The incredible story of New Orleans' first black female homicide detective
On 22 February 2002, Sgt Jacklean Davis was on a walk with her supervisor, Lt Samuel Lee, when Lee got a call from their commander at the seventh district in New Orleans. “The commander asked him if he knew my whereabouts, and he said, ‘Yeah, she’s here, we’re walking,’” Davis remembers.
“I need you to return back to your residence,” Davis recalls the commander telling Lee. “You’re about to be arrested. And surely, when we pulled up to Sam’s residence, they had four black cars and two police units. Four black cars for the FBI agents.”
For more than seven months, the New Orleans police department’s Public Integrity Bureau, the FBI, and the US attorney for the eastern district of Louisiana had been investigating Davis and Lee over allegations that they extorted a group of Florida promoters who hired them to work a paid detail during an Essence festival event on 7 July 2001. A paid detail is off-duty, sometimes highly paid work for police officers, and Essence is an annual event that has become a Black cultural institution since the first festival in 1995, bringing acts like Beyoncé, Mary J Blige and Prince to the city.
Davis’s arrest effectively ended her 20-year career with the NOPD. She was not just a veteran officer but also the first Black female homicide detective in New Orleans’ history.
For years, Davis was celebrated in newspaper and magazine profiles including Ebony, which in May 1991 asked, “Is Jackie Davis the best homicide detective in New Orleans’ history?” In a February 1992 profile for the Philadelphia Inquirer that also appeared in the Chicago Tribune – “Next stop Hollywood? The stunning life of New Orleans’ top cop” – Davis was hailed for solving 88 of her 90 homicide cases, “a record better than any other detective and all the more impressive for the first black woman to join an elite corps of mostly white men who prodded her to fail”.
The piece also mentioned Hollywood interest in Davis’s story from stars like Whoopi Goldberg (none of which came to fruition). After Davis’s arrest, federal indictment, and conviction in the early 2000s, a career that had shattered the New Orleans PD’s racial and gender norms collapsed into the dustbin of history.
But history may be moving her way. In 2013, the convictions of five New Orleans officers, charged in 2005 with shooting and killing people fleeing Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters or covering up the shooting later, were overturned because of misconduct by prosecutors, including Salvador “Sal” Perricone, the prosecutor in the case – and the prosecutor who pursued Davis.
The unraveling of the Danziger Bridge case over what a federal judge called “grotesque prosecutorial misconduct” by assistant US attorneys Perricone and Jan Mann was a profound embarrassment for the justice department. Victims included a 17-year-old boy and an intellectually disabled man, and the officers engaged in an elaborate cover-up of the killings that included inventing witnesses.
In December 2018, the Louisiana supreme court disbarred Perricone over his misconduct in that case, as well as in a federal corruption investigation into a privately held landfill company in Jefferson Parish, a New Orleans suburb. Davis, now 63, and her attorneys have long maintained that her case was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct by Perricone. Was it too late for justice?
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Jacklean Davis was born on 6 February 1957 in Cleveland, to Lafrench and Frederick Davis. When Davis was three, her dad, a delivery driver, died in a vehicle accident. Davis says her mother mismanaged a lawsuit against her father’s employer and the inheritance he left for her and her brother, who was three at the time. “My grandfather was concerned about my brother’s and my wellbeing and issued my mother a threat that if she didn’t put her life together, he would have us taken from her,” Davis said.
Soon afterward, Davis and her brother boarded a bus to Louisiana with their mother. “Evidently it had been a pre-arrangement that my grandfather made with his sister here in New Orleans,” Davis says. “My mother left, and we stayed here in the state.” Davis and her brother moved in with her great-aunt, Mabel Walker, whom she called “Madea” and her husband, Willie, a merchant marine, in a shotgun home on Baronne Street in the Central City neighborhood.
It’s a historic Black neighborhood with deep cultural roots – jazz great Buddy Bolden lived there in the early 20th century, Tyler Perry lived across the street from Davis, and soul singer Irma Thomas sang in local bars. Much later, Perry released a series of 11 “Madea” movies based on a fictional character named Mabel Simmons who was raised in New Orleans.
But Central City was – and remains – deeply segregated. Black people lived on “lakebound” blocks to the north, toward Lake Pontchartrain, whereas whites resided on St Charles Avenue and “riverbound” streets, meaning those on higher ground and nearer to the Mississippi River. For Davis, the arrival of carnival season every year temporarily broke down racial barriers. “The whole area, we all mingled together during Mardi Gras,” she says. “You could come on the street. You hear the music blasting. We had groups like the Neville Brothers who were uptown.”
Davis’s home was different from others in Central City. “As a child, I constantly saw people, a group of the same people every day. And then there were times I saw strangers. All I knew was that these men did the same job that my uncle did. They were merchant marines and they would come off the ship. They would come to the house. [Mabel] literally let the room, two rooms. They would stay a minute or they would hook up with the ladies that would come.”
Davis says that when her great-aunt wasn’t facilitating sex work at home, she worked at a nearby bar called Shadowland. The area around the bar was violent – “People got shot. People got stabbed. People got robbed” – but it was Shadowland’s chaotic energy that changed Davis’s life. One day, Davis witnessed a man brutally assaulting a woman near the bar. Davis watched in shock as he punched and bit her – but she fought back, and then, Davis remembers, “this woman beat him down”. Moments later, a group of police officers “just come from out of nowhere. And I’m thinking that the woman about to be arrested, but come to find out, she was a Black woman detective.”
The detective’s name was Gail Miller, but on Central City’s streets she was known as “Christy Love”.
“I just became, not obsessed, but every time I saw this woman, I was just in awe,” Davis says. “This policewoman inspired me because I wasn’t a weakling. I was a loner, and I was a loner because I stuttered … And people used to make fun of me, so I would never talk. And this woman, I mean, she just did something to me. I just had never had a Black woman to look up to. I had always, unfortunately, been told I wasn’t going to be nothing.”
There was more than sex work going on at her great-aunt’s home. Davis remembers Madea telling her a man would be staying in the front room one night. “He technically raped me,” she said. “And I contacted my aunt and after the man left.” Madea, she said, “you didn’t mess with her … I still to the day remember my aunt getting her gun and leaving.” Did she catch the man when she set out into the night with her gun? ”If you knew Mabel Walker …” she said, her voice trailing off.
Davis says that she was also sexually abused by her great-uncle in her pre-teens until he became sick with jaundice, and then with cancer, while stationed overseas. “He died when I was 14 years old,” Davis says. “And on his deathbed he asked me to forgive him for what he had done to me. And I forgave him.”
Davis found solace from the horrors of home in school. She thrived at Carter G Woodson middle school just outside the French Quarter, and then McDonogh 35 in the St Bernard area. But in her sophomore year in high school, she got pregnant and was sent to a school “for wayward pregnant girls”. After Davis had her daughter, Christina, in 1974, she was allowed to finish school at McDonogh 35 and headed to college at the University of New Orleans. Davis studied chemistry but only made it a year and a half, because she couldn’t afford childcare and was forced to bring Christina to class. “I wind up bringing my baby to school one time, and got so embarrassed because while the professor was lecturing us, Christina was talking to the professor.” Davis says. “Every time the professor would talk and write something on the chalkboard, she would holler out, ‘No!’”
After dropping out of college, Davis worked a series of odd jobs until she decided to pursue her long-held dream of police work. She succeeded on her fifth