The Angel of Death Wears Granny Glasses

In New Orleans this morning, a terrorist attacked a crowd with his truck, then tried to get out of the car and start shooting — and New Orleans cops, working for a department that has an old reputation for troubling behavior, stopped him instantly. We have footage on social media that shows a bunch of NOPD officers sprinting straight into the attack, and choppy, broken footage that maybe sort of shows the edges of the gunfight. The attacker appears to have died right next to his truck, a fact that suggests courage and seriousness in the police response. And then I saw this, and instantly let out a kind of hybrid laugh-groan, because I know this face but didn’t know where she had gone:

Anne Kirkpatrick has been a police executive for a long time, proudly fighting to remove machismo from policing, and she’s bounced from high-profile job to high-profile job. Among many other jobs, she was the police chief in Oakland, California for three years, until she was fired. She won a modest judgement for wrongful termination there, but LOL.

You can’t exaggerate the failure of policing in Oakland, in the wake of an effort to, you’ll never guess, re-imagine policing and shift police funding to social justice. The city is notorious for shuttered businesses, driven out by daily crime:

Back when Kirkpatrick was the police chief, Oakland had a reputation for unanswered and slowly answered 911 calls, and news stories described 911 calls that were finally answered by an operator but never actually produced a police response. And of course, as I’ve said many times, Oakland’s best-known community activist makes videos in which he just walks around to show what a disgraceful shithole the city has become:

So how does this person get to New Orleans? Let’s look at the hiring announcement from the mayor’s office:

Sample sentence, and read this carefully: “Kirkpatrick is one of the most tenured police executives in the country, with over 35 years of policing experience and 20 years as a Chief of Police.”

She’s “one of the most tenured” at something: She’s gone through musical chairs as a leader, bouncing from department to department. This is a positive, see. And she’s been a police chief for most of her career, after a much shorter period of experience as, you know, police.

I bet she’s made long list of major felony arrests in her storied career as a cop /s

1. Rises to management on limited experience

2. Bounces from job to job

3. Fails then gets hired again elsewhere

It’s a whole cultural story in a single lifetime.

Let’s go on with that hiring announcement: “In addition to executive leadership experience, Kirkpatrick is a National Instructor for the FBI’s Law Enforcement Executive Association’s Leadership Training Program, where she instructs on topics including, but not limited to, Bias and Diversity, Emotional Intelligence and Leading Generations.”

She’s led cops in a series of cities with serious crime problems, tough places with a lot of violence: Memphis, Chicago, Spokane, Oakland, New Orleans, as just a partial list of her many police departments. She teaches in her areas of expertise, diversity and emotional intelligence.

Oh, and by the way:

Exactly the kind of tough, experience-hardened cop you want in charge when the gunfire starts, I guess. This person’s career is the story of American institutional decline, neatly packaged in one personality. She cannot fail, because she wears red-framed cultural signals on her face and says “diversity” a lot. If you live in a high-crime community, look for Anne Kirkpatrick to arrive as your temporary police chief at some point in the next eighteen months.

Much respect to the NOPD officers on duty in the French Quarter this morning for handling a horrifying act of violence with courage, despite the quality of their leadership.