Big Easy a bit uneasy as Mardi Gras returns

Police face challenges
To help make things easier for the police department and other city resources, the city compressed the usual two weeks of parades into eight days, and designated a single route for all of the marches this year.

Another factor working in the department’s favor is that Mardi Gras, despite all the raucousness, is usually a remarkably safe event. Despite a 2004 shooting along a packed parade route that killed one person and wounded three others, most arrests are for public urination. Others get into trouble for public nudity, drunkenness or other petty crimes.

In fact, New Orleans police are known nationally for their crowd-control ability.

“The New Orleans Police Department is probably better than any other organization in the U.S. at policing an event like this,” said Rafael Goyeneche, director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a police watchdog group. “I think it’s because most of them grew up with Mardi Gras; they understand it because they’ve been attending since they were kids.”

Alex Brandon / AP New Orleans Police officer Kelly Vicknair keeps a lookout during a Mardi Gras parade on Feb. 18.

Still, the police face challenges. The department’s ranks have shrunk from 1,700 before the storm to 1,450, though Quinton noted to the Times-Picayune newspaper that as recently as the mid-1990s, the department handled Mardi Gras with as few as 1,200 officers.

A larger concern might be overtime for officers, many of whom still vividly recall the strain put on their resources in the days after Katrina, when they worked with minimal resources and strained morale. Normally the 11-day festival would leave the rank and file taking home extra-large paychecks, but it is not clear where the financially ravaged city will get the money for the estimated $1.4 million in overtime costs.

All officers typically work 12-hour shifts during Mardi Gras. This year, police hope the parades move fast enough to allow many officers to work regular eight-hour shifts. Officers in hotspots such as the French Quarter, where the wildest revelry runs almost nonstop from Friday until midnight Tuesday, will still put in 12 hours.

Lingering concerns
The city also hoped to get as many as four corporate sponsors to pay $2 million each to underwrite Mardi Gras and cover cleanup, crowd control and other expenses, but the plan fell through.

Glad Products Co. did agree to provide 100,000 trash bags and organize volunteers for a post-Carnival cleanup, and gave an undisclosed amount of money. In addition, one parade club donated $50,000 to the police department.

Some residents in the hurricane-ravaged city were questioning whether a celebration was appropriate. In the hard-hit lower Ninth Ward, where Katrina floodwaters lifted some homes off foundations and left them in heaps in the middle of streets, work began Thursday to haul away a huge red barge that landed smack in the midst of the nearly obliterated neighborhood and became an icon for the waste laid to the city's poorer areas.

Still, Ninth Ward resident Percy Branon was in no mood to party. “I think we’ve got far more important things to do than fooling with Mardi Gras,” he said as a friend used a push broom to shove debris off Branon’s roof. “I don’t think that should be permanent, but this year, I think we should have overlooked it — try to get to some of this work that needs to be done.”

But French Quarter resident Buckner Harris was ready for a bit of levity to come swaggering down the street: “It gives most people something to do and take their minds off the tragedy.”

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