French Quarter business owners are apparently being dragged into the middle of a fight between a New Orleans crime prevention organization and Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration.
In a Facebook post today by ProjectNOLA, an online crime abatement system that monitors over 1,500 security and surveillance cameras in the city, the organization said members of Landrieu’s ‘NOLA Patrol’ are going around asking business owners to switch to the city’s crime surveillance instead.
Here’s the full Facebook post by ProjectNOLA:
Recently, concerned French Quarter Business owners have advised that NOLA Patrol “yellow shirt” officers have been going door to door trying to persuade people to sign up for the Mayor’s NOLA 4 Life / SafeCam program, claiming that SafeCam works better than ProjectNOLA and is the city’s official crime camera program. As the NOLA Patrol falls under the mayor’s office and is funded by public money, I spoke with Ryan Berni (Mayor Landrieu’s Director of Communications) this morning about this. Berni claimed that what FQ business owners are telling me is false, as this is not a function of the NOLA Patrol.
I’m reaching out to French Quarter business owners and operators, asking that you please comment below or PM me should you have recently been visited by a NOLA Patrol officer who was promoting the Mayor’s SafeCam program or making false statements concerning ProjectNOLA. If any literature was provided, please take a picture of it and send it to me. Unfortunately, what needs to be determined is if the city is now using public money and resources to undermine Project NOLA.
This is not the first time the city and ProjectNOLA have gotten into a tiff over crime and surveillance in the city.
Last week, ProjectNOLA wrote an open letter to Landrieu and the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) about how they were allegedly spreading rumors about the organization’s demise and how they apparently wanted the organization to come to an end.
ProjectNOLA monitors crime in the city in real-time on Facebook, with constant updates about who, what and where is happening in New Orleans.
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