NOPD leadership says it will investigate police response to Saturday’s homicide in Leonidas | Crime/Police

New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said Saturday that the department would launch an internal investigation into the police response to a fatal shooting that drew heavy criticism from relatives of a woman killed earlier that day.

Accompanied by Chief Deputy Superintendent Hans Ganthier, Kirkpatrick said at a downtown press conference that the NOPD’s Public Integrity Bureau would investigate the entire police response, including the time it took officers to arrive at the scene.

The investigation comes after family members of the slain woman said they called police several times early in the morning after a relative was involved in a domestic hostage situation. They said they eventually called the New Orleans Fire Department to get someone to respond.

Ganthier said the investigation is being launched “not only to inform the family about the incident, but also to make sure our officers are held accountable for any problems they may have caused. I’m not saying they have to do that, but that’s the purpose of the investigation.”

Police responded to a 911 call at 6:51 a.m. and arrived at a home in the 1200 block of Monroe Street. There they found a man and a woman dead from gunshot wounds. Kirkpatrick and Ganthier later described the incident as a “domestic violence situation” that appeared to be leading up to a murder-suicide. The NOPD said this morning that the department confirmed the nature of the incident at about 8:04 a.m., more than an hour after the 911 call.

Kirkpatrick and Ganthier could not provide further details about the response time, the murder or the planned PIB investigation, other than to say the investigation will cover the entire notification process and the way officers responded to the call.

“Our investigations include: How did the call come in? How was it relayed to the officers? What did they know? What didn’t they know? Sometimes we look at all of that,” Kirkpatrick said. “We try to look at the entire situation.”

Ganthier said there was no indication there was a problem with the 911 emergency call system.

Police have not yet identified the victims, but relatives said the woman is Felicia Cooper and her husband Raymond Cooper. They said there had been numerous incidents of domestic violence in the home.

Kirkpatrick told reporters that the NOPD responded to a call to that address “earlier in the evening” and that an officer went out and attempted to make contact.

The NOPD has struggled with response time to violent crime in recent years as it has suffered heavy losses in its ranks. And while violent crime has dropped sharply this year, the city has also been plagued by domestic violence cases that often end with women being murdered by the men who abused them.