New Orleans, La. -
When James Carter was named criminal justice commissioner of New Orleans in May 2011, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said he would work solely on lessening the city's violent crime rate by crafting new crime prevention policies.
With the announcement, Landrieu said, "We're gonna get in front of it, we're gonna get in the middle of it, we're gonna get behind it. We're gonna work it from the police side, we're gonna work it from the prevention side."
As Carter prepares to step down Friday to focus more on his private law practice, he rates his own performance over the last 16 months.
"I did an excellent job," says Carter with a smile.
Overall crime is up in New Orleans for the first half of 2012. Assault and armed robbery both saw double-digit percentage increases from January to June and year to date, NOPD says the murder count is almost exactly what it was this time last year.
Carter's confident those statistics will change in the long haul: "This is a long-term issue that's not going to take a Bandaid approach."
FOX 8 had questions months ago about what exactly Carter did in a day's work as the city's crime commissioner, so we requested his official city calendar for his first year on the job from May 2011 to May 2012.
It shows meeting after meeting, sometimes a half-dozen in a day. Aside from weekly staff meetings, Carter attended at least 26 homicide reduction strategy meetings with NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas, meetings of the mayor's strategic command to reduce murders, at least 28 meetings devoted to last year's Save Our Sons crime summit and more than four-dozen meetings regarding the Ceasefire initiative.
The calendar shows Carter traveled to Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., looking for new crimefighting ideas. Carter also showed up at more than two dozen of the more-than-200 murders that have happened since he took office.
"James had absolute sincere intentions, he's a class act. But murder's a tough thing to reduce," says Tulane criminologist Peter Scharf.
He believes there were promising starts that just haven't paid off yet. Scharf says, "If you don't get a result in a decent time frame, careers get altered."
At least on paper, it appears the soon-to-be-former crime commissioner's career got altered early on. When he started on the job, he was part of the mayor's executive staff, his "Assistant to Criminal Justice."
Two months later in July of 2011, city records show his official title changed to a full-time "Associate City Attorney," earning $116,000 a year.
City spokesman Ryan Berni told us that job classification change allowed Carter to represent the city on matters pertaining to the consent decree at the Youth Study Center and other criminal justice legal issues.
As an associate city attorney, Carter was allowed to have an outside law practice as long as there was no conflict with his city job. Even he admits, private practice can be time-consuming.
"Sometimes circumstances occur whereby practice areas occur and the time constraints may cause a challenge there," says Carter.
And as it turns out, three months into his job as crime czar, his private practice paid off big. In an August 2011 trial that lasted 18 days at Orleans Civil District Court, Carter, while New Orleans' crime commissioner, won a $4.1 million civil judgement against Entergy New Orleans, a company regulated by the City Council.
Court records show he was in the courtroom every single day, sometimes both morning and afternoon. Carter even delivered closing arguments.
What's more, even though he was at trial for two and a half weeks, city records show he took no time off that month. Payroll records obtained by FOX 8 show Carter still got paid his full salary by the city.
Now as he prepares to focus mostly on his civil law practice, some question the timing of his departure from fighting crime.
"It's only been one year since Save Our Sons crime summit," says Scharf. "For this to end this way, in this timeframe, is very unusual and difficult to interpret."
Carter and the city say he will continue to advise the city on criminal justice matters, free of charge. Carter insists his departure is not a resignation, but rather a transition.
