MEET THE CANDIDATE

 About Susan Hutson

EARLY YEARS: ‘A CONFIDENT LEADER’

Susan’s story, like many, begins before her birth, in the piney woods of East Texas, where in 1941, following an altercation with a white teenage male, her grandfather, Jimmie Hutson, a parent of seven children, was shot and killed, while unarmed, by the sheriff in a small town near Nacogdoches. His crime? Being in possession of the temerity to say ‘no’ to on-the-job, race-based discrimination at the height of the Jim Crow era.

Susan’s father and his six siblings, after her grandfather’s death, were the recipients of schoolyard taunts. “You don’t have no daddy,” it was said of the Hutson children—insults that were compounded in the years that followed when the teenager who set in motion the events that led to her grandfather’s death, himself became a lawman in East Texas and killed her grandfather’s brother under circumstances motivated by racial animus.

These events became staples in a diet of childhood stories her parents, Ceola and Mary Hutson, relayed to Susan and her five siblings about the racist violence each bore as children and helped to drive her father’s decision to move north where Susan spent her early childhood in the public housing units of West Philadelphia, a part of the city to which she would later return as a student in the dorm units of the University of Pennsylvania, where she would draw on her family’s experience to confront the racism of the Reagan era. 

COLLEGE YEARS: ‘A GROWING POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS’

There is perhaps no greater demonstration of the police state under which Black Americans lived in the 1980s than the 1985 bombing by police in Philadelphia of the home of a group of Black communal activists, known as MOVE. The subsequent fire was allowed to burn unattended by the fire department killing six adults, five children and destroying 61 homes.

This was the milieu that incubated the activism of Susan’s freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania where she attended student meetings to address the MOVE crisis and its aftermath. In subsequent years, she joined protests against South African apartheid, supported, as a matter of free speech, the exhibition of works by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, demonstrated against gender-based violence and rallied against the anti-Black racism of the majority white fraternities and sororities that dominated Greek life at UPenn. 

Before graduating with a degree in economics, Susan’s political attention turned toward the White House during the 1988 presidential campaign—her first as an eligible voter—of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and the euphoria that surrounded the possible ascendancy of Black politics to the pinnacle of the country’s domestic agenda. She attended rallies in support of Jackson and can still remember, more than three decades later, Jackson’s theme song, “Run, Jessie, Run.”

NEW ORLEANS YEARS: ‘DETERMINED, AMBITIOUS, EYES ON THE PRIZE’

Deciding against a career in business, the basis for her degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, Susan opted, after years of student activism, for a legal career instead, selecting Tulane University Law School in 1989. She joined the school’s law clinic where she explored matters of environmental and criminal law, including, early in her tenure, a case of domestic violence in which a male defendant, accused of assaulting and biting his erstwhile partner, after breaking into her home via the roof, was asked by a judge, also a male, “Man, why you let her get you like that?” No objections were made to this query much to her chagrin.

She left law school with a desire to protect women and joined an all-female Black law firm in Houston, soon followed by the establishment of her own firm. In 2001, she joined the prosecutor’s office in Corpus Christi, where she demonstrated an annoying penchant for offering defendants diversion programs or community service in lieu of fines and fees, something for which she was repeatedly reprimanded. Finally, after one such reprimand, she told the office’s senior prosecutor, “It’s my law license, so I am going to do it my way.” Her way soon led to a career in police oversight—first in Austin, then in Los Angeles, at times reviewing more than 500 civilian complaints received in a week, and, finally, a return to New Orleans, where in 2010, after years of police misconduct, she would face her toughest challenge yet as the city’s new independent police monitor.

Susan’s leadership provided civilian oversight of a department with years of mistrust ironed into its reputation and began the process of emphasizing justice over criminal in the criminal justice system. In 2016, she was selected president of the International Law Enforcement Auditors Association. In 2019, she was tapped to lead the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, the largest organization of its kind dedicated to police oversight.

Susan’s work as independent police monitor has secured dozens of oversight victories on behalf of the residents of New Orleans, including the establishment of a critical incidents investigation team, to probe officer-involved shootings; securing the adoption and release of body camera footage; and opening investigations into complaints of retaliation from the public and from within the ranks of NOPD. Eighty years ago, changes in tactics and technology notwithstanding, Susan is well aware that hers is the kind of moral oversight that would have kept her grandfather alive.