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Officers sat on the 16-year-old’s back for nine minutes before he died. They claim they needed to do so because he posed a threat.

The finding builds on earlier reporting, which found records were destroyed in the case of a 16-year-old boy who died while in custody of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

A lawsuit brought by the family of an autistic teen who died while in custody found the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office destroyed the disciplinary records of a deputy involved in the case.

Amid outcry, the state said it was no longer suing residents who had improperly used hurricane recovery money. That doesn’t change anything for the 425 who already paid a total of $6.8 million back to the state.

Louisiana sued thousands of homeowners for not following the rules in how they spent recovery grants. After a joint news investigation, the governor announced Thursday that the state won’t try to collect the money.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated St. Bernard Parish, many residents didn’t receive enough money from the state to rebuild. Nearly half made the difficult decision to start over somewhere else.

For years, low-income residents of New Orleans have said the state’s Road Home program paid them less to rebuild their homes compared to wealthier residents. They were right.

Louisiana sued thousands of homeowners for not following the rules in spending grants after Katrina. After a joint news investigation, the state says it hopes a federal agency will approve a settlement that will allow it to drop the lawsuits.

After Hurricane Katrina, struggling homeowners said, they were told not to worry about the fine print when they received grants to elevate their homes. Now the state is going after them because they did exactly that.

Police can arrest people for “cover charges,” like resisting arrest, to justify their use of excessive force and shield themselves from liability. In Jefferson Parish, 73% of the time someone is arrested on a “cover charge” alone, they’re Black.

Of the more than 73,000 traffic tickets the office issued between 2015 and September 2020, deputies identified only six of the cited people as Hispanic. As of 2020, Hispanics made up 18% of the parish’s population of more than 440,000.

Julio Alvarado, a Jefferson Parish deputy who was seen on video violently dragging a woman by the hair, has been named in nine federal civil rights lawsuits, all involving the use of excessive force. This is the most of any deputy currently employed.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office is investigating a deputy accused of holding a Black woman by her hair and slamming her head repeatedly into the pavement with such force that a witness to the Sept. 20 incident said it ripped several of Shantel Arnold’s braids from her scalp.

“It is no secret that the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office has a deep-rooted history of racial discrimination and cruelty toward residents of color,” Odoms said. “The harsh political reality is the Sheriff of Jefferson Parish is wholly unaccountable to the people.”

For years, Black residents of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, have voiced complaints about abuses and a lack of accountability within its Sheriff’s Office. Unlike in neighboring New Orleans, no one has stepped in to help.

Resilience is a word often used to describe people like David Chauvin, who, for generations, have endured countless natural disasters. But there is now a shell-shocked look stamped on the faces of the survivors, who agree Ida is the worst hurricane they have ever experienced.

Frank Jackson, 60, appeared tired and weary as he sat outside the Mahalia Jackson Theater in Treme Wednesday morning where the Louisiana National Guard was distributing MREs, water and ice. It was about 10 a.m., and Jackson was already covered in sweat, having biked more than two miles from his home in search of supplies.

None of it made sense, Kamisha Carter said. Why had gas suddenly become a rare commodity? Why couldn’t they find ice anywhere? Why were all the grocery stores closed? “Everybody is saying that hope left,” Carter said.

Inmates at Angola prison in Louisiana told ProPublica of widespread illness, dysfunctional care and deadly neglect as the coronavirus outbreak hit.

Louisiana’s so-called lifers number nearly 4,700, more than Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas combined.

More than 10 percent of the youths in Louisiana's secure detention facilities — more than two dozen — have tested positive for covid-19, a higher number than any of the other 22 states for which data is available.

Louisiana prosecutors are fighting to keep a man behind bars after a judge overturned his double-murder conviction last month, arguing in part that he has been exposed to the novel coronavirus in a prison besieged by the illness.

Housing nearly 200 homeless people, many struggling with mental illness and substance abuse issues, into a single hotel has been an enormous challenge, Koch said. In the first two weeks, five people overdosed, a couple of them twice. One person stopped breathing and nearly died.

One man was accused of stealing whiskey from a drugstore. A homeless man had allegedly refused to leave a hotel lobby. A woman had walked out of a grocery store without paying for a cart full of food worth $375, according to the police. These are among the people police arrested, even as it became clear that the city was at the center of one of the nation’s fastest-growing covid-19 hotspots.

Fighting the virus takes its toll on health-care workers. Three nurses at a New Orleans area hospital, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, painted a grim picture of their daily work lives. One said of her coronavirus patients, “When they scream for mama, that means they are about to die.”