FOX 8 investigation finds 15 NOPD officers logged questionable overtime while reviewing camera tickets

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - A FOX 8 investigation has found 15 more New Orleans police officers, some of them among the highest paid on the force, with a pattern of questionable overtime hours reviewing red light camera tickets.

The findings come as Senior Police Officer Brandon Coleman faces 350 felonies in what Louisiana State Police call payroll fraud tied to thousands of overtime hours he claimed reviewing the tickets.

How investigators built the Coleman case

FOX 8 obtained Coleman’s arrest records, which detail how state police and the New Orleans Inspector General investigated his ticket review overtime.

Investigators compared digital timestamps of ticket reviews with Coleman’s timesheet, specifically shifts under the 3R pay code. They identified thousands of what they described as “ghost hours,” when they say he was paid overtime to review red light tickets but was not reviewing at all.

State investigators wrote that it became apparent Coleman would perform only minutes of work but claim hours on his timesheet, and that he would complete large sets of reviews per minute.

How FOX 8 ran the same analysis

FOX 8 followed the same investigative method. Through public records requests, the station obtained hundreds of thousands of lines of data from the city captured by Vera Mobility, the company that operates the review program. The data is linked to more than 170,000 tickets issued in 2025.

FOX 8 then compared it with officers who logged red light camera review overtime, or 3R shifts.

According to NOPD time records, 15 officers, all of whom took home more than six figures in 2025, logged 1,248 red light review overtime shifts. Those shifts amount to 6,274 hours of overtime paid in 2025.

FOX 8 found that for more than 87% of that time, the digital timestamps show no logged review activity at all.

Officers with the most shifts showing no activity

• Senior Police Officer Jeffrey Carradine was the highest-paid officer on the force in 2025, behind only Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick, according to NOPD payroll records. He took home $285,765.76 in 2025. Records show he logged 100 red light review shifts, and 46 of them show zero review activity.
• Sgt. Mark Joseph was paid $176,540.32 in 2025. Records show he logged 62 review shifts, and 28 of them show zero review activity.
• Sgt. Rodney Brown collected $175,045.82, including 303 hours of overtime reviewing traffic tickets. Timestamps show zero reviews recorded during 42 of his 56 shifts.
• Sgt. Kevin Thompson was paid $230,114.25, including 604.58 hours of overtime from the red light review program. Digital records show no reviews during any of the 82 “3R shifts” he logged.

FOX 8 also analyzed dozens of timesheets, cross-referenced against review timestamps. Along with Carradine, Joseph, Brown and Thompson, the analysis found Lt. Avery Theard, Sgts. Bernard Crowden and Shawn Summers, and Senior Police Officers Norbert Henry, Richard Chambers Jr., Danny Ellis, Eric Carr, Brandon Neal, Stephen McGee, Colby Stewart and Michael Baldassaro each recorded multiple red light camera review shifts with zero review activity in the digital logs.

Nearly half of all the red light camera shifts logged by the 15 officers, 49.35%, had zero reviews logged.

Metropolitan Crime Commission President Rafael Goyeneche reviewed FOX 8’s analysis.

“What you’ve presented to me is some pretty compelling evidence that the problems that have been documented with Brandon Coleman extend to other officers that were also being paid overtime to conduct red light camera reviews,” Goyeneche said.

Reviews during regular shifts

The activity that is recorded in the review logs raises more questions.

Chambers reviewed 9,937 tickets in 2025 during his regular duty shift, yet records show he charged the city for 787 hours of overtime for ticket reviews. However, his digital timestamps show he was active on the review system for only about 33 of those 787 hours.

NOPD told FOX 8 that officers are not allowed to review tickets from home, during regular duty hours or while working paid details. FOX 8 found that Chambers and the 14 other officers all conducted some reviews during regular shifts instead of during the overtime hours they clocked.

“When you have examples like you’ve documented where officers are actually performing red light camera reviews while they’re working a detail or working their regular shift, it means that their regular shift or their detail responsibilities are suffering,” Goyeneche said.

Ronal Serpas, a former NOPD superintendent who served more than four years and now works as a law enforcement consultant for departments across the country, said the findings should have been obvious.

“You were getting paid to do work you weren’t doing. That’s obvious. And it should be obvious to sergeants, lieutenants and captains, and the citizens of New Orleans,” Serpas said.

Rapid-fire reviews

Timestamps show similar patterns for Ellis, who made $192,939.40 in 2025 according to NOPD payroll records. Many of his red light review shifts show short bursts of rapid review activity.

On March 23, he reviewed 30 tickets in about five minutes, or about 10 seconds per review. FOX 8’s analysis of issued tickets shows a typical red light infraction has an evidence video about 12 seconds long. NOPD confirmed in an email to FOX 8 that red light violations require a video review. During those five minutes, Ellis has multiple reviews just two to four seconds apart.

Serpas said reviews should not be rushed.

“Does the video match the citation? Did the officer miss something? Did they not see something?” he said. “The key here is the hours of being paid for not doing anything.”

He said the findings point to a lack of supervision and oversight.

“This is really just simple auditing practices that sergeants and lieutenants around the country do every single day as part of their duty,” Serpas said. “I mean how come nobody thought of doing this before? How come no one thought to audit this? And I think it’s a dramatic failure in leadership of the police department.”

NOPD response

FOX 8 contacted the NOPD last week to share its detailed findings and ask for a sit-down interview with Chief Kirkpatrick.

A week later, on November 2nd, the NOPD announced it had suspended issuing tickets from traffic cameras while it investigates whether officers are properly reviewing tickets and instead of a sit-down interview, the department held a news conference addressing the initial concerns FOX 8 identified, announcing immediate changes for when the program resumes.

“When we restart this program, all officers who will be working overtime will report to one common location. They will work in one room together with the presence of a supervisor. There will be oversight,” she said.

In the meantime, NOPD says it is reviewing every officer who was part of the program, including the 15 officers detailed in this report.

Serpas questioned whether the department should be running the program at all.

“How could you have confidence in this? If I was the leader of all things, I’d have yanked it out of the police department’s responsibility on day one until they could prove to me that they had it under control,” he said.

Goyeneche said supervisors must answer for how it went on so long.

“How did this go on for so long? Why did the supervisors fail in their responsibility to make sure that the officers that were putting in the overtime and performing these duties were, in fact, doing them in conformity with departmental rules and policies? So, you may see this entire house of cards come collapsing down,” he said.

The NOPD said in a press release that officers working red-light camera overtime may have other assigned responsibilities beyond reviewing citations. FOX 8 requested a list of those responsibilities, but the department has not responded.

The NOPD noted that while it has suspended issuing tickets, automated cameras are still collecting data on potential violations that could be subject to review once the program is restarted.

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