A former French Quarter police commander is retiring from his post as a police chief in Alaska under an unusual deal to drop charges against him from a dustup at a fishing lodge.
Jeffrey Walls, 48, who left the New Orleans Police Department in 2021 after 28 years, has submitted his resignation as police chief of Ketchikan, Alaska and agreed never to seek a law enforcement job again, in that state or anywhere in the U.S., according to the agreement reached last week.
Prosecutors in turn agreed to dismiss five misdemeanor charges against him, including three counts of assault and two counts of reckless endangerment.
It all stemmed from a scrap on Sept. 10, 2022, less than a year after Walls left New Orleans. Walls and another Ketchikan officer were eating dinner with their wives at the bar of the Salmon Falls Fishing Resort when another patron, Matthew Wilde, collided with Walls' chair.
Wilde apologized and offered to buy the group a drink, but Walls declined. Later that evening, Wilde ran into the chairs of both Walls and his wife Sharon, knocking her to the bar. Walls then pursued Wilde, knocked him into a stone wall, bloodying his head, and restrained him around the area of the neck and head. State prosecutors claimed it was a chokehold that lasted up to three minutes.
Walls argued that he acted within his rights as a peace officer when he restrained and detained Wilde, but a grand jury indicted him in December 2022.
The judge in the case tossed the felony charges, however, agreeing that prosecutors had misled the jury. Walls had been placed on administrative leave but was reinstated as police chief last fall, even as prosecutors continued to pursue the case against him.
Walls admitted as part of the agreement that he never identified himself as a police officer before witnesses broke up the altercation. Walls maintained his innocence of any crime, however.
“Once he made the decision to retire and return to the Lower 48 for family reasons, it appeared to me that the state might be willing to dismiss the case rather than go through with a trial,” Walls' attorney, Jay Hochberg, said Tuesday. “Chief Walls may now go enjoy his well-deserved retirement, take care of his family, and keep his head held high that the case against him was dismissed."
The deal with prosecutors calls for Walls to “voluntarily disqualify himself from seeking or holding any law enforcement position in Alaska.” That agreement also will go into a national database of de-certified cops.
Hochberg described Walls’ pledge not to seek a police job elsewhere in the U.S. as “not an enforceable promise" but that Walls “has no intention of working in law enforcement again.”
Walls joined the NOPD in 1997 and spent two stints as commander of the district that oversees the French Quarter, Central Business District and surrounding areas. He led the 8th district from 2011 to 2016, then commanded two other NOPD districts before returning to the French Quarter in 2021.
Sam Curtis, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law, said that ensuring Walls "will no longer be part of Alaska’s law enforcement community was a primary goal” of the agreement to dismiss the charges.
“Neither Ketchikan, nor any other community in Alaska, nor any community in the rest of the country will be at risk that Mr. Walls' poor judgement will impact them while wearing the uniform of a law enforcement officer," Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore said in a statement.