a defendent’s untried case in order to catch mistakes made by the legal system, then put the onus on the legal system by creating a name that reinforces your watch dogging of them every single time. This will get your group noticed, as well as sending a clear message of your purpose and mission.
With all due respect, Adopt a Criminal sounds like charitable organization, not a watchdog group.
Thanks, Dix.
You’re right, too, that we are tracking the courts, and not the indicted, to find fault in the courts, and that fault may be that there is a lack of a presumption of innocence, sentances are harsh, or reflect strange baises. Thus, it’s not about being “tough on crime”, but being tough on the competence of procedures, the handling of evidence, collaboration between police and the DA, etc.
Blanketing people with the word criminal is incorrect. I agree.
It’s just the name of this post, and it’s too late now to change the name of this post, because, well, it’s just a post. Discussing the name and message is valuable. Having this misnomer in place, and the confusion that it caused in the comments is a good record of how the development of the mission and message of the project.
Yes, “Adopt a Criminal” is an unfortunate name, but I never thought Alan wanted that to be the real name. More of a “working title” until the right name comes along.
The mission is more like citizen follow-through on felony crime prosecutions. Under Alan’s idea of starting after an indictment (not really a good term to use either, because you only have an indictment when the DA convenes a Grand Jury and not all murders or violent crimes get a Grand Jury), we wouldn’t be involved until someone is charged.
Being charged certainly does not mean a person is guilty, so we should not call them criminals. It usually means, however, that the investigation has settled on this one suspect (assuming only one person is involved). There isn’t any more investigating being done at that point.
Like Alan says, we have laws and procedures in place. After someone is arrested and charged, we need to know exactly what they are charged with and find out as much as we can about court dates, deadlines, whether the suspect was bonded out, how much was the bond, etc. Sometimes people are charged with different crimes at the same time that can’t be tried together because it will prejudice the jury – for instance, if you are convicted felon in illegal possession of a firearm, but a different one than the murder weapon, that doesn’t legally tend to prove you committed the murder, so the jury can’t be told about that.
I think we will find that there are many areas where things go wrong, not just one, and the first step is to find out how it’s supposed to work and then why it so often does not.
How about Adopt a Criminal Case?
Perhaps it would be better to adopt a DZ or adopt a case.
There’s definitely something in the air; I’ve been talking for a few weeks with friends about creating a site to help track crime and the process of law in N.O. We looked at Docket Master, but the search limitations make that route impractical. (It wouldn’t be hard to scrape from there, since the query string gives the game away, but the disclaimer at the bottom of the page makes it seem that such an approach would be discouraged.)
Congressperson James Carter has announced a “Court Watchers Program” that he wants to start: basically a citizens group to keep track of court cases. I contacted his office to volunteer to help build a tool for the program, but they seem to think I just wanted to volunteer to be a watcher.
Ideally, I think we’d have a comprehensive system. Start with something like chicagocrime.org, which provides a great front-end to view crime stats (including Google Maps and various data slices). This would require data from the NOPD (which may require a FOIA request). Chicago’s PD makes the data publicly available, and chicagocrime.org just scrapes and repurposes it.
Until NOPD provides the data, the system could draw on newspaper reports and also provide an input form for individuals to report crimes.
Then, I’d like to see arrest records tied to these crime reports. Saw a report on t.v. Monday that no arrests have been made in the 14 murders so far this year. If citizens are supposed to become more proactive, we need to be kept abreast of police efforts, and arrests are one indication.
From the arrest records to Docket Master is a tricky business. I’ve heard from some folks working with the Public Defender’s office that there are
many cases lost in the system, people incarcerated since before the storm for minor offenses (or simple bureaucratic lapses). So, I’m not sure how you get from arrests to cases in criminal court.
But once you do get there, apparently the criminal court must make that data available (the scary disclaimer on Docket Master claims that this data is available in response to a FOIA request).
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now, and I’d like to work with folks to figure out how we can use technology to help make the judicial system more transparent.
We should start making a list of the possible data sources, official and unofficial, and a list of things we want on our website and start building it piecemeal.
Troy, as far as people whose cases have been in process since before the storm, I think it is such a mess that it may be impossible to figure out, especially if we don’t have access to all the information. I think it would be less frustrating for us if we start with January 1, 2007, and build forward. We could also build backward, as information becomes available. It would be less frustrating for me to think of the pre-2007 cases as lagniappe if we can get them.
The way I am picturing it is that we have currently, say, 14 murders (if we start small), so we have 14 “stories” we are following on murder. There is not much to report if there have been no arrests because the police are not going to give out any information that is not in the incident report. I think the incident reports are public records, but there is a fee for copies and they don’t become available for weeks (as you know if you have ever had a car accident).
Once there is an arrest, records will start being created. A schedule will be set for trial, but typically it will change many times. That’s why it’s going to be hard work to figure out what is going on.
I think many of us would like to also see a more comprehensive website that reports real statistics for all crimes in the city. I would like to see this also, but I am getting the impression that this information is closely held for nefarious reasons related to people not wanting to have to explain their failures. Has anyone ever sued the NOPD for this information? Perhaps we can get a lawsuit started and force them to release accurate crime records.
Had a thought: If we were to work with Councilman Carter’s office, would this help us get access to more information? Get inside the lion’s den, so to speak?
Mr. Alan I would like to make another recommendation. Can we have a 1800 number that has nothing to do with NOPD however, managed by Metro Crime Commission where individuals can report criminals and their activity and let the crime commission track the criminals and also the criminal justice department. Criminals are being reported however, convictions seems to be the problem and poor representation in the court system.
Dangerblond, I think starting with this year and moving forward (with the hopes of getting a complete accounting someday) seems like a practical suggestion. According to the member of Councilperson Carter’s staff who called me, their Court Watchers Program seems pretty close to what you’re suggesting in terms of following the post-arrest process. They’re going to set up protocols and have training for volunteers. I don’t have any idea whether this program will be effective (or when it would go into effect), but it seemed worth a shot.
And, as you suggest, I do hope that by working with Carter’s office we could get better access to the data we want. I spoke with his staffer again today and made clear my offer to work on a tool to make the court data more accessible. She seemed to like the offer and assured me she’d take it to the group planning the program.
Docketed cases seem to be public record under the Freedom of Information Act and Public Records Act. So, I don’t think it’ll be much of a struggle to get access to those records (particularly if a Council Member is on our side, but even without).
The incident reports are another story. They do cost. Apparently even Public Defenders have to pay. So, it will be a struggle to get that data, but it might be a struggle worth fighting. I don’t think the NOPD or the D.A.’s office is going to be much help. Call it a hunch.
In Chicago, the police department itself uses a system called “Citizen ICAM” to make its crime report records publicly available: http://12.17.79.6/ . I think I’ll do some research into the history there to see what brought about this gesture of transparency.
Closer to home, St. Charles Parish posts its arrest briefs online: http://www.stcharlessheriff.org/news.php
So, why not Orleans?
That we can’t get crime information drives me crazy.
Also, I’m exasperated by projects that stall because someone else is looking into that. I’m not content to wait for a city official to pull something together for us. I’m tired of waiting for leadership.
We should not have to play ball in order to get information on the nature of crime in our city. We need to know the nature of the crime in our city to protect ourselves from that crime, to guide policy on crime.
Today, I’m back to angry. I don’t want to wait. I want to lead.
“What Can Brown Do for You?”:http://houstonpress.com/Issues/2007-01-25/news/hairballs.html
Or worse:
“Widower relives N.O. nightmare”:http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1169712550320640.xml&coll=1.
We need to set the agenda. We can use this format to set the agenda. Any progress that I’ve seen has come from the research and proposals of citizens, not the guided faciliation of a city program.
Alan, I think you’re absolutely right. Just did a little research on the ICAM system in Chicago, and of course it was preceded by citizen efforts to map crime in their community. The current system is the result of police-citizen collaboration.
I also heard yesterday that, in Orleans, the cost associated with incident reports is for the copying. Apparently, you can view incident and arrest reports without charge. I haven’t confirmed this, and I’m not sure about the details, but concerned citizens could, conceivably, start a “records brigade” of laptop users updating data sources manually until NOPD decides to be more forthcoming with the data.
What’s most frustrating for me is that NOPD is already generating data and doing crime mapping, but it has never been posted in a useful format and, as of October, isn’t being updated at all:
https://secure.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=50&tabid=76
Court watchers could take the arrest records and use Docket Master’s search by name to identify defendants and follow the progress of the case.
I still intend to work with Carter’s office, hoping that his influence will open doors, but I’m not willing to wait around for our political leaders to fix things.
I sent an e-mail to Carter’s office last week, no reponse yet.
I see in the paper that there has been only one arrest for the 15 murders so far. I think it’s more now.
The person they arrested was Sterling Pipkins, for the murder of Jealina Brown. I remembered his name because it’s Dickensian. He was arrested a long time ago for killing or attempting to kill a police officer. What happened with that? Why was he out on the street? You would think a person who attacked a police officer would be locked up in the bowels of Angola and the key thrown away.
Sterling Pipkins (that is Dickensian) shows up in Docket Master:
http://opcsolxb.opcso.org/dcktmstr/dmdspscn.php?d1scnn=720340
Here’s how I read the story of Mr. Pipkins, although I’m not sure I completely understand the Docket Master data:
It appears he was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in 2004 for attempted armed robbery and two counts of aggravated battery (one count pled down from attempted
first degree murder). He was given credit for time server (which appears to
be one year and four months). Not sure how he’s back on the street already, though.
He was arrested on 1/14/2007 for resisting an officer, possession of stolen property, illegal carrying weapons, and felon in possession of a handgun. Looks like he made bond of $29,000 and was set to appear again in court on March 16.
While out on bond, he was arrested for first degree murder and aggravated burglary on 1/24. His bond is set for $35,000, but he hasn’t posted it yet. The DAs office has 60 days to decide whether to make a case, so he’s set to reappear on 3/25 for that hearing.
Here’s what I don’t get: Back in 2002, his bond was set at $1,000,000 before being dropped back to $400,000, and that was for attempted murder. Why is the bond so much lower for an actual murder charge now?
Looks like we have a case for court watching.
My mistake. According to the T-P, Pipkins was still in jail for the handgun when charged with the murder:
http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1169715356320640.xml?NZNENO&coll=1