Guest column: Fair, functioning courts are essential to a safe New Orleans

By Simone Levine, executive director of Court Watch NOLA

The criminal justice system affects all of us. We pay for it through our taxes, we go to the polls to elect people to run it and then we often try to close our eyes to ignore it the rest of the year. Yet in poll after poll, New Orleans citizenry rank public safety and the criminal justice system as their number one concern.

Truthfully, we often cannot just close our eyes to the criminal courts, but instead go through a series of sentiments of trust and mistrust of the criminal courts depending on what we hear from our fellow citizens and from the news media. In fact, citizen and community confidence in our criminal justice system is one of the most integral elements of a civil society. If we do not believe the police or the prosecution will thoroughly investigate, we will be less likely to report crime. If we do not believe the courts are effective or fair, we will
feel it is a waste of our time to appear in court as a juror, witness, victim, or defendant.