Harry Lee (sheriff) - Controversies

Controversies

By the late 1980s, as fear of crime became Jeffersonians' No. 1 concern, Lee sensed his continued political fortunes would have less to do with reforming the Sheriff's Office than in making his suburban constituents feel safe from the big city ills. Their fears were often expressed in stark racial terms, and they found vent for a time in the divisive rhetoric of an aspiring politician named David Duke, whom Metairie residents sent as one of their representatives to the state Legislature.

Once Lee was accused of trying to separate the races by issuing an order erecting a barricade on a street at the line dividing majority-black New Orleans and majority-white East Jefferson. Mr. Lee turned the story—although false—into political capital. "Depending on who I'm talking to", he said, "I either take credit for the barricade or I don't." On another occasion, he defended his decision to yank deputies out of an all-black neighborhood in Avondale after residents complained about police brutality.

When an 8-year-old girl was raped in March 1998, the police initially described two black males as the culprits. Lee was criticized for declaring every black man in the subdivision a suspect. He apologized for any offense but insisted the practice was not racist. In fact, friends said the sheriff was so personally shaken by the vicious attack on the girl, who was also black, that he pulled out all the stops to solve the case.

"I'm going to catch that bastard, and when I catch him, he is going to be black," he said. "I just don't give a damn what people think of me anymore. If that was their daughter and we weren't doing that, they would be on our ass." Several days later, he personally placed the girl's stepfather under arrest for the rape. In 2003, a jury sentenced the stepfather to death.

Despite the apparent missteps, his popularity grew from the time he took office, particularly among whites. In 1994, a survey for The Times-Picayune showed that 84% of Jefferson Parish residents had a favorable impression of the sheriff, including 91% of whites. The same poll showed that, while almost nine out of 10 people thought he "tells it like it is", six of 10 thought he should sometimes keep his mouth shut.

Lee's widespread popularity gave him some political capital in the face of criticism about his management of the Sheriff's Office. A 1993 study by one government watchdog group lambasted his handling of the Sheriff's Office then-$60 million budget; the same group gave him higher marks in a follow-up study a few years later.

The worst political scare of his career had to do with crime and nothing to do with race, his fiscal management or his controversial remarks. It came in 1985, when voters learned that a convicted rapist named Brian Busby was allowed to wander Jefferson Parish unsupervised during the day, instead of being locked down in state prison elsewhere. Mr. Lee had granted Busby special privileges as a favor to a Parish Council member. Ten days after the disclosure, Busby was sent to the Louisiana State Peniteniary at Angola. Lee's approval rating plunged. A year later, however, after a series of Metairie robberies in which white shoppers were followed to their homes and held up at gunpoint in their driveways by African-American men, Lee made the following statement, which either almost ended or saved his career:

"If there are some young blacks driving a car late at night in a predominantly white neighborhood, they will be stopped. There's a pretty good chance they're up to no good. It's obvious two young blacks driving a rinky-dink car in a predominantly white neighborhood—I'm not talking about on the main thoroughfare, but if they're on one of the side streets and they're cruising around—they'll be stopped."

Outrage was immediate, and Mr. Lee quickly cancelled the order and apologized as the NAACP called for his resignation. When he ran for his third term the next year, however, Lee failed to win the primary, but defeated Art Lentini in the runoff with 54 percent of the vote.