Left to right Deputy Commander Marlon Defiloo, Mayor Mitch Landrieu, and NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas discusses crime statistics of the levels of crime at the ComStat meeting. (April Buffington/NYT Institute)

In a move he said was aimed at making the New Orleans Police Department more transparent, Police Chief Ronal Serpas convened the first department-wide crime statistics meeting on Thursday that was open to the public.

The meetings are intended to give district commanders an opportunity to share information on different issues and trends among themselves and with other elected and appointed officials. The move to open the meetings to the public followed Monday’s announcement that the Department of Justice had begun a sweeping review of police corruption, at Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s invitation.

Two district-level meetings were held earlier this week.

“This is about the future of the city of New Orleans,” Landrieu said at Thursday’s meeting. “It’s as threatening to the future of the city as the oil spill is and we have to be outspoken to fight this fight. It’s got to be done with intensity and aggressiveness that we haven’t seen in a long time.”

Though Landrieu and Serpas touted the meeting as a way for citizens to become part of rebuilding the police force from the ground up, no time was set aside for public comment while the two were in attendance. And the press and police outnumbered the public.

Noel Rivers, a community activist who lives in the Fourth District, was one of the few citizens who attended. Rivers said there is more work to be done, but was pleased that Landrieu was open to airing issues in front of the public and the police force.

“Anything that brings visibility to crime issues,” Rivers said, “is helpful in the city of New Orleans.”

Standing in front of the audience, each of the eight district commanders outlined crime levels in their respective areas at Thursday’s meeting in the Victor H. Schiro Municipal Training Academy on City Park Avenue.

The officers used an interactive graphics presentation -– called ComStat –- to illustrate everything from the increased concentration of residence burglaries to the possible need to redraw police district boundaries.

Landrieu said later, “We have to rethink our boundaries because crime doesn’t know them,” he said.

Serpas has made it no secret he intends to expand the use of computer technology, like ComStat, to help forecast crime.

“ComStat is useless if you only focus on the numbers,” Serpas said. “The numbers drive how you become effective. We have to break the mindset of just talking about what happened.”

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