NOCrimeline’s Thom Kahler has the money quote in the David Winkler-Schmit’s excellent, well-researched cover story in this week’s Gambit (link may not update for another day or so).

The story does a good job of uncovering how lack of transparency, feigning a concern for propriety and accuracy, and just plain stonewalling, are all tactics employed by local officials to disguise their utter incompetence and corruption.

An important detail not revealed in that story was the fact that the NOPD still hasn’t produced any response whatsoever for why crime is being grossly under-reported on the city’s GIS Web site, as reported on the Citizen Crime Watch blog, and how that inaccuracy doesn’t square with patently false comments made by the NOPD that it has the best crime-reporting system in the country, or that it’s accurate.

Also not reported is how a developer on staff created a new state-of-the-art crime-mapping system for Jefferson Parish, but the sheriff’s department ignored that development done at taxpayer expense, deciding instead to pay a well-connected contractor to develop a new system, spending more of the taxpayer’s money. But hey, who’s counting? Jefferson Parish is booming. They can afford to pay off contractors.

A similar quid pro quo may be in play in Orleans Parish. The NOPD and the Chief Technology Officer said in early 2007 that they were going to have electronic police reports (developed by a contractor) functioning within a matter of months. It’s now the end of 2008, and the NOPD continues to say that it’s doing manual data entry of police reports. Meanwhile, it still takes two weeks for crime to show up on the city’s crime-mapping Web site.

Like the crime camera fiasco, this is another legacy of the incompetent former New Orleans Chief Technology Officer, Anthony Jones, who some City Council members allowed to step down to a protected civil service position rather than fire him, but somehow Jones still oversees MIS operations in City Hall. This is also the legacy of City Hall paying ridiculous sums of money to well-connected contractors whose deliverables never work the way they were supposed to, leading to more money required to fix projects — unless they’re abandoned outright.

Are corruption and incompetence adversely impacting your safety?

The point to get out of all of this might be that in no instance should taxpayers be funding contractors when, in fact, a lot of problems might be solved if the primary goal were transparency, with a deliberate and focused attempt to provide electronic public records before spending expensive sums of taxpayer money to contractors for applications which never work.

More here, here, and here.