Unmaking Carceral Disasters: A Post-Katrina Timeline of Struggles Against the New Orleans Punishment Regime

Introductio

Hurricane Katrina was a carceral disaster. Federal, state, and municipal officials did not simply fail to take action (as the story often goes) but chose disaster racism and law and order as their response to the catastrophe. New Orleans police spent the days leading up to the storm’s landing arresting people for fines and fees. The New Orleans city jail, Orleans Parish Prison, was exempted from the mandatory evacuation order, leaving thousands of prisoners trapped behind bars amid Katrina’s rising floodwaters. Within days of the floods, while most of the city was still under water, officials recast Black survivors searching for provisions or a way out of town as dangerous and lawless. Racial criminalization justified the NOPD’s murder (and subsequent coverups) of Black New Orleanians. And as the water began to recede, the city’s first rebuilding project was the transformation of the New Orleans Amtrak and Greyhound station into a

Yet these human-made disasters of criminalization, confinement, and disposability did not appear out of thin air. They were the logical continuation of a neoliberal racial regime invested in and established on carceral Just as the breaking of the levees could not have occurred without decades of federal disinvestment and neglect of flood protections alongside petro capital’s destruction of wetlands, the deployment of state violence could not have occurred without the decades of investment in local, state, and federal law enforcement expansions, the passage of draconian laws, and the ballooning of Louisiana’s jails and In other words, the crises that came to a head in Katrina were not new for New Orleans but a magnification of the organized abandonment and racial criminalization that had long afflicted the

This is not to say that this response was inevitable. Other paths could have been chosen. And indeed, in the twenty years since Hurricane Katrina, grassroots organizers have fought to ensure that this story is never repeated. By building off pre-storm activist formations and forging new organizations and alliances, New Orleans organizers in the Black Radical Tradition have worked to dismantle carceral infrastructures and craft new geographies of From reigning in policing to campaigns to shrink the city jail, racial justice activists have won concrete victories that ensure fewer people are subject to everyday and extraordinary carceral violence.

In chipping away at punitive power, organizers have repeatedly confronted backlash from both liberal and conservative corners. While such antagonism is to be expected given the persistence and adaptability of the carceral state, it means that oppositions to the New Orleans punishment regime are far from over. Over the last two decades, struggles over the future of New Orleans have repeatedly pivoted on whether grassroots movements have the power to compel city and state leaders to undo punitive policies and practices, or if officials will double down on the same racist, patriarchal, and neoliberal agenda that made Hurricane Katrina a carceral disaster to begin. 

To think through the contours of these struggles, this article provides an overview of the contractions and expansions of New Orleans’ carceral infrastructure over the past twenty years. 

This article is organized as a chronological timeline of key events, campaigns, and interventions in relation to policing, criminalization, surveillance, and jailing. I have loosely demarcated this twenty year period into three post-Katrina “eras”: the immediate post-Katrina conjuncture (2005-2008), long haul struggles for non-reformist reforms (2008-2020), and carceral backlashes (2017-2025). While these periods have overlaps, this periodization seeks to clarify trends without minimizing the messy edges that encompass all temporal transitions. I conclude the article with a brief discussion of what this recent past and ongoing present has to teach about abolitionist world-making, from wherever we might be. For while the context of Hurricane Katrina and its afterlives is specific to New Orleans, the dynamics at play are in no way unique and mirror fights against criminalization, policing, and incarceration occurring across and beyond the United States. As the below events illustrate, the terrain of struggle in New Orleans is refracted through national and global trends and events at the same time as post-Katrina activism has rippled outward.

The Immediate Post-Katrina Conjuncture

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a confluence of punitive, racist, and neoliberal state responses rendered Black New Orleanians as a criminal threat to be managed through a combination of containment, abandonment, displacement, and extermination. The first months and years after the storm were marked not only by the deployment of disaster racism but also grassroots mobilizations against the acute and protracted carceral state violence that produced the Katrina crisis.

2005-2009 National Guard and the Militarization of Law Enforcement

Upon the declaration of Hurricane Katrina as a federal emergency, 51,000 National Guardsmen were deployed to the In the first days, upwards of 30,000 of these troops patrolled the streets of While the official reason for the National Guard’s presence was for search and rescue, much of their activity took the form of militarized policing in collaboration with New Orleans law enforcement and state police Amid racist rumors of New Orleans descending into lawless chaos, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco made the role of the National Guard clear in her infamous statement that these National Guardsmen were fresh back from Iraq” and “These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than

Elected leaders extended the National Guard’s deployment beyond the floods as necessary for restoring law and order. Although they were initially pulled from the city in early 2006, Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco requested 300 National Guardsmen return under the banner of “Task Force Gator” following a high profile shooting in At a time when water in the Ninth Ward was not safe to drink and streetlights were still dark in much of the city, state officials allocated $500,000 a week to have Humvees patrolling the streets of While officially the National Guard were not law enforcement, able to detain but not arrest people, they facilitated the arrest of 9,000 people and it was commonplace for people (such as myself) to be held at gunpoint for extended periods for minor infractions such as a Most notoriously, in the spring of 2007, the National Guard shot and killed Lower Ninth Ward resident Terry Burton, a 53 year old Black man diagnosed with mental illness, for acting “bizarrely” and mistaking a rusted bb gun for a When loved ones sought redress, they learned there was no mechanism for accountability for such military violence. Only state budgetary shortfalls compelled the exit of the National Guard in February 2009 – three and a half years after their

2005-2012 Danziger Bridge Shootings, Coverup, and Trials

On September 4, 2005, a group of New Orleanians seeking supplies were ambushed by the NOPD on the Danziger Bridge; six people were shot, two were killed. The NOPD claimed that the cops had acted in self-defense against armed looters and orchestrated a coverup by planting evidence, fabricating witness statements, and arresting one of the survivors to hide the When internally cleared of any wrong-doing, the New Orleans DA brought a case against the officers involved in the shooting following pressures from shooting victims’ loved ones and grassroots organizations such as Safe Streets/Strong Communities (detailed below). However, Judge Bigelow (well-known for his close ties to the NOPD) threw out the case in

Within a few weeks, public pressure led the Department of Justice to begin investigating the case. After months of investigation including the FBI’s seizure of NOPD computers and files, the federal government indicted multiple officers for the murders andIn the spring of 2012, the four officers indicted for the shootings were found guilty and sentenced to between 38 and 60 years in prison, while another senior officer involved in the cover ups was sentenced to While many heralded these sentences as accountability for the NOPD’s violence, many still contended this was just the tip of the iceberg of NOPD misconduct and violence. And indeed, in the following years the NOPD officers’ convictions were vacated on appeal. In return for pleading guilty, they received vastly reduced sentences of seven to twelve years – serving as a reminder of the highly constrained redress available through the courts for police

2005-2007 Critical Resistance Amnesty Campaign

As the organized abandonment of New Orleans was broadcast across the globe, abolitionist organizers with the national organization Critical Resistance (CR) began brainstorming what might be done. Only a few years prior, New Orleans had hosted the Critical Resistance South conference, a regional convening of anti-prison and anti-policing activists, that deepened people’s analysis of the US South in the prison industrial complex and fostered relationships between local organizers and others across the region and nation. Following the conference, New Orleans abolitionists formed a CR New Orleans chapter to continue abolitionist work in the city. 

In September 2005, New Orleans and non-New Orleans CR organizers and advisors met to identify how CR might be able to intervene in the hyper criminalization of Black Katrina survivors. They decided to demand full amnesty for what they termed “Prisoners of Katrina” – the full release and complete expungement of the criminal records of all people who had been abandoned in OPP and those who were arrested as “looters” for seeking food and In the words of CR organizer Tamika Middleton this was not a utopian demand, “it was the only logical step…What would be the thing you would ask for that’s less than this when you consider all the things that [jailed and criminalized people]

CR organizers pushed forth the demand for amnesty through a multi-pronged campaign. First on the agenda was publicizing the extent that carceral violence was enacted against storm survivors as local and national media initially framed law enforcement as heroes. Working with other activist and advocacy organizations, CR conducted research, held press conferences, testified to the UN, and contributed to reports about the abandonment of OPP and the centrality of criminalization in the state’s disaster They also engaged in interfaith organizing from the perspective that, if faith leaders called for amnesty through a language of forgiveness and recovery, state leaders would be compelled to take action. In December of 2006, CR coordinated a weekend of events with local faith leaders calling for amnesty including a keynote by

While the campaign succeeded in shifting the narrative, the gubernatorial election of Republican Bobby Jindal in fall 2007 limited mechanisms for amnesty. CR decided to switch tactics by collaborating with the organization Safe Streets/Strong Communities to hold an expungement day for not only Prisoners of Katrina, but anyone seeking to clear their records in Spring 2008. Hundreds of people showed up demonstrating the widespread demand for such relief. CR decided to begin holding ongoing expungement clinics to lessen the ongoing harms of criminalization on people’s everyday

2006-2008 Safe Streets/Strong Communities Independent Police Monitor Campaign

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, organizers and advocates founded Safe Streets/Strong Communities to reconstruct the New Orleans criminal legal system through transformative reforms. One of the pillars of their work was pushing for greater oversight of the NOPD not only given the atrocities they enacted during the storm but also everyday police harassment and brutality. Through base building, Safe Streets collectivized the stories of members’ experiences of police violence that ranged from routine harassment to police shootings. Members' stories and surveys conducted with hundreds of people served as the bedrock of their campaign for an Independent Police

The Independent Police Monitor (IPM) would differ from existing bodies because it would be politically independent from both the NOPD and the Mayor’s office with a dedicated funding stream. This would allow the IPM to take on issues and officers regardless of the political expediency for elected officials. Safe Streets members and staff pushed for the creation of IPM by sharing NOPD survey findings through the report Crisis of Confidence, holding press conferences, testifying at city hall, working with national media outlets, and collaborating with good governance groups. Safe Streets shifted narratives about the NOPD from an agency of post-Katrina heroes to a violent and corrupt institution. And by researching the intricacies of city governance, they were able to maneuver within opaque structures and make allies in key positions. Through this strategizing and organizing, Safe Streets secured the creation of the IPM office in

Long Haul Struggles for Non-Reformist Reforms

As the immediate Katrina crisis subsided, community organizers set their sights on building campaigns for non-reformist or abolitionist reforms that would undo New Orleans’ capacity to criminalize, police, and These anti-racist and feminist campaigns built upon previous post-Katrina movement building while demanding a new future for the city grounded in unmitigated freedom. Through years of organizing these grassroots struggles created the conditions of possibility for both reformist and abolitionist interventions such as Louisiana’s criminal justice reforms and 2020’s call to “free them all.”

2008-2011 Coalition Building to Shrink OPP

The flooding of Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) severely damaged multiple buildings in the jail complex leading to OPP’s capacity to shrink from almost 7,200 beds to 3,500 beds when Sheriff Gusman reopened the jail in October Despite Sheriff Gusman’s abandonment of OPP prisoners during the storm, he easily won re-election in 2006 paving the way for his oversight of the jail’s rebuilding to the dismay of When FEMA announced they were appropriating up to 270 million dollars for the rebuilding of the jail, Sheriff Gusman announced his plans to increase the size of the jail to

Organizers were determined to prevent the jail expansion project go forward. In the first year after Hurricane Katrina, activists with Critical Resistance and Safe Streets/Strong communities (among others) collaborated with the ACLU National Prison Project to document the state’s abandonment of incarcerated people in OPP during Hurricane Katrina and how people were then lost for months on end in the Louisiana criminal legal system. The culminating report, Abandoned and Abused, refuted dominant narratives that elected officials were not to blame, emphasized how the storm magnified the pre-existing crisis of mass criminalization, and argued for major reforms in the criminal legal system in the city’s reconstruction

Building off these collaborations, organizers came together to re-energize the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC) to combat Sheriff Gusman’s jail expansion plan. While OPPRC existed prior to Hurricane Katrina, after the storm it underwent a renewal as member-powered organizations such as Safe Streets, Critical Resistance, and the Congress of Day Laborers joined the coalition alongside advocacy and religious groups. OPPRC decided that fighting this jail expansion was not enough as at 3,500 beds OPP was already one of the largest per capita jails in the nation. OPPRC decided to push for an 850-bed cap on the jail to bring it into alignment with jails in other Southern

OPPRC’s campaign for a “safer, smaller, more humane jail” emphasized that the vast majority of those locked up could and should be released. This included those held in pre-trial due to their inability to afford bail, state prisoners doing their sentences in the jail as part of the Louisiana Department of Corrections’ devolution to the parish jail system, and immigrant detainees held past their release date on Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds. Central to OPPRC’s campaign was that the per diem system whereby the sheriff’s budget was tied to the number of people locked up rather than a static yearly budget incentivized jailing and constant carceral growth. Over the course of the campaign, organizers highlighted that the violence of the jail was tethered to New Orleans standing as an epicenter of mass incarceration. Through political education and teach-ins, targeted media campaigns, protests and vigils, and unrelenting pressure at city meetings, OPPRC increasingly built public support in their OPPRC’s organizing was bolstered when city consultants’ report on the “ideal size” of the jail concluded that the rebuilt OPP should be no larger than

When City Council members proposed to cap the jail at 1,438 beds OPPRC decided to support their plan as a significant victory they could build upon. In early 2011, City Council unanimously voted with the support of the mayor to reduce the jail’s size to 1,438 beds – representing an 80% cut in the jail’s capacity since Hurricane

2008-2013 Women With A Vision and the NO Justice Project

Following Hurricane Katrina, the long-standing Black feminist organization Women With A Vision (WWAV) took on the hyper criminalization of Black cisgender and transgender women living and working in New Orleans's street-based economies through the NO Justice Project. As people began returning home after the storm, sex workers in the WWAV network found themselves on the sex offender registry for Louisiana’s Crimes Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) Under CANS, the practice or solicitation of sexual acts deemed deviant (oral and anal sex) was a felony and those convicted under the statue were required to register as sex offenders for fifteen years after a first conviction and for life after the In other words, simply soliciting sex (or being accused of doing so) could lead someone to be labeled a sex offender and have to carry a license with the words “SEX OFFENDER” stamped in block red letters below their picture for the rest of their life.

While the CANS statute had been on the books for decades, it was not until Hurricane Katrina that the state had the capacity to enforce sex offender registration. The federal government made it a priority to track down “fugitives” in the aftermath of the storm which included an influx of federal funds that were partially allotted to updating the Louisiana sex offender registry system. Black cisgender and transgender women were over-represented on the registry due to the racist and patriarchal policing of Black women as sex workers, and the policing of Black women escalated amid the city’s neoliberal As Haywood and McTighe note, “By 2011, ninety-seven percent of the women on New Orleans’ sex offender registry had a CANS conviction; seventy-nine percent of these women were

Building on Black women’s experiential knowledge, WWAV launched the NO Justice Project to not only repeal the CANS statute but to dismantle the wider criminalization of Black women in post-Katrina New Orleans. Central to this organizing was educating the public about what CANS even was, how people ended up on this registry, and the negative material impacts it had on people’s In 2010, they began assembling a legal team to see how they might challenge the CANS statue. The NO Justice Legal Team, filed an equal protection clause constitutional challenge to the law in Simultaneously they began moving in the state legislature to get a bill introduced that would make a CANS conviction carry the same penalties as a prostitution conviction. Due to WWAV’s community organizing and political education, the bill moved through the legislative process to become a law. While the new law was not retroactive, it bolstered the claims of their federal lawsuit. In March 2012, the federal courts found the sex offender registration requirement for CANS convictions unconstitutional and ordered the removal of all the plaintiffs from the sex offender registry. In June 2013, after a second lawsuit and relentless advocacy, the state of Louisiana agreed to remove the more than eight hundred people on the sex offender registry due to a CANS This unprecedented victory provided concrete improvements in countless people’s everyday lives while also chipping away at the criminalization and marginalization of Black women.

2010-2013 NOPD Consent Decree and Reforms

In response to ongoing outrage over NOPD violence, several racial justice organizations pressed for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate the NOPD’s endemic patterns of abuse and misconduct in the hopes that the DOJ would place the police department under a wide-sweeping consent decree. Many saw having Barack Obama in the White House as a political opportunity and believed a more sympathetic DOJ could be leveraged against intractable local political blocs for systematic change. 

When the DOJ announced they would begin an investigation, a range of grassroots organizations such as Community United for Change, Louisiana Justice Initiative, and Women With a Vision held listening sessions for DOJ officials to directly hear people’s testimonies of police harassment, profiling, sexual assault, and other forms of brutality. These stories also served as the basis of the People’s Consent Decree—a collectively-written document filled with dozens of policing reforms that activists hoped the DOJ would adopt as the official consent decree. The People’s Consent Decree policy proposals included: the creation of a use of force policy, new limitations on arrests for minor offenses, increased jurisdiction and power of the IPM, increased reporting and training requirements, and the creation of an LGBTQ

While the DOJ chose not to adopt the People’s Consent Decree, its investigative report and later Consent Decree agreement with the city reflected organizers' critiques. The DOJ confirmed that the NOPD had a systematic disregard for civil rights and had committed “widespread violations of law and According to the DOJ, the NOPD “frequently use excessive force and conduct illegal stops, searches, and arrests with impunity” including unnecessary deadly Specifically, they noted the NOPD’s pervasive patterns of police profiling against African Americans, Latinx people, youth, and LGBT In addition the DOJ was the most explicit it had ever been regarding the discrimination of LGBTQ people and named how Black trans women were routinely profiled as sex workers, often leading them to be charged with the notorious CANS law, placing further restrictions on their abilities to find gainful employment and

Organizers sought to leverage the DOJ’s presence to push for policing reforms that had otherwise been difficult to attain. One example is the We Deserve Better Campaign carried out by BreakOUT!, a grassroots organization that combatted the criminalization of LGBTQ youth of color. BreakOUT! sought to decrease the NOPD’s discretionary power by making policy that sexual orientation, gender identity or sexual expression did not constitute probable cause to limit police stops (and thus arrests), and to prohibit more “invasive frisk procedures” (groping) of trans Through building member power, engaging in media work, building alliances with criminal justice and immigrant rights organizations, and protesting the NOPD, BreakOUT! secured the creation of Policy 402–the city’s first LGBTQ policy–in June

2013-2023, The Struggle Over Phase III

Sheriff Gusman did not give up his vision for a larger jail following OPPRC’s bed cap victory. He initially designed the new jail (euphemistically renamed the Orleans Justice Complex) with a large physical space between the two primary buildings. OPPRC activists immediately worried this space would be used for a future Then in 2012 a federal consent decree regarding conditions of confinement was placed on OPP following OPPRC organizing. While the consent decree mandated that the new jail meet the needs of all prisoners, Sheriff Gusman omitted facilities designed for people with physical and mental health issues. In 2013, he began leveraging the consent decree to argue that he could not bring the jail within the consent decree without an additional jail building, commonly known as “Phase III,” and that there were still FEMA funds available for this

Unlike previous arguments for carceral expansions, Gusman’s Phase III proposal was not framed through tough on crime discourses, but rather through the liberal logics of carceral humanism, defined by James Kilgore as recasting “jailers as caring social service Gusman downplayed the extent to which Phase III was a proposal to lift the jail bed cap and instead asserted that it was to meet the needs of some of the city’s most vulnerable residents – as if care could ever come through a cage. The initial proposal was for 164 “mental health” beds, 106 “medical beds,” and 256 “re-entry” beds, but following OPPRC’s protests the proposal was whittled down to 89 “mental health”

After years of local organizing kept Phase III from moving forward, a new inflection point occurred when the federal judge overseeing the consent decree ordered the city to build Phase III. Following this order, City Council approved Phase III in late 2019 while also creating a new overall cap on the jail of 1,250 beds under pressure from OPPRC. Yet with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, city leaders pushed back against Phase III, again arguing the city did not have the revenue and Judge Africk had overstepped his As a legal battle ensued, the Orleans Parish sheriff election in 2021 became a referendum on Phase III as reformist challenger Susan Hutson campaigned against Gusman’s proposal. When Hutson won the sheriff’s election, many assumed that Phase III was dead in the However, the mayor’s office quietly allotted money to begin the building of Phase III in 2023 in alignment with the federal courts, despite Sheriff Hutson’s As of this writing, Phase III construction is well underway.

2017 Louisiana Criminal Justice Reforms

During the 2017 Louisiana Legislative Session, Louisiana lawmakers passed the most comprehensive criminal justice reform package in Louisiana history. Championed by then Governor John Bel Edwards, the package of bills promised to cut the state’s prison population by ten percent over the following decade and save millions of tax National and local advocacy groups rallied around this legislation as a positive step in undoing Louisiana’s standing as the world’s highest per capita

The passage of these laws indexed how critiques of mass incarceration had entered mainstream politics at the same time as they epitomized the limitations of liberal reforms. These bills cut prison sentences and jail terms, expanded parole and and lifted restrictions on food stamps for formerlyHowever, sentencing law reforms were overwhelmingly reserved for what Marie Gottschalk has termed Mandatory minimum and maximum sentences were reduced for some non-violent offenses, judicial discretion was extended in sentencing for some first time and/or non-violent and non-sex offenders, and prosecutors were limited in applying the habitual offender statute for people convicted of drug and non-violent offenses. Parole eligibility expansions were done in a painstakingly narrow way—never for those convicted of “violent” or “sex” crimes and never codified as mandatory but as now within the purview of judicial discretion. Moreover, most of these new reforms were not retroactive for currently imprisoned people. What is more, within this reform package a new mandatory minimum sentence was created for opioid

Taken together, the criminal justice reforms were an uneven policy program—narrowing the number of people locked up while reifying the notion that there continued to be certain populations requiring physical incapacity and state supervision.

2020 Free Them All and Defund the Police

The onset of COVID-19 produced a heightened threat of premature death for those locked up in New Orleans. As in cities across the nation, activists demanded that people be released from the New Orleans city jail and arrests be curtailed to save human life. OPPRC organizers explicitly linked this demand to the drowning of OPP fifteen years prior—making crystal clear that the disposability of incarcerated life was never This organizing helped to shift policy, at least temporarily, and the jail’s population dropped to its lowest average annual population in over fifty years—776 people behind

Grassroots organizing to “free them all” fed into street protests in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in June of 2020. New Orleanians took to the streets and highways to demand an end to police violence. In contrast to previous anti-police protests, New Orleans activists did not call for greater oversight or reforms but followed the abolitionist framework sweeping the nation in demands to “defund the While meaningful reductions to the NOPD’s budget did not come to fruition, this moment marked the growth of a new commonsense, that to end police violence requires an end to policing. This sensibility has continued to shape local organizing on issues ranging from NOPD surveillance to immigrant rights to Palestine solidarity.

Carceral Backlashes

Since 2017, there has been a growing backlash against anti-carceral activism from moderate Democrats and far-right Republicans at the local and state level. While this shift can be indexed to national trends—the rise of Donald Trump, anti-Black crime moral panics, the war on immigrants—its materialization is also shaped by local conditions such as the imperatives and desires of tourism capitalism. Yet even in the face of these dire conditions, organizers continue to fight for a New Orleans free from state violence.

2017-2025 Surveilling New Orleans

Mayor Mitch Landrieu instigated a new round of surveillance initiatives during his tenure. New surveillance programs were part and parcel of Landrieu’s vision of the city’s recovery as tied to the growth of the tourism economy. In early 2017, Mayor Landrieu announced his plans for a $40 million public security plan that included the installation of 240 surveillance cameras and 160 license plate readers in twenty designated crime hot spots (many in the French Quarter); the integration of private security cameras in the French Quarter and Central Business District into the NOPD’s surveillance system; the development of a centralized NOPD command center to monitor the surveillance camera feeds 24/7; and the enhancement of police patrols in the French While some aspects of this plan were minimized following opposition, within a year most of this plan was implemented with hundreds of blinking surveillance cameras serving as Landrieu’s legacy.

Concerns about heightened surveillance, particularly for Black and immigrant communities, were redoubled in 2018. Investigative journalists revealed that for years Landrieu and the NOPD had been in a secret partnership with the tech firm Palantir to pilot a predictive policing program on the people of Widespread outcry over the program and the fact that not even the City Council was aware of the partnership compelled the NOPD to end its partnership a few weeks after the news However, the NOPD continued to use facial recognition software through collaborations with state and federal law enforcement over the next several In response, the grassroots organization Eye on Surveillance fought for a city ordinance that would ban facial recognition, license plate readers, predictive policing, and would require approval and oversight protocols. While the oversight and approval process and license plate reader ban were scrapped from the final ordinance, in 2020 New Orleans became one of the few cities in the US to prohibit facial recognition

Unfortunately, the NOPD found a loophole to use AI-powered facial recognition through a network of private cameras a few years later. And at the time of this writing in July 2025, the New Orleans City Council is considering lifting the existing ban to allow the NOPD to use real-time facial recognition through the city’s surveillance camera However, Eye on Surveillance, New Orleans Democratic Socialists of America, Union Migrante, and other organizations are fighting back, stressing how this policing technology can be used as a tool for

2024 Governor Landry’s Tough on Crime Initiatives

In early 2024, newly elected rightwing Governor Jeff Landry called a “Crime Special Session” of the Louisiana Having run on a reactionary tough on crime platform, Landry’s explicit goal of the session was to roll back the criminal justice reforms passed only seven years prior under Governor Bel Edwards. Among the 37 draconian bills passed in this special session were: the elimination of discretionary parole, restrictions on good time, increased penalties for parole violations, increased immunity for law enforcement, and the incarceration of all seventeen-year-olds in the adult penal This package of laws is predicted to significantly increase the state’s prison and jail population as there are fewer opportunities for release and harsher penalties for those entrapped in the criminal legal system. There has already been a steady growth of the New Orleans jail population since 2024, going above the cap set by City Council in 2019 with seemingly no

In addition, Governor Landry created a permanent Louisiana State Trooper force “Troop NOLA” to patrol the French Quarter and surrounding areas. Governor Landry’s targeting of New Orleans follows the racist script of New Orleans as dangerous and lawless while also seeking to undermine local governance in Louisiana’s most progressive city. Troop NOLA is outside the bounds of the NOPD consent decree, and city leaders have little to no oversight over this law enforcement body. Over its first year, the force conducted sweeps of homeless encampments against city leaders' wishes and arrested almost 500

2025 Operation GEAUX

With the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, Governor Landry expanded the reach of his punitive anti-immigrant politics. In spring 2025, Landry launched “Operation GEAUX,” an initiative for five state law enforcement agencies (Alcohol & Tobacco Control, Wildlife and Fisheries, the National Guard, the State Fire Marshal, and the State Police) to enter into 287(g) agreements with ICE. In other words, Operation GEAUX authorizes Louisiana law enforcement (including Troop NOLA) to act as immigration enforcement despite the desires of local constituencies and elected

New Orleanians have pushed back against this extension of immigration policing. Actions against ICE have ranged from defense campaigns for those in detention, fundraisers for those fighting deportations, and weekly protests outside the New Orleans ICE Field Office. While these struggles are still unfolding, New Orleans organizers are building on lessons learned in previous moments to intervene in the current conjuncture. 

Dialectics of Disaster: Reflections on the last 20 years

Dialectics of struggle have profoundly shaped the contours of New Orleans since August 29, 2005. While federal, state, and city leaders focused their energies on expanding carceral power as central to their vision of a whiter and wealthier New Orleans, racial justice organizers have refuted the notion that Black, and increasingly immigrant, New Orleanians are disposable people best dealt with through displacement or confinement. Through political education, campaigns, coalition-building and more, anti-carceral activists have secured grassroots policy wins that ensure fewer people are subject to police violence, arrest, and incarceration. Or, in other words, policies that dramatically reduce the number of people who might find themselves trapped in a cage the next time a hurricane enters the Gulf.

This is not, in the words of Amilcar Cabral, to “claim no easy Striving towards an abolitionist horizon demands reflexivity and humility. Many of the gains won since Hurricane Katrina have had their limitations. First, carceral state actors have updated their discourses, strategies, and tactics following grassroots wins. For instance, as the political tide shifted from tough-on-crime to liberal reform, Sheriff Gusman revised his argument for a larger jail as a commitment to constitutionality and care. Second, carceral infrastructures are almost never the domain of only local politics. Federal and state power configurations have significant impacts on the conditions of possibility for abolitionist reforms. At certain moments this has opened the window of opportunity for grassroots organizing, such as a more sympathetic DOJ investigating the NOPD. Yet in other instances, paths for organizing have been fundamentally limited in the face of entrenched state violence and austerity—such as under the governorships of Bobby Jindal and Jeff Landry. And finally, sometimes strategies that at the time were the edge of radical demands are in time revealed to be reformist. Perhaps in no area is this clearer than in the case of policing. While greater oversight over law enforcement has seen real improvements in people’s lives, reforms under the DOJ consent decree have also increased the NOPD’s budget and reinscribed the myth that law enforcement can be transformed into a just institution. Dislodging the legitimacy of policing, not just spectacular police violence, continues to be a forefront of struggle in New Orleans not despite, but because of, the state’s acceleration of carceral violence against anyone who is seen as a threat to the racial capitalist order – whether Black working class and poor communities within tourism zones, or immigrant workers simply trying to live with dignity, or Palestine solidarity activists fighting the genocide in Gaza.

If post-Katrina struggles in New Orleans have taught us anything, it is that combatting criminalization, policing, and incarceration is critical to preparing for future climate disasters and those that are already here. Given the contemporary US state’s propensity to turn to law and order in the face of disasters as well as the wielding of racial criminalization as a tool in neoliberal rebuilding, abolitionist politics are pivotal for climate justice. For, while not everywhere might be in the path of a hurricane, acute and chronic disasters from floods to wildfires are rapidly multiplying. Let the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina remind us not only of the importance in investing in the life-sustaining infrastructures of New Orleans but everywhere and anywhere we might call home.