It's the kind of story nightmares are made of... an NOPD Officer appears to refuse to intervene in an on-going sexual assault of an unconscious woman at Toulouse and Royal in the French Quarter. What does this say about the department?
The gravity of the accusation, the situation, the pending investigation, and the determination of what happened and why could rock New Orleans to the core.
WWL went to a learned expert, Dr. George Capowich, Loyola Criminologist and former police captain.
"When I was a police officer, it was very clear to us—drummed into us—that off duty or not it was our obligation to take action if we ran across it," Capowich explains. "You just couldn't ignore the fact that you were a police officer."
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Capowich says the fallout from this incident could blunt efforts at recruiting new officers:
"It does cast a poor light on somebody who might be thinking about applying or has applied," Capowich continues. "It might raise a question of 'what kind of department am I going into if that's how officers respond?'"
Capowich says to not do anything seems appalling:
"If just a regular citizen and someone came up to you and said someone's getting assaulted, something happening over here, someone needs help, you would try to do something out of the human standpoint."
But before any judgment can be meted out, Capowich says it's up to the Public Integrity Bureau to conduct a full and formal investigation of the incident and catalog all sides: the witness who couldn't motivate the officer to help, the officer reported to be sitting their cruiser, the unconscious victim, the arriving minutes after the witness called for help, residents and potential other witnesses canvassed for what they saw or heard, even the accused assaulter if they can be captured.
The career of the officer at the center of this incident is in the balance here.
"If in fact he just ignored it and told the woman to go away, didn't even investigate, I think, you know [termination] would potentially be on the table," Capowich says. "But you have to know more to be able to say for sure."
But for now the facts about what motivated, or didn't motivate, the officer in question are swirling around the NOPD.
Given its problems, drawn out response times to crime, and all that's come out about the department we've learned over the past few years, the haunting question remains: "What if you called a cop and nobody came?"