NEW ORLEANS -- It started out as a problem of a rowdy neighbor, but one man says it recently snowballed into something much bigger involving a gun, the police and a reality television show theme song.
You can't always pick your neighbors to this dismay of one Marigny resident, whom Eyewitness News is choosing not to identify.
"If you have really loud neighbors late at night, who do you call when those neighbors are the police?" he said.
The man lives adjacent to the Fifth District Head Quarters for the New Orleans Police Department. Initially, he welcomed them, but says over the last year some of the officers have become a neighborhood nuisance -- blaring music out of their police cars in the parking lot during the late and early morning hours and speeding, even in their own personal vehicles, down the wrong way of the one-way stretch of Spain Street.
"So you're pulling in here at night and there's a car flying at you the wrong way up a one-way street," he said. "That's incredibly dangerous."
But he adds that was nothing compared to what happened with a pair of officers in the parking lot.
"One officer standing at the back of the car came to the driver's door and then began to play the theme from COPS, 'Bad Boys' through the p.a. system. It raddled my windows," he said.
"This went on for ten, fifteen minutes. There was a break in the music and I just said is this really necessary. At that point, the officer standing outside the car turned and faced me, unclipped his holster, pulled out his weapon, dropped the clip out which he set on the hood of the car, checked the pipe to make sure nothing in it and then he started pulling it back and clicking the trigger several times kind of swaying to the music. My first thing is that he was threatening me.”
Allegations that certainly surprised some neighbors.
"I've just never experienced anything like that with them, at all," said Marigny Resident Mark Fiorilli.
“Having the police around here has been wonderful.”
But not everyone in the neighborhood is shocked.
"I don't find it hard to believe the cops could have become unprofessional with whoever came out and asked them that," said another concerned resident. "I've seen them get irate with people before."
The resident we first introduced you to says he filed a complaint with the Fifth District Commander, Major Bernadine Kelly.
"She says she'll get to the bottom of it," he said. "Here we are a week later, there's supposed to be an investigation. Except for [Kelly], no one has contacted me.
While Eyewitness News was able to briefly speak with Kelly in person, she didn't want to go on camera. She did, however, say the department is taking the allegations very seriously. It was Wednesday, Oct. 21 when she received the complaint letter, and, according to Kelly NOPD's internal affairs opened an investigation into the matter the very next day.
But with results still pending, the man who filed the complaint said he's worried about his safety.
"I felt like he was making very clear that he's armed and can do whatever the hell he wants and that I better shut up and get back in my little hole and take it, and I'm not going to do that."
The NOPD says it has not received complaints from any other residents about the Fifth District Station, but say an additional one-way street sign was just posted just this week along Spain Street to remind officers and the public not to drive the wrong way.
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