16248: Searching For Sense In “New” Popeyes Campaign, Finding Nonsense.

 

Adweek spotlighted the “new” Popeyes campaign from White advertising agency McKinney, which feels like a hackneyed—and culturally clueless—redux of past campaigns.

 

The tagline, “We Don’t Make Sense, We Make Chicken,” makes little sense, reportedly based on an “authentically New Orleans” strategy. To declare that the city’s uniqueness doesn’t make sense reflects ignorance of its cultures and traditions—as well as its people. Not surprising from a White advertising agency with offices in multiple locations, excluding New Orleans.

 

Besides, does anyone really care about Popeyes’ Louisiana roots any more than KFC’s background from Kentucky? That’s some contrived and lazy strategery.

 

Also disturbing is the Black woman featured in the commercial. Is she supposed to be Annie the Chicken Queen 2.0? Can’t help but wonder if she’s “authentically New Orleans,” or like the original Annie character, just an actress faking it?

 

In summation, the “new” Popeyes campaign is disingenuous dookie that presents authentic cultural cluelessness.

 

McKinney’s First Work for Popeyes Debuts an Authentically New Orleans Ad Strategy

 

The brand wants you to know it doesn't make sense. It makes chicken.

 

By Olivia Morley

 

McKinney’s first work for Popeyes debuts a new positioning for the brand, fittingly titled “We Don’t Make Sense, We Make Chicken.”

 

The 30-second spot revolves around New Orleans culture and is set to air on digital channels next month, before nationwide out of home and TV activations launch in June. The short ad packs a punch, capturing all the eclectic and memorable sites and scenes one might take in while strolling the French Quarter.

 

Popeyes, founded in New Orleans in 1972, wants consumers to remember the city it hails from. It also wants them to recognize that just like New Orleans, it does things a little differently than its competitors. It’s got colorful beads, bikers and rolling reclining chairs—the endearing things that have become New Orleans’ cultural staples. The brand wanted to make an authentic campaign that captured things you couldn’t find just anywhere. In pursuit of authenticity, the brand also hired New Orleans-based actors to star in the spot.

 

“Popeyes has been a brand that was really good at spikes of interest,” said the brand’s CMO Jeff Klein. He recalled the “Chicken Sandwich Wars” that took the brand viral on social media and led many locations to sell out of sandwiches.

 

It was clear that the food (plus a savvy social strategy) could hype customers. But Klein wanted a brand strategy that could become deeply ingrained in customers’ minds—a narrative that could define Popeyes for the next three-to-five years. If all goes according to Klein’s plan, the campaign slogan will become part of consumers’ “vernacular.”

 

“What we really needed was a creative framework where we could improve our messaging to consumers kind of on an everyday basis…We want to build memory structures over time,” Klein said.

 

The spokesperson is a place

 

That tracks with McKinney’s purview as described to Adweek earlier this month: Highlight Popeyes’ New Orleans roots and sell more chicken. Although the brand’s (technically) called “Popeyes, Louisiana kitchen,” consumers tend to just call it just Popeyes. To remedy this accidental disconnect from its New Orleans heritage, the brand’s decided to focus on New Orleans in its marketing.

 

“When you have something that can’t be copied, that you can own, that is authentic…then you should lean into it,” said Jonathan Cude, McKinney’s chief creative. “And in this case, that was what happened. Popeyes has something in its heritage, in its DNA, that is authentic and comes from a certain place in the world.”

 

At the heart of the campaign, and what Popeyes hopes viewers understand, is that its approach to making chicken is different than its competitors. The cooking method is uniquely New Orleans—the slow-marinated and hand-breaded food’s got Cajun spices and fresh ingredients. Its time-consuming cooking techniques might not make sense for a so-called fast-food restaurant to employ, but as the creative describes, they work for Popeyes.

 

“It doesn’t really make sense. If you were trying to make chicken the most profitable, efficient way, you wouldn’t go through all the trouble that Popeyes does,” Cude said. “[New Orleans] defies logic. It’s a town that was intentionally built below sea level, right?”

 

When conflicts of interest benefit clients

 

The new brand strategy follows several changes within the organization. Klein joined Popeyes last year after departing his former role as marketing lead at Little Caesar’s. The CMO brought a pre-existing relationship with McKinney along with him. The agency, which still services Little Caesar’s, became Popeyes’ interim partner for a six-month trial period before eventually winning the AOR role. When that change went into effect, Popeyes parted ways with its former agency Gut, which had handled its creative since March 2020.

 

While Klein admits he and McKinney had a successful prior working relationship, he maintains that the agency is the right fit for Popeyes specifically because of its deep retail and franchisee experience. Popeyes’ biggest opportunity as a brand, Klein believes, hinges on its expansion via successful franchises. And to succeed, franchisees must execute the overarching marketing strategy on a hyper-local level. Historically, franchisees worried that brand messaging felt disjointed, and according to Klein, are now excited to have more overarching direction.

 

“It’s very important that the advertising works really hard today…The best way for us to grow our business is for franchisees to make money,” the CMO added.

 

Spokes-pelicans and Easter eggs

 

The tagline “We Don’t Make Sense, We Make Chicken,” lends Popeyes some flexibility to experiment and get a little weird. By its own admission, it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to. Consumers might expect to see eclectic campaigns and a punchy social strategy. Klein is willing to experiment, even if some concepts are a little funny.

 

“What if we had a spokes-Pelican?” he wondered, adding, “that makes no sense. It does for New Orleans, but not for a chicken chain.”

 

The brand’s also building out a digital experience strategy. It has hidden 12 images of Popeyes’ chicken icon, Poppy, in an interactive commercial on the Popeyes website.

 

You’d need to watch the commercial frame-by-frame to catch them all, Klein said. The ad asks viewers to navigate a digital version of “Where’s Waldo” to unlock more yet-to-be-disclosed brand experiences.

12869: Is GumboLive Mumbo Jumbo?

Adweek reported on GumboLive, an organized effort to recruit outsider talent created by Momentum Worldwide in New Orleans. Given that Gumbo has strong connections to Black culture—and New Orleans has a large Black population—it would be interesting to learn if the initiative has diversity-related goals. Based on the accompanying photograph depicted above, GumboLive appears to be an exclusive stew.

To Attract Outsider Talent, One Agency Cooked Up a New Approach in New Orleans

GumboLive looks to break the recruiting cycle

By Gabriel Beltrone

Before Nate Sutter worked in advertising, he was a professional yo-yo-er. Sponsored by Duncan Yo-Yo, he traveled the country performing tricks at toy stores, children’s hospitals and schools. He then spent a year and a half apprenticing as a body-piercing artist, and after that worked as a bartender in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood. That is where, in 2012, he met someone from GumboLive, a creative think tank that had recently opened in town.

An ad job sounded interesting, recalls Sutter, 27, “so I just applied.” Sutter’s twisting career path represents just the kind of unconventional background GumboLive was designed to attract. Owned by Interpublic Group’s Momentum Worldwide, the initiative has quietly operated for the past three years with the mission of drawing fresh, millennial talent from beyond conventional sources like portfolio schools.

“The market is changing so dramatically if you look at how we as marketers and advertisers communicate … but if you look at agencies, the way we recruit is still pretty much the same way it’s always been,” says Chris Weil, CEO of Momentum. “We trade people back and forth from agency to agency. And then when we need some new talent, we hire somebody, a junior copywriter or a junior account person, and we put them on a small account in the corner and then have them fight their way up.”

As chairman of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) from 2012 to 2014, Weil was involved with talent research at both the trade group and Momentum, putting him in a prime position to diagnose why more people don’t put advertising at the top of the list when picking a career path. “Part of it is just the pure pressure or the monotony as you come up,” he says. “You’re jamming it out and trying to bill the hours so that you can then move up and get to the point of what this industry is all about, which is creativity and ideas.”

GumboLive has turned that problem on its head. Staffers don’t have to worry about time sheets or account management. Instead, they focus on cranking out big-picture ideas on a wide range of fast-turnaround briefs for brands forwarded on from Momentum and sometimes its sibling agencies. “It could be anybody from Coca-Cola to American Express to United Airlines,” notes Weil. “And the client may not even know that these guys are working on it.”

Momentum isn’t the only agency going outside the industry for talent. In 2011, 72andSunny launched 72U, a 12-week creative residency designed for non-ad professionals (recent participants included an architect, an audio engineer and a Ph.D. who’d studied gender roles in remote fishing villages in Spain). The agency has gone on to hire 21 full-time staffers and six freelancers out of the program’s 48 graduates. Maria Scileppi, 72U’s director, says the larger mission is to help participants grow creatively and professionally, emphasizing collaboration, experimentation and “creating a safe place” for what she calls, affectionately, “wonderful weirdos.”

GumboLive’s 15 or so staffers (who get “competitive compensation,” according to Momentum) tend to rotate on 18- to 24-month cycles—though three years in, Sutter is the notable exception. In addition to being an ideation resource for the entire Momentum network (Weil recalls one quarter in which they turned around 85 briefs), GumboLive staffers are plugged firmly into its new-business machine. Sometimes, that means producing spec ideas to pitch to clients. Others, it means Momentum execs fly down to New Orleans for blue-sky brainstorming sessions. Prospective clients can buy sessions, too. New York-based Westfield Corp., which operates shopping centers in eight states, bought one, reports Weil, “and they’re a client now.”

To be fair, GumboLive doesn’t discriminate against those with formal ad training or experience—the current class includes a couple of art directors and Miami Ad School grads. But it does skew toward the eclectic. To land his job there, Sutter cooked up an elaborate sample strategy to rebrand a wine company around Gen Y consumers. A colleague, Ben Johnson, 26, joined the shop this past May after bootstrapping Big Charity, a feature-length documentary about the controversial closing of Charity Hospital following Hurricane Katrina. One of three co-producers on the film, Johnson also composed the score. Earlier, he worked on HBO’s Treme for two seasons, helping source, sign and manage musicians.

And before she landed at GumboLive in March of this year, Sophia Osella, 24, studied philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, where she produced a concert series featuring musicians like Rosanne Cash at Elvis Presley’s pre-Graceland residence, which is owned by the school. Osella thought she would end up in politics, law or video production, but now hopes to pursue a career in market research.

As for GumboLive’s first class (2012-14), half moved on to jobs in the industry. Call it millennial wanderlust, but Sutter—even with his boss, GumboLive managing director and former NBC integrations exec Ann Egelhoff, sitting in on this telephone interview—won’t commit to the advertising business for the long haul. “Totally, totally something I’m considering,” he says. “I feel it’s a field where there’s a lot of really good work to be done.”

11948: Chocolate City Mayor Nuts.

From The New York Times…

Ray Nagin, Former New Orleans Mayor, Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison

By Allen M. Johnson Jr. and Campbell Robertson

NEW ORLEANS — C. Ray Nagin, the former mayor of New Orleans, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Wednesday on federal corruption charges, ending a case that began with the rebuilding of the city after Hurricane Katrina.

The sentence was less than the recommended 15 years, but Judge Ginger Berrigan of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana told the court that the evidence failed to show that Mr. Nagin had organized or had been a leader of a corruption scheme.

“Mr. Nagin claimed a much, much smaller share of the profits of the crime than any other member of the group,” Judge Berrigan said, referring to the businessmen who profited from the scheme. The judge said that Mr. Nagin’s leadership was much needed after Hurricane Katrina but that it had also been lagging.

Prosecutors objected to the sentence, a move that could set up an appeal.

Mr. Nagin, who will remain out on bond, hugged family and friends after the sentencing, and was quickly driven away from the courtroom. “I’m trusting God is going to work all this out,” he said during sentencing. The judge ordered him to report for prison no later than Sept. 8.

Reaction was swift, and mixed.

“I think that he got off lightly considering the violations of the public trust,” said Edward E. Chervenak, a political science professor at the University of New Orleans and a critic of Mr. Nagin during his eight years as mayor.

“I think he should have gotten more time,” says Michelle Alford, 37, a native of New Orleans and a hotel employee. “He did nothing to benefit the city. I think he should have gotten 20 years at least. I think it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous.”

A longtime civil rights advocate in New Orleans, Jerome Smith, said he offered Mr. Nagin words of encouragement after the sentencing. “I just let him know that he has spiritual support,” Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Nagin, a Democrat, was found guilty in February on 20 counts, most relating to kickbacks from contractors looking for city work. He was arrested in January 2013, nearly three years after he left office. He was charged with taking kickbacks in the form of cash, cross-country trips or help with the family-run granite countertop company; the bribes were handed out by men looking for city business ranging from software supplies to sidewalk repair. Many of the schemes, though not all, took place after Hurricane Katrina, when contractors crowded into the city for rebuilding work.

Many of those involved eventually pleaded guilty and testified at length against Mr. Nagin at his trial.

The corruption had been so thoroughly covered in the local news media that few people were surprised by the verdicts in February. Mr. Nagin had come into office in 2002 as a reformer from the business world and a foe of cronyism. But the city grew frustrated with his stewardship, particularly in his second term when the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina stalled and Mr. Nagin seemed unengaged. By the time he left office in 2010, many in New Orleans had moved past frustration and were simply ready to see him go.

Throughout the trial the courtroom was half-empty, except for a riveting two days when Mr. Nagin took the stand and denied everything, at times with a glib dismissal. At one point he even refused to recognize his own signature on receipts that federal prosecutors displayed on a large screen.

In a court filing urging a stiff sentence, federal prosecutors had described Mr. Nagin’s testimony as “a performance that can only be summed up by his astounding unwillingness to accept any responsibility,” and listed in detail 22 instances in which they said he had lied on the witness stand. As they had at trial, prosecutors also contrasted Mr. Nagin’s attention to detail in some of the kickback schemes with what many came to see as his lackadaisical stewardship in office.

“These repeated violations, at the expense of the citizens of New Orleans in a time when honest leadership was needed most, do not deserve leniency,” wrote Matthew M. Coman, an assistant United States attorney.

Robert Jenkins, the lawyer representing Mr. Nagin, had urged leniency, arguing that Mr. Nagin has a “completely sterling record” outside of the convictions and that the behavior described at trial is a “complete aberration to his otherwise outstanding life.”

10920: Ray Nagin Faces Criminal Charges.

From The New York Daily News…

Ex-New Orleans mayor charged with bribery, fraud

Ray Nagin has been hit with 21 counts, including wire fraud, bribery and money laundering.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was indicted Friday on 21 corruption charges including wire fraud, bribery and money laundering.

The charges come from a City Hall corruption investigation that already has resulted in guilty pleas by two former city officials and two businessmen.

The counts against Nagin include wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, filing false tax returns and conspiracy.

Greg Meffert, a former technology official and deputy mayor under Nagin, pleaded guilty in 2010 to charges he took bribes and kickbacks in exchange for steering city contracts to businessman Mark St. Pierre. Anthony Jones, who served as the city’s chief technology officer in Nagin’s administration, also pleaded guilty to taking payoffs.

Meffert cooperated with the government in its case against St. Pierre, who was convicted in May 2011 of charges that include conspiracy, bribery and money laundering. Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was indicted Friday on 21 corruption charges including wire fraud, bribery and money laundering.

The charges come from a City Hall corruption investigation that already has resulted in guilty pleas by two former city officials and two businessmen.

The counts against Nagin include wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, filing false tax returns and conspiracy. Greg Meffert, a former technology official and deputy mayor under Nagin, pleaded guilty in 2010 to charges he took bribes and kickbacks in exchange for steering city contracts to businessman Mark St. Pierre. Anthony Jones, who served as the city’s chief technology officer in Nagin’s administration, also pleaded guilty to taking payoffs.

Meffert cooperated with the government in its case against St. Pierre, who was convicted in May 2011 of charges that include conspiracy, bribery and money laundering.

Nagin, a former cable television executive, was a political novice before being elected to his first term as mayor in 2002, buoyed by strong support from white voters. He cast himself a reform-minded progressive who wasn’t bound by party affiliations, as he snubbed fellow Democrat Kathleen Blanco and endorsed Republican Bobby Jindal’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 2003.

Katrina elevated Nagin to the national stage, where he gained a reputation for colorful and sometimes cringe-inducing rhetoric. During a radio interview broadcast in the storm’s early aftermath, he angrily pleaded with federal officials to “get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.” In January 2006, he apologized for a Martin Luther King Day speech in which he predicted New Orleans would be a “chocolate city” and asserted that “God was mad at America.”

Strong support from black voters helped Nagin win re-election in 2006 despite widespread criticism of his post-Katrina leadership. But the glacial pace of rebuilding, a surge in violent crime and the budding City Hall corruption investigation chipped away at Nagin’s popularity during his second term.

Nagin could not seek a third consecutive term because of term limits. Mitch Landrieu, who ran against Nagin in 2006, succeeded him in 2010.

Nagin has largely steered clear of the political arena since he left office. On his Twitter account, he describes his current occupations as author, public speaker and “green energy entrepreneur.” He wrote a self-published memoir called “Katrina’s Secrets: Storms After the Storm.”

9920: Annie The Chicken Queen In N’awlins.

This Popeye’s commercial attempts to present Annie the Chicken Queen in an authentic New Orleans location. Actual residents know the CBD restaurant looks more like what’s depicted in the Google map below—plus, the place attracts crowds completing Bourbon Street drinking binges.

8797: New Orleans Goes Ghetto.

The Mr. Ghetto “Walmart” video has become popular in recent days. Fairly certain that the New Orleans store location originally gained infamy after Hurricane Katrina, when even police officers were caught looting in the aisles. Guess Mr. Ghetto demonstrates the city has rebounded. Ho Dat!

It’s definitely a contrast to the Black History Month spot Walmart ran earlier this year.

8459: Fuzzy Facts And Figures.

TGIF with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• The unemployment rate dropped to 9 percent. Just to be clear, is that the White unemployment rate, or does it include the double-digit rates that have devastated minorities? Let’s not break out the champagne yet, folks.

• The U.S. Census reported New Orleans has lost nearly 1/3 of its citizens in the past decade. That’s a lot of truffles and bonbons missing and from the Chocolate City.

• This Sunday, the largest cruise targeting gays and lesbians will be launched by Royal Caribbean. There’s a joke involving “Royal” and “Queen” here somewhere. Or maybe “Super Bowl XLV” too.

7910: Black Churches Fighting The Flood.

From The New York Times…

In New Orleans, Black Churches Face a Long, Slow Return

By Samuel G. Freedman

NEW ORLEANS — Five minutes past 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday this month, which is to say five minutes past the time the worship service was supposed to start, Shantell Henley pushed open the front door of her pastor’s house in the Lower Ninth Ward. She entered the living room to find a gospel song playing on the stereo, two ceiling fans stirring the sticky air and 25 folding chairs for the congregants waiting empty.

“Am I late?” she asked the pastor, the Rev. Charles W. Duplessis.

“No,” he replied, smiling. “We’re Baptists.”

His joke, though, could not dispel the truth. The problem at Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church had nothing to do with any Baptist indifference to punctuality and everything to do with Hurricane Katrina, even as its fifth anniversary on Aug. 29 approached.

Having lost his house and his church to the broken levees in the Lower Ninth, Mr. Duplessis had managed by grit and will and fathomless faith to reopen in early 2009, using his rebuilt home to replace the sanctuary he couldn’t afford to replace, the sanctuary that had stood in some grim coincidence on Flood Street.

He installed an electric piano and a computer with a projector. He collected several dozen copies of the Baptist Hymnal. He put out weekly editions of the church bulletin; he put up a lawn sign declaring, “Our Church Is Back!”

What was not back was the bulk of his congregation. Of the 120 members before Hurricane Katrina, only 40 had returned. The rest were still strewn across the map — Alabama, California, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas. And Mr. Duplessis could not in-gather the exiles, as the Bible commands, because most of the Lower Ninth remained a ruin of buckled roads, cracked foundations and swamp grass six feet high.

“It’s church — it’s serving the Lord,” Mr. Duplessis, 59, said in an interview in his house. “If I linger on what I don’t have, I can’t see what I do have.” He paused. “But I know this isn’t where God wants us to be.”

In his plight and his persistence, Mr. Duplessis represents the experience of churches, ministers and congregations throughout the Lower Ninth. While the fifth anniversary of Katrina offers much reason to celebrate New Orleans’s revival, this neighborhood that once thrived with a black working-class of homeowners and churchgoers continues to stand as a desolated disgrace.

As every level of government has failed to restore more than a fraction of former residents to habitable homes, the black churches have tried desperately to return through a combination of sacrifice, insurance and charity. And anyone with an even cursory understanding of African-American life knows that without vibrant churches, the Lower Ninth can never truly rise again.

Where about 75 churches operated before Katrina, barely a dozen have been able to reopen, according to the Rev. Willie Calhoun, a local minister who has closely tracked the process. Even among those churches that have rebuilt, what were once congregations of 150 to 200 now number in the dozens. The monthly intake of tithes and offerings, previously $20,000 or more, has fallen to the low thousands.

“You got those that are still struggling to come back,” said Mr. Calhoun, the assistant pastor of East Jerusalem Baptist Church, “and you got those that came back but the congregations are so small they’re struggling to keep their doors open. And without the churches, you got no community.”

East Jerusalem, for example, has only $55,000 of the $150,000 it needs to replace the church building that was destroyed when the floodwaters propelled a house into it. In an especially perverse touch, which several other congregations have faced, New Orleans officials are requiring the church to buy land for off-street parking, as if the pressing problem of the Lower Ninth is traffic gridlock.

“I remember that film — ‘build it and they will come,’” said the Rev. Hall Lanis Kelly Jr., 62, the pastor of East Jerusalem. “I believe in that. The Bible tells us, you plant the seed, God will do the watering. But we sure thought that in two, three years, we’d be back.”

The Rev. Michael Zacharie did get back, rebuilding Beulah Land Baptist Church for nearly $400,000 with a combination of savings, insurance money and a grant from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief organization. On the Sunday in early 2009 when he rededicated the trim red-brick sanctuary, Mr. Zacharie preached to only 50 of the 400 pre-Katrina members. Etched in the church cornerstone were the names of four who had died in the flood.

“We were determined to come back so we could be the light shining in the darkness,” Mr. Zacharie, 54, said in a phone interview. “We want to be there for anyone that needs comfort, counseling, compassion.”

Such balm in Gilead has long been the mission of the Lower Ninth’s black churches. When Mr. Duplessis first inspected the wreckage of Mount Nebo’s building — pews tossed aside like toothpicks, chunks gone from the roof, the rear wall knocked loose — he also learned that several boats had been tied to the steeple. With 20 feet of water around, the second floor of Mount Nebo was, in more ways than one, a sanctuary.

And so he has persevered in his living room. On this particular Sunday, the faithful finally did arrive, a dozen by 10:15 a.m., nearly 25 by 10:35. Mr. Duplessis preached from the Book of Joshua, all about determination. He conducted a baby blessing. And he joined his people in singing lyrics that were almost unbearably freighted with double meaning:

“Storm clouds may rise
Strong winds may blow
But I’ll tell the world wherever I go
That I have found the Savior and he’s sweet, I know.”

7619: NOPD—Rotten Apples Or Rotten Orchard?

From The Times-Picayune…

The New Orleans Police Department’s rotten orchard: An editorial

By Editorial page staff, The Times-Picayune

Whenever members of the New Orleans Police Department are accused of misconduct or convicted of crimes, Superintendent Warren Riley and police associations have asked New Orleanians not to judge the department based on the actions of “a few bad apples.”

But the recent string of criminal charges and guilty pleas involving police officers, and abominable revelations in some of those cases, demonstrate that the department’s problems are more serious than just having a handful of bad officers. The rotten orchard exposed on the police force has seriously undermined the public’s trust in the department and hurt the many brave and honest men and women on the force who are trying to make the city safer. That’s why prosecutors must complete a thorough cleanup of the department.

This week alone, two officers were accused of committing crimes.

On Thursday, state prosecutors charged Detective Herman Franklin with public payroll fraud for allegedly working private, off-duty details while he was being paid to investigate crimes for the Police Department. Similar abuse by Detective Franklin was first alleged in an internal department investigation revealed last year, which concluded that he had broken state law.

But state prosecutors and top police officials declined to bring criminal charges, instead cutting a secret deal that sent Detective Franklin to a diversion program. That allowed him to keep a clean record and remain on the force.

Detective Franklin’s attorney, Kevin Boshea, said his client has already been sanctioned for the payroll fraud and that the new charges amount to double jeopardy.

Prosecutors said the new charges stem from separate instances of alleged payroll fraud. Filing criminal charges is the right avenue when such abuse is suspected—and it’s good to see prosecutors are doing so now.

Sadly, these were not the most serious criminal allegations made against a police officer this week.

On Friday, federal prosecutors filed charges against Officer Robert Barrios, who was accused of conspiring to obstruct justice in relation to the police shooting at the Danziger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina.

The charges allege that Officer Barrios conspired with other officers to cover up the shootings, which left two civilians dead and four wounded. He also provided false information to investigators, court documents allege.

The charges appeared in a bill of information, which typically signals the defendant is cooperating with the government and is expected to plead guilty. That would make Officer Barrios the fourth NOPD member to admit to crimes related to the Danziger Bridge incident and the second to do so among the officers who were present during the shootings.

One of those previous guilty pleas, from Officer Michael Hunter last week, described NOPD officers coldly shooting civilians Officer Hunter said were unarmed. The two other officers who also have pleaded guilty in the Danziger probe admitted to being part of a cover up for what they called a “bad shoot” of innocent civilians.

This is the second time Officer Barrios has faced charges in the bridge shootings. In late 2006 a state grand jury charged him with four counts of attempted first-degree murder, for allegedly firing at civilians on the bridge. That case included charges against six other officers as well, but fell apart in 2008 because of prosecutorial misconduct under then-District Attorney Eddie Jordan.

New Orleanians, however, still remember one image from that failed prosecution: The officers charged, included Officer Barrios, wading through a crowd of NOPD members who showed up to embrace the accused as heroes when they reported to Central Lockup on Jan. 2, 2007.

Many officers who demonstrated their support may feel betrayed now that some of their colleagues have admitted to numerous crimes.

Some of the other officers who participated in the Danziger shootings have been identified as targets of the federal probe, though they have not been charged. Their attorneys have said their clients committed no crime, and the officers are entitled to their day in court if they are accused of crimes.

Based on the grotesque corruption described by those who have pleaded guilty so far, New Orleanians expect investigators to aggressively seek justice against anyone who may have committed a crime.

Only then can the department begin removing the stain left by these horrible abuses.