By Stephen Stock, Dannah Sauer and Jon Turnipseed | fox8live.com | May 27, 2025
NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – The ongoing search for two remaining Orleans Parish jail escapees is costing New Orleans hundreds of thousands of dollars each week and draining law enforcement resources from other duties, Fox 8 has learned.
A top city official tells Fox 8 that personnel expenses tied to the manhunt now total around $250,000 per week. The costs primarily cover overtime for more than 200 Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office and New Orleans Police Department officers working extended 12-hour shifts.
That estimate does not include vehicles, equipment or Real Time Crime Center staffing.
NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick says she’s not concerned with the financial bill right now.
“Money is so not an issue to me,” Kirkpatrick said “It costs what it costs for your public safety. And I don’t think anyone here is going to say ‘boo’ to me or the city council about the overtime that I spent. It’s the cost of your safety. And I’m going to put as many resources out there (as possible) and don’t even talk to me about overtime. I could care less.”
Kirkpatrick noted the physical toll on officers.
“So, it’s a full-court process. A lot of overtime. These officers are working themselves to death, and they work hard to begin with,” Kirkpatrick said.
Kirkpatrick says the search has delayed work on other investigations. All officers assigned to the Violent Crimes Task Force have had to divert their attention to the escapee search.
“We work a very effective strategy on our violence reduction strategy and gun violence reduction,” Kirkpatrick said. “You’ve seen the numbers on how tremendous our impact has been. I think we were around 30 percent down on violent crime, 60 percent down on the shootings and things like that.
“We’ve had to take attention away from working that strategy to now going over here. But this is a higher priority, and it is something that just happens with law enforcement.”
Metropolitan Crime Commission president Rafael Goyeneche said he worries about the long-term impact on public safety when diverting resources away from violent crime.
“The NOPD officers that are on this search were working high-level cases before this escape. And those high-level cases are being tabled for right now,” Goyeneche said. “Those investigations are critically important, because the longer those violent and repeat offenders remain free, the more victims we’re going to see in the community, the more crime we experience in the community. So, the units that are responsible for arresting those individuals have been repurposed to look for the 10 escapees, which means that the other people that they were prioritizing to take off the streets, they’re going to remain free.”
Eight of the 10 men who slipped out of the Orleans Justice Center jail early on May 16 have been recaptured, but Derrick Groves and Antoine Massey remain at large.
State and federal resources also have been diverted to search for the escapees.
State police spokesperson Sgt. Kate Stegall tells Fox 8 that more than 200 troopers, Department of Public Safety officers, and support personnel from across Louisiana have been working to find the escaped inmates.
And a federal law enforcement source tells Fox 8 that as many as 100 federal agents from the FBI, ATF, US Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security have joined the effort.
“They had to take people from some of the other areas of responsibility — might be cybercrime, maybe public corruption, maybe other violent crime investigations, drug cases. They had to repurpose and redeploy the agents that were working all of those areas onto this,” Goyeneche said.
But both Goyeneche and Kirkpatrick say the costs are necessary.
“Obviously, all the attention is here. All of the manpower and resources in an intense form are here within the city and our region,” Kirkpatrick said. “The manhunt is where we’re putting all of our effort.”
After the New Year’s Day terror attack on Bourbon Street, the city spent approximately $1.6 million on personnel and overtime, according to a city official.
Now, with the jail escape adding sustained financial strain, that official worries these incidents could lead to budget cuts this fall.