NEW ORLEANS — Most people know LSU wide receiver Malik Nabers for his elite talent on the football field, skills that will make him a high pick in the upcoming NFL draft.
But some police officers and prosecutors in New Orleans have seen very different footage of Nabers, from police body cam videos of Nabers getting stopped and arrested on Bourbon Street during Carnival last year for having a gun in his pocket.
The Louisiana law — illegal carrying of a firearm — is a misdemeanor and stems only from the gun being concealed. Had Nabers been carrying his pistol out in the open, it would have been perfectly legal.
And that's exactly what happened to more than one hundred people during Carnival last year: police spotting a bulge in a waistband, seeing someone smoking marijuana, or in the Nabers' case, noticing “an L-shaped object.”
“They have to be able to document the justification, the probable cause, to stop, pat down and arrest somebody,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the non-profit Metropolitan Crime Commission.
After Nabers spent a night in jail, his case was dismissed the next morning at his first court appearance in exchange for him forfeiting his gun.
He was one of fifteen defendants who got that same deal during Mardi Gras from Assistant District Attorney Emily Maw. Her decision sparked instant controversy, and DA Jason Williams later reprimanded her, dropping the cases without authorization.
But what about all the other illegal carrying arrests made last Carnival?
There were 107 of them, and WWL Louisiana has been tracking them for more than a year.
So far, only one of those cases ended with time behind bars, and that’s because the gun turned out to be a machine gun. Keaton Manghane, from Tennessee, is seen in an NOPD body cam video getting stopped and arrested. He was later indicted and convicted in federal court for attaching a device to his Glock handgun that turned it into an automatic weapon.
WWL’s research shows that in the other 30 convictions so far, all of the defendants entered a plea, and all received the lightest possible penalty: inactive probation. Of the remaining 76 cases, charges were dropped in 32, and another 44 are still pending, many because defendants failed to return to court or were from out of town.
Despite the mixed results, Goyeneche says the gun sweeps are an effective police strategy.
“They warned the public that there was going to be strict enforcement,” Goyeneche said. “The police can be on foot patrol in the French Quarter, be observing the crowd, and see the outline of a weapon.”
Other criminal justice experts slammed the wholesale gun arrests.
“You absolutely don't need to be following or using resources targeting low-level, non-violent offenses. You actually need to do the opposite,” said Alanah Odomes, director of ACLU Louisiana.
Odoms reacted even more strongly to WWL Louisiana’s findings about the demographic breakdown of the people arrested.
Of the 107 defendants, one was a black female, two were white males and 104 were black males, the statistics show.
“Second Amendment rights for African American people, in particular African American men, are really almost non-existent,” Odoms said.
Breaking down the cases even further, eighty-nine of the suspects were 28 years old or younger, and ninety-three of them had no prior New Orleans arrests.
“This is a troubling statistic. That's what needs to be investigated. That's what there needs to be uproar about. And that needs to be our concern,” said Mercedes Montagnes, former director of the non-profit reform group Promise of Justice Initiative.
Racial profiling is unconstitutional. For the NOPD, the stakes are even higher because of the 12-year-old federal consent decree that requires the department to correct a history of biased policing. The consent decree monitors have generally applauded the department's improvements in this area.
In illegal carrying cases, Montagnes points out that the charges stem only from the guns being concealed.
“These were cases that mostly involved people who had legal guns that they put in their pocket for example, instead of open carry,” she said.
And now the state Legislature wiped that crime off the books, making it legal for anyone over eighteen to carry concealed guns without a permit or training. The law passed easily, with the final vote taking place Wednesday during the special legislative session devoted to criminal justice issues.
“I would hope that the legislature would see fit to make it retroactive,” Odoms said, “and to provide these individuals, all 107 of them, the proper recourse for fines and fees and any other obligations.”
Even District Attorney Jason Williams, who is prosecuting the Mardi Gras gun cases, expressed concerns about WWL Louisiana’s findings, especially the lopsided arrest tally of young black males.
“You know, I think that's something we need to continue to talk about,” Williams said. “Anytime you have numbers that are skewed that way, it tells you that certain people are being looked at more so than others…
We need to be concerned about implicit bias. That's one of the things that we always deal with.”
We reached out to the NOPD about our findings, and the department said it is still assessing last year’s Mardi Gras gun arrests.
A spokesperson added, “The NOPD is constantly reviewing internal policies and making improvements where they are deemed necessary.”
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