The New Orleans City Council Criminal Justice Committee held its second quarterly meeting of 2026 on March 30, 2026. The meeting featured presentations from Orleans Parish Criminal Court, Juvenile Court, the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center (JJIC), the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office (OPSO), the Clerk of Criminal Court, the District Attorney’s Office, the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), and the Office of the Independent Police Monitor (OIPM). A working group introduced a “10 Pillars of a Thriving Community” framework to address root causes of crime. Public comments highlighted concerns about police accountability, victim advocacy, and racial disparities. No formal votes were taken beyond approving the previous meeting’s minutes.
Councilmember Morell. Councilmember Harris. Councilmember Green. Councilmember Hughes. We have three members. We have a quorum. All right. Can we do the uh approve the minutes from last meeting? I make a motion to approve. Second by Councilmember Harris. Councilmember Cream. Aye. All right. All right. Approve the meetings. Minutes from last meeting. All right, good morning, everyone. We're going to start our criminal justice meeting for March 30th, 2026. It's our second meeting of the year. Um, we're gonna go a little out of order to respect the time of our criminal court judges who are present and have to be back in court. So we're gonna exit our pre our first presentation be made by the Orleans Parish Criminal Court judges, led by Chief Judge Juana Lombard. Pass me my glasses, please. She got them in the first. Okay. Good morning, council members. Thank you so much for taking us first, and thank you so much for taking your time out of our busy days to uh listen to the court's presentation. At this time, uh criminal court has managed to maintain normal operations as you're well aware. Oh, I'm sorry. Juanamarine Lombard, Chief Judge, and Magistrate Judge for Criminal District Court. I am here with Kimya Holmes, the deputy chief of criminal district court, Rob Kasich, our judicial administrator, and Shannon Sims, our deputy judicial administrator. And again, thank you all for having us here this morning. Uh at this time through the first quarter, as you're aware, we were cut um like many other agencies last year. At this time, the court has managed to maintain normal court operations and to keep all of our services and pretrial programs running, including the specialty courts, our domestic violence program, our mental health court, our drug court, our re-entry program, and our veterans' affairs program, as well as our rise after release program. Um again, that might be something we come back at later in the year to talk about, but at this time we have managed to maintain normal court operations on our more limited budget. Um we have instituted the case management system that we talked about for a long time. It went live in mid-November. We are in the middle of the data conversion still. The beacon system from the sheriff's office has not gone live yet. The two systems were designed to talk to each other. So for the past couple months, we have been kind of operating in a bifurcated system where the sheriff is still in AS400, and we are in CMS. It has caused some hiccups that we work through daily, and hopefully when Beacon goes live, we will have more accurate numbers, a more uh transparent system, and the two systems will communicate better, which will reduce the man hours that it is taking right now from the clerk and the sheriff's office. Um judge, there's a lot of sound like feedback coming from your mic. No, I don't know if uh we can have somebody from the staff correct that, but it's am I the only one hearing that? No, you need to no further back. No, that's I don't know, but maybe if we have somebody from the A V department eventually come and check it out, but go ahead. Maybe I'll turn it and just project. Can y'all hear me if I don't know? We can hear you, but it's I to hear this all day long. It may it may be a bit problem. So let me turn mine off.