New Orleans Officers Upset over Mardi Gras Pay Discrepancies

Under a city plan to allow Mardi Gras parades to return to their full routes, krewes are scrambling to find extra police. But meanwhile, some members of NOPD are crying foul.

Why, they'd like to know, should auxiliary officers be paid more than experienced Crescent City cops to provide crowd control during Carnival?

Eric Hessler, a retired NOPD sergeant, who is now the attorney for the Police Association of New Orleans, said he's received several calls from officers venting about what they see as the unfairness in the mayor's plan to fully staff the city's upcoming schedule of parades.

City Hall has offered to pay qualified officers from agencies across Louisiana $50 per hour during most of Carnival, and $75 per hour on Fat Tuesday. According to the salary calculator on NOPD's recruitment page, officers' hourly salary starts at roughly $28 per hour for rookies, and rises to $68 per hour for a deputy chief with 19 years' experience.

Hessler said that officers may receive holiday and overtime pay, but for most, their compensation still won't rival that of the stopgap officers.

Buckets of money

Hessler said that the city hopes to temporarily solve the problem of diminished NOPD staffing "with buckets of money."

"They just want the bodies and they're willing to pay premium prices to get them," he said.

Carnival was canceled in 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The celebratory return of the parades in 2022 was complicated by a shortage of police officers and other service personnel, prompting the city to prune all of the parade routes.

In October the city announced that the routes would remain trimmed in 2023.

Parade fans and the owners of businesses along the lost sections of the routes clamored for them to be restored. During a news conference on Kings' Day, the official start of the Mardi Gras season, Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced that the krewes would be allowed to search the state for trained supplementary officers.

If enough trained officers could be found, the full routes would be restored, the mayor said, adding that the extra officers would be paid by the city and would be housed at public expense.

Increased responsibilities?

"I want Mardi Gras to go off," Hessler said. "I want everybody to be safe. I want everybody to have a good time."

But, he said, the city is asking a lot of NOPD officers who will be charged with controlling and patrolling the parades, while also having a role in supervising the supplementary officers.

"Their responsibilities increase," he said. "You not only have to do your job, but you have to make sure the other guy is doing his."

Hessler said routine crowd control is one thing, but nightmarish emergencies sometimes spring up.

"God forbid we have a car run through an unmanned intersection," he said, "or a mass shooting when we're understaffed."

Will deputies fill the gaps?

Back on Jan 6, when the mayor announced the supplemental police plan, she noted that one of the city's largest krewes had already found the officers necessary to restore the first eight blocks of its parade, which had been trimmed in 2022. Forty qualified deputies from the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office will be aiding in crowd control during the Feb. 18 Endymion parade that starts in Mid-City.

And the OPSO will help alleviate police shortages in other parades as well.

Spokesperson Casey F. McGee on Wednesday did not elaborate on the scope of the OPSO's involvement in the plan. "I can confirm Sheriff Susan Hutson is working with the city and NOPD to facilitate allowing krewes to parade on their original parade routes," she wrote.

"We expect to be able to provide more information when logistics are managed," she concluded.

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