Who Runs the Streets of New Orleans?
Torres’s security detail is unique not just in the prominence of its beat — a major American city’s most-visited neighborhood — but also in the fact that it was conceptualized and financed by a single individual, with government support. Staffed by off-duty N.O.P.D. officers in vehicles that bear the N.O.P.D.’s star-and-crescent logo, the force became part of a larger initiative for public-private policing that Mitch Landrieu, the city’s mayor since 2010, had been working to put in place since the shooting on Bourbon Street last summer.
A lot of talk is happening around where and how many of these public/private police partnerships go wrong, this is one example of where it more or less works. Far from perfect, but I can tell you that I’ve never felt safer in the Quarter than the last couple of years in a row I’ve visited. A night/day kind of difference.