Weekend In New Orleans
In New Orleans news reporting sometimes the headlines will read "5 shot within 4 hours," and other times such facts must be pieced together by faithful readers, and supplemented with TV news. It was from TV that I got the numbers I wrote about the other day, 7 shootings, two of them deaths, in a two-day period ending at 5p.m. Saturday.
So the good news is the city is experiencing a period where there are not shootings and murder every day of the week. The bad news is the shootings we are having here are relatively high profile: children armed with guns murdering other children; teenage bystanders getting hit in crossfire; 8-year-old girls being shot in the back; a pregnant local girl killed by stray gunfire on a Mardi Gras parade route; a Jazzfest tourist murdered near the fairgrounds; aging rock stars chasing purse snatchers and being shot in the leg; cars burning on the side of the road with bullet-riddled bodies in the trunk.
A large part of the yearly murders in New Orleans are gangster killing gangster. As long as their aim is true and no innocents are nicked in crossfire, nobody, as far as I can tell, really gives a fuck about these murders. We won't admit it but we think it is cost effective justice. The perpetrators are scary people we can't seem to or don't want to understand. Born of us, maybe, but these hoodlings are foreigners on our soil. They cannot be of us because then we would be of them and that is too scary to conceive. We suppress the memory of 200--400 murdered bodies every year and glorify the travesty of the occasional tourist or upstanding citizen who will every so often get shot dead in New Orleans.
I think the criminals are either crying out for help or are merciless purveyors of irony because over the years sure as a local politician or police chief reports that crime is down the next month is filled with bizarre and heinous violent crime. Most recently our police chief was all over the local media patronizing all us dumb locals with his poor imitation of the Gore/Kerry sigh of condescension--murder is down by twenty percent people, I don't know what to tell you, you people who persist that crime is up, this perception that crime is up is wrong. Well Ok, I stand corrected.
By the way, Sunday, about one in the morning, I heard four loud gunshots, maybe two blocks away. No sirens, no subsequent reports from the media. Today, in Tuesday's paper, is an unrelated Sunday shooting that resulted in death, in Central City at 4th and Daneel.
So, a Monday headline could have, but did not, read--New Orleans weekend, at least 8 shot, 3 dead. We are not allowed to behave as if it is pertinent but all the victims may be presumed black, and poor.
And now, late in the succeeding week of a weekend where 8 people were shot, I feel not too much at all about it. It is a completely forgotten series of events. We all have our lives to get on with; there is no point in remembering. And our consciences as represented by media coverage are quiet. I would like to suggest that there is something wrong with all of us for forgetting so easily but that's all I'm going to do is suggest, I'm not going to point any fingers, or indulge in self-recrimination.
Lastly, almost daily NO media updates inform us that justice will be served if you are stupid enough to kill a very white tourist. There is motion towards trying as adults the four teenagers involved in the Jazzfest slaying. First the 14-year-old shooter has to pass a psych exam and then it must be proved the juvenile detention system will be incapable of reforming the alleged young killer. So if the kid passes all his tests and the state (juvenile system) fails its' tests, then ostensibly there will be a go ahead for the adult-style prosecution of this 14-year-old. In which case the state will undoubtedly begin conversations about the death penalty. I have been on record as not being against every instance of state sanctioned death so I would have to in this case look again at the facts, see what I feel.
Ok, well, I've thought about it. I think we should just round up all bad people, and kill them. Then only good people would have guns, and the world would be safer, for, um, more killing. The benefits of this in New Orleans would be immeasurable. If only good people were doing the killing then killing would be a good thing. It could be celebrated. We could have more parades, more tourists, more money, more guns, more killing, more parades…
All excerpts in this thread, posted by me, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the New Orleans Times Picayune online version. I am collecting these stories as notes for an unknown purpose. You may assume that any comment to the original post, Weekend In New Orleans, is not uplifting or in anyway entertaining, and therefore you may well be advised to pass over these posts. jml.
"Man shot dead, pregnant woman hurt
A 27-year-old New Orleans man was killed and an eight-month pregnant woman was injured when someone walked up to the car they were in and opened fire Thursday evening in Hollygrove, marking the fourth slaying in the neighborhood in less than a week, police said. A 2-year-old boy also was in the car but was unhurt, police said." (6/3/04)
Troy Williams, 24, walked into the BG Mart, 2248 West Bank Expressway, shortly before 9:30 p.m. and began arguing with another customer at the counter, said Col. Robert Garner, sheriff's spokesman.
The man followed Williams outside to the gas pump and shot him once with a handgun, then got into a Nissan Quest and fled southbound on Scottsdale Drive, the spokesman said. (DOA) (6/6/04)
***************************************************************************
Shortly before 5 p.m., two officers saw Tehopile and a group of other people standing at Ursulines Avenue and North Rocheblave Street, police spokeswoman Jonette Williams said. As the officers got out of their car to question the people, Tehopile ran, Williams said.
One officer chased Tehopile into an alley between two houses, where Tehopile turned and began pulling a gun out of his waistband, Williams said. The officer fired one shot and missed. The chase continued and Tehopile was caught by the officer behind one of the houses, Williams said.
The officers recovered a loaded .40-caliber gun dropped by Tehopile, who was carrying small amounts of crack cocaine and heroin, police said. (6/6/04)
Carwash suspect surrenders at Central Lockup
3-week hunt comes to an end; he's blamed in string of violence
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
By Tara Young
Staff writer
A three-week hunt for New Orleans' most wanted man came to an end Tuesday evening when Antoine Johnson strode into Central Lockup and identified himself to jailers, just minutes after professing his innocence to a local news station, police said.
Johnson, 19, of 1206 S. Galvez St., is wanted in a May 9 shooting that killed one man and wounded a 14-year-old girl. In another, unrelated incident, police said Johnson shot at 13-year-old and another juvenile earlier this month.
The recent string of violent incidents in which Johnson is the prime suspect began May 9, just two days after Johnson was released from jail. Johnson was released after Orleans Criminal Court Judge Arthur Hunter found no probable cause to hold him and two other suspects on charges related to the shooting of two men at TCL Car Wash in Central City last July.
Monday, July 05, 2004
• Metairie teen is slain in Iberville complex
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
• Teen was changing his life, mom says
Brandon Kirby seemed to be making a comeback, after falling into drug abuse and leaving school. The 18-year-old Metairie resident had completed drug rehabilitation, earned his general equivalency diploma and found a girlfriend, and he was looking for a job.
• Three men are killed in separate shootings
Three men were found fatally shot early Monday within 90 minutes, in separate parts of New Orleans, police said.
Friday, July 9, 2004
Street in eastern N.O. is jolted by killings of 3 men in 2 days
Saturday, July 10, 2004
• Abused baby's father sought
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office is asking the public's help in locating a Metairie father accused of beating his 11-month-old son and burning the child's face with a cigarette lighter, authorities said.
• Cop suspended after DWI charge
A New Orleans police officer was suspended without pay Friday after she was arrested on a driving while intoxicated charge, New Orleans police said.
• Hollygrove victim is identified
A New Orleans man fatally shot in the Hollygrove neighborhood Thursday night has been identified, the Orleans Parish coroner's office said.
• POLICE REPORTS
ST. CHARLES ARRESTS
• Sheriff pushes Âumflex;-cent sales ta
Jack Strain takes pride in saying that in his eight years as St. Tammany Parish sheriff he has doubled the number of deputies and spent millions of dollars on the latest crime-fighting technology without a tax increase.
• Summer is mean season in New Orleans
Summer is a hot time for arguments and accidents. Take, for instance, the Central City domino duo whose playing days ended July 4 when one allegedly shot the other dead during a heated match. Or ponder the Slidell area shooting Tuesday of a 10-year-old boy; his 11-year-old cousin told detectives he was fiddling with a pellet gun and accidentally fired it.
• Two men are fatally shot, third in serious condition
Two men were shot fatally in New Orleans on Friday, and another was injured in a shooting at a Broadmoor barbershop as his 2-year-old son was getting a haircut.
Sunday, July 11, 2004
• Injured officer's life slips away
Alva Simmons' family knew that the day inevitably would come.
• Rising murder rate has police retooling tactics
As they investigated the latest New Orleans murder and grappled with grieving family members Saturday, this time in Central City, New Orleans Police Department officials announced plans for sending more officers into high-crime areas.
Monday, July 12, 2004
• Woman is found shot dead
An woman was found shot to death in her Algiers apartment late Saturday, the New Orleans Police Department said.
N.O. man killed in 9th Ward sports bar
Gunman walked in, shot him in the head
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
By Tara Young
Staff writer
A New Orleans man was shot and killed inside a Lower 9th Ward sports bar Tuesday as frightened patrons scattered and ducked, the New Orleans Police Department said.
3 slain Sunday in N.O. boost total to 6
Bloody weekend began on Friday
Monday, November 15, 2004
By Tara Young
Staff writer
Three men were killed in unrelated shootings Sunday, ratcheting up the weekend death toll to six people slain within less than 72 hours in New Orleans.
N.O. man found slain in Cooper complex
Another N.O. slaying victim is identified
Monday, November 15, 2004
From staff reports
Police found the body of a man in a courtyard of the B.W. Cooper public housing complex Sunday morning, the New Orleans Police Department reported.
Anthony Mitchell, 33
4 people are killed in stabbings, arson
Police say suspect confesses; he, girlfriend had argued
Thursday, November 11, 2004
By Rob Nelson
West Bank bureau
A Marrero man enraged by a domestic dispute went on a stabbing rampage Wednesday, then set fire to a Harvey apartment, killing his girlfriend, their 1-year-old daughter and two others who lived there, authorities said.
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
• Shooting, stalking, shooting again, gunman kills 9th Ward motorist
A woman stood in silence as she watched a gunman walk up to her boyfriend's car, fire a single shot into the driver's side window and then stroll over to the passenger side and shoot him again as he attempted to crawl to safety, the New Orleans Police Department said.
Monday, December 06, 2004
• 2 families are caught in Uptown crossfire
Just three days after a Terrytown woman was seriously wounded when a stray bullet ripped through her car and pierced her neck on Earhart Boulevard, two other carloads of unsuspecting locals were caught in the crossfire of an Uptown shooting, but escaped injury, police said.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
• 23-year-old shot, killed in Algiers
A 23-year-old New Orleans man was shot dead Saturday about 5 p.m. in the Cut Off area of Algiers, police say.
• Man shot in neck on Fourth Street
A man was hit in the neck Saturday shortly after 3 p.m. during a shooting in the 2200 block of Fourth Street, at South Galvez Street, the New Orleans Police Department said. He was taken to Charity Hospital to be treated for an injury that was not life-threatening, police said. Police were still investigating the incident.
• Shooting spoils a Classic weekend
Three people, including a 15-year-old New Orleans girl, were wounded when an unknown gunman fired into a thick Bourbon Street crowd during the annual post-game Bayou Classic festivities that jammed the French Quarter early Sunday, police said.
The dispute had nothing to do with the rivalry-stoked football game. It wasn't a spin-off from the pulse-pumping Battle of the Bands. And, by all accounts, it had nothing to do with the raucous street party featuring tricked-up cars blasting bass-heavy rap jams amid a crowd sporting enough bling-bling to light up the night sky.
Gunmen in van rake street with bullets
1 dead, 2 wounded in drive-by shooting
Saturday, December 11, 2004
By Michael Perlstein
Staff writer
The first gunshots sounded faint and few, so the longtime Uptown resident rolled over in his bed, even as his wife bolted into the kitchen. Maybe her intuition was telling her something, the man said, because moments later his house was being raked by bullets and a bleeding man was crawling up to his porch.
8 people killed within 24 hours
Six victims found in N.O., two in Jeff
Sunday, February 06, 2005
By Gordon Russell
and Wayne Knabb%%par%%Staff writers
The final weekend of Carnival got off to a bloody start as eight people, six in New Orleans and two in Jefferson Parish, were killed within a 24-hour span that began Friday evening, officials said.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
• Man killed in home robbery
A man was found shot dead inside his home southwest of Slidell early Saturday in the first homicide in unincorporated St. Tammany Parish since May, the Sheriff's Office said.
• Two killed in shootings
Two men were fatally shot and another wounded in two separate incidents Saturday night, New Orleans police said.
Friday, March 11, 2005
• N.O. man killed inside Canal bar
A 24-year-old New Orleans man early Thursday became the third person killed inside or near the Canal Bus Stop bar in five years. And the club's owner, who is facing obstruction charges in the January death of a patron in another bar he owns, was booked with illegally carrying a weapon and possession of illegal drugs after investigators found marijuana and a pistol behind the bar, New Orleans police said.
• N.O. teen acquitted in parade shooting
An Orleans Parish jury Thursday acquitted the teenager accused of gunning down a woman during a Carnival parade last year while sparring with street rivals along the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground.
• Slidell man's killer sentenced to death
A jury decided in less than three hours that Jesse Montejo should be executed for killing Slidell businessman Louis Ferrari, the first death sentence handed down in St. Tammany Parish in seven years.
Tuesday, March 8, 2005
• Mother says son was killed due to dispute over jacket
An Avondale mother said goodbye to her dying son Monday before he entered surgery to remove his organs for donation, as police continued to search for the Kenner man accused of shooting him in the head.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
• 2 killed, 1 hurt in shootings
Two people were killed and another critically injured in separate incidents in a 70-minute span Saturday evening, including the shooting of two men in a car in a St. Bernard neighborhood, police said.
Monday, March 21, 2005
• Gunshot victim dies on stoop
A man on his way to church was shot and killed in the doorway of his grandmother's home Sunday, police and witnesses said.
Thursday, March 25, 2005
• Teen, 15, convicted of killing fest-goer
A 15-year- old was convicted Wednesday of killing a Jazzfest fan leaving the Fair Grounds last spring and will be incarcerated in an adult prison until he is 31, under mandatory sentencing rules
Saturday, March 26, 2005
• Doubts raised in police killing in N.O.
A large pool of blood stained the grass in front of a back-yard woodpile where Jenard "Nordy" Thomas was fatally shot by two New Orleans police officers Thursday night. The officers, Scott Rodrigue and Joseph Waguespack Jr., fired seven or eight shots after Thomas, according to police, stuck a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol in Rodrigue's ribs.
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
• N.O. man killed in 9th Ward
A New Orleans man was fatally shot in the chest during a fight Tuesday afternoon in the Lower 9th Ward, police said.
• Killing suspect facing trial as adult
An Algiers youth, accused of killing a Marrero teen during a fight over money last month, will be tried as an adult and faces life in prison if convicted, a Jefferson Parish prosecutor said.
• Acquitted killer gets time after all
A Metairie teenager who eluded a life sentence when a jury acquitted her of murder two years ago has been sent to prison for 10 years because she violated conditions of her probation on a narcotics conviction, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
Thursday, April 7, 2005
• Student is shot near N.O. school
Minutes before 16-year-old Jerome Brown was shot in the neck outside Alfred Lawless High School in New Orleans Wednesday afternoon, his principal stopped him in the hallway, telling him to get to class. He laughed and assured her he would.
Friday, April 8, 2005
• N.O. man arrested in pair of slayings
New Orleans police have arrested one man in two shooting deaths. In another case, two other men were arrested in an unrelated slaying.
• 2 men shot dead 15 minutes apart
Less than a day after a student was shot outside a New Orleans school, two men were shot dead on Mid-City streets Thursday morning within blocks of two other schools, prompting a lockdown at one school and heightening security at the other.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
• Man is shot to death in West Carrollton
A man was shot dead Tuesday afternoon in the West Carrollton neighborhood, the third person killed in New Orleans in a 24-hour period.
• Rocker is absent for holdup trial
British rock-and-roll star Ray Davies, longtime lead singer of The Kinks, did not return to New Orleans on Wednesday to testify against the man who allegedly drove the getaway car for a gunman who robbed Davies' girlfriend and shot the singer in the leg.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
• Wave of gunfire kills four people in 1 day
A 24-year-old Algiers man was gunned down Wednesday afternoon as he left his mother's apartment in an apparent dispute over a woman, relatives of the man said.
Friday, May 20, 2005
• Shootings leave 5 dead in 26 hours
In life, they were second cousins who never knew each other. On Wednesday, they became linked in another way: Both were gunned down, two of five New Orleans murder victims in a 26-hour surge of shootings.
Saturday, May 21, 2005
• Intruder cut Mid-City woman, police say
Police are asking for help in identifying a man who entered a woman's Mid-City residence Wednesday and cut her face with a knife while demanding money.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
• Man killed, another hurt in Central City shooting
A 26-year-old New Orleans man was killed and a second was seriously wounded Saturday night in a Central City shooting, police said.
Monday, May 23, 2005
• N.O. pair wounded in Bywater shooting
A double shooting in the Bywater on Sunday morning left two men hospitalized, one in critical condition, New Orleans police said.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
• Block party turns violent
A 9th Ward block party in memory of a man gunned down by police last year erupted into violence Sunday, with one woman stabbed in the face and 11 people arrested, police said.
Friday, June 3, 2005
• New Orleans teen fatally shot
A 17-year-old New Orleans man was shot dead Thursday night in the St. Bernard public housing complex, New Orleans police said.
Saturday, June 4, 2005
• Man is slain in Algiers home
An 88-year-old retired Navy pilot was bludgeoned to death in his home in the Aurora Gardens neighborhood in Algiers on Thursday, with $300 and some credit cards stolen but no sign of forced entry, New Orleans police and relatives of the victim said.
Sunday, June 5, 2005
• DEADLY FORCE
The fatal shooting of 16-year-old Antoine Colbert by Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies last week was unusual because deputies fired more than 100 bullets at Colbert and two other teens who, though they had no guns, nearly ran over officers during a wild chase in a stolen truck.
Monday, June 6, 2005
• N.O. man dies in Uptown shooting
A 30-year-old New Orleans man was shot dead Sunday morning and a 22-year-old woman was wounded in what police are calling an Uptown drug deal that turned violent.
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
• Man tells local deputies he was shot while in N.O.
A wounded man showed up in St. Bernard Parish on Saturday night saying he had been shot in New Orleans, the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office said.
• Gunmen wound 2 in Abita Springs shooting
Two men in a car were shot by gunmen who opened fire from another vehicle Saturday night in the Abita Springs area, authorities said.
• Gentilly man killed in home invasion
Two days before his 34th birthday, a New Orleans man was shot to death Sunday by assailants who ransacked his Gentilly apartment but left his girlfriend and her infant son unharmed, police said.
• Bank teller shot in stickup at Gretna area bank
A 23-year-old teller was shot in the back during a robbery of the Iberia Bank near Gretna on Monday morning, about an hour before the bank was scheduled to open, authorities said.
• 4 busted with pot, pistols, police say
A group of New Orleans men, said by police to be smoking pot and armed with pistols, were arrested Monday after one responded to an officer's knock on the front door holding a smoking cigar of marijuana.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
• 8 people shot at 3 sites, 2 fatally
Eight people were shot, two fatally, during an apparent rolling shootout in Hollygrove on Friday night that spanned three crime scenes in the neighborhood, police said.
Tuesday, July 12,2005
• Two New Orleans men are killed in shootings
The New Orleans Police Department is investigating two apparently unrelated shooting deaths, one near the site of the old Desire public housing complex late Sunday night and the other in the 9th Ward early Monday.
• Man killed during speeding dispute
As his 5-year-old daughter rode her Barbie jeep nearby, a LaPlace man joining his neighbors for a "prehurricane party" on their front lawns Saturday night was shot in the head after an altercation stemming from a complaint of a car speeding past the gathering.
• Jilted lover shot pair, then self, police say
Three women were found shot to death Monday morning in a Chalmette home in an apparent double murder-suicide linked to a love-triangle dispute, authorities said.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
• Man found fatally shot in N.O.
An unidentified man was found fatally shot Tuesday afternoon in an 8th Ward neighborhood.
• Man booked with throwing bottle
More than two days after a LaPlace man was killed during a dispute about a beer bottle thrown at a moving car, the man accused of chucking the bottle was arrested, the St. John Parish Sheriff's Office said Tuesday.
• Harvey man killed in his driveway
A 23-year-old Harvey man is dead and three others are recovering from gunshot wounds after three separate West Bank shootings early Tuesday morning, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office said.
• Gunman bursts into store on Magazine, kills grocer
A 46-year-old Magazine Street grocer was shot to death Tuesday afternoon by a man who entered the store cursing and then fired a single shot at her as she ran to the back of the business to warn her husband, police and family said.
• Child rapist OKs surgical castration
In a rare penalty for a sex crime, a Covington child rapist agreed Tuesday to undergo surgical castration and serve 25 years in jail rather than face a possible life sentence.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
• Man kills wife, self, 1 other in Elmwood
By Michelle Hunter
Saturday, July 16, 2005
• Man kills burglar, police say
A 20-year-old Destrehan man, who authorities say was attempting to burglarize a home, was killed Friday when the resident shot him in the side.
• Former murder suspect is killed
A 21-year-old eastern New Orleans man, arrested for first-degree murder last summer but freed after the case was dropped, became a murder victim himself Thursday night, police said.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
• Two found shot dead in Gentilly residence
A man and a woman were found shot to death early Saturday in the man's home at 2910 Mandeville St. in Gentilly, the New Orleans Police Department said.
• N.O. police called too heavy-handed
Outraged by a rash of shootings of suspects by New Orleans police, a crowd of community leaders and residents met in search of answers Saturday morning at the Treme Community Center.
• Fight proves deadly for Kenner resident
A 29-year-old Kenner man died Friday night from a head injury suffered when he fell during a fight with two men in Kenner, police said.
• 2 women killed by suicide gunmen
By Walt Philbin
Monday, July 18, 2005
• 7 in N.O. wounded in drive-by shooting
In one of the most violent shooting sprees New Orleans has seen this year, seven people were shot Sunday night when several individuals open-fired on a small crowd in what police say was retaliation for a killing the night before.
• Nightclub shooting injures five
A shooting early Sunday left four people wounded outside a 7th Ward nightclub, according to New Orleans police.
"chucking the bottle" -- isn't that a bit colloquial for a newspaper?
Not at all, Mark. That is proper usage. I foolishly lobbed a full beer can at a friend's retreating car, back in Dallas as teenager, and when I see the guy I always say--remember when I chucked that beer can at your Mustang? Almost thirty years later and he still remembers and he finds it not amusing at all. Ok, maybe it is a bit colloquial for newspaper.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
• Pair sought in bicyclist's death
A 26-year-old New Orleans man was shot to death as he rode a bicycle on North Prieur Street late Sunday, police said.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
• Harvey man, 19, shot dead in car
A 19-year-old Harvey man was fatally shot in the head early Tuesday morning in Terrytown as he sat in his sister's car, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office said
• Boy, 12, testifies in murder trial
A 12-year-old boy, whose life allegedly had been the subject of a jailhouse plot to silence the state's only witness in a first-degree murder trial, testified Tuesday that he saw 22-year-old Bryan Mathieu kill his uncle James Robinson Jr. two years ago.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
• Man dies in Pigeon Town shooting
A 21-year old man was killed in Pigeon Town Wednesday night when a gunman walked up to him in the 1700 block of Eagle Street and opened fire, New Orleans police said.
• 17-year-old identified in fatal shooting
The Orleans Parish coroner's office has identified a 17-year-old who was fatally shot Tuesday in Algiers.
Monday, August 1, 2005
• Man found shot dead in car that hit utility pole
A man was found shot dead in a car that struck a utility pole in Gert Town Sunday night, the New Orleans Police Department said.
• N.O. man, 28, shot dead on his birthday
As Brian Craig Jr.'s body lay chest up and arms spread wide on North Prieur Street near Orleans Avenue on Sunday morning, his mother's tears and anguish flooded her eyes and throat as she begged the city's killers to put down their guns.
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
• Six men killed over bloody span of 3 days
After a short reprieve from murder and mayhem in New Orleans on Friday, six men lost their lives in a fresh spate of violence between Saturday morning and Monday night.
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
• 2 killed, 2 injured in series of shootings
Two men were killed in unrelated shootings Tuesday and a third man, critically wounded, burst into a 7th Ward church as he fled from a gunman, authorities said.
Tuesday, August 9, 2005
• Three men killed in seven hours
Three men were killed late Sunday night and early Monday morning, raising this year's murder tally to 177, police said.
... Carter, who did not own the Jeep, was "pretty badly hit" by bullets from the AK-47, and died inside the vehicle...
Thursday, August 11, 2005
• Child, 7, mother gunned down at home
A 7-year-old girl and her mother were killed Wednesday after police said at least one gunman entered their Hollygrove home and shot them both in the head.
Friday, August 12, 2005
• Violence shows no signs of letup
In one slaying, a 22-year-old New Orleans woman was shot in the back while clutching a 2-year-old boy in her arms in Hollygrove. A few hours later, a 30-year-old man was near death in the 9th Ward after being shot multiple times early Thursday. He died later at Charity Hospital.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
• N.O. teen dies in Algiers shooting
A teenager died Thursday after being shot in Algiers, the Orleans Parish coroner's office said.
• N.O. man shot dead on city street
A man was shot and killed Friday about 1 a.m. in Central City, police said.
• Killers are killed, Orleans police say
For the second time in a week, the New Orleans Police Department has closed a murder case by saying that the suspects became murder victims themselves.
Christopher Hitchens was suggesting that some American municipalities adopt Baghdad as a sister city. (This was right before Baghdad's secular mayor was relieved of his duties by armed Shiites.) Anyway, my vote would be New Orleans.
I had to read the Hitchens Slate article to get more meaning and then finally it hit me that you meant that some American municipalities should adopt New Orleans, instead of Baghdad, not that New Orleans should adopt Baghdad. I agree. New Orleans would be a start, anyway. The crime postings on this page are not a new trend in New Orleans. Crimes of this nature have been happening pretty consistently for the past 20 years in New Orleans.
Whoops, I meant-- New Orleans should be Baghdad's sister city because both have whopping levels of violence that aren't officially admitted. My Comcast cable start page runs news that's mostly Administration spin. Today there's a picture of 2 smiling Iraqi leaders and the headline "Constitution to be finished soon." That's because the country's blowing itself to pieces and Bush wants to hang his exit on an advanced Constitution-writing timetable.
I don't know why more people don't know that New Orleans is a killing ground--I guess it's at odds with the tourist image of the Big Easy. New York used to be like that, violent as hell, until some control freaks came into the constabulary with "advanced police methods" (e.g., statistically tracking where crimes were being committed and increasing patrols there). New York isn't as fun anymore but the control freaks proved a city can be made less murderous. There's no excuse for New Orleans to be like this. Is deeply entrenched racism the main reason, would you say?
I supect this reveals more than a little about the police: "For the second time in a week, the New Orleans Police Department has closed a murder case by saying that the suspects became murder victims themselves." I think there may be a bit of the "let them kill each other" attitude.
I know that despite being right next to a police station house, the Treme is more lightly patrolled than any of the NorCal 'burbs I've lived in.
Actually, New Orleans adopted the NY method of crime tracking, Comstat or whatever, one of the NY architects of that system, Maples, came down about, oh, nine or ten years ago and helped set it up. However, certain aspects of the zero tolerance concept just wouldn't work in New Orleans. The zero tolerance for loitering lasted about one week, and then it became clear that the New Orleans culture sort of depends on loitering and to outlaw it would further alienate from the people a police force that, especially at that time, 94 and 95, was fairly reeling from corruption and abuse scandals, and needed to appear more street friendly. As for increased patrols in high crime areas, they do that too, but the amount of police they would need to police all high crime areas would, I think, bankrupt the city. I really don't know that the underlying cause can be summed up as deeply entrenched racism, although that certainly does exist in Louisiana. And I don't know the origin of the phrase, "New Orleans, the city that care forgot" but I have yet to find fewer words that better sum up the reality there.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
• Teen shot, killed; 3-year-old hurt
A 16-year-old male was shot and killed in the 3000 block of Toledano Street late Monday night. A 3-year-old girl received minor injuries in the incident but was expected to be treated and released from the hospital, said Capt. Marlon Defillo, New Orleans Police Department spokesman.
• Man is shot dead in quarrel
An early afternoon argument in Central City turned violent Monday, when one of two quarreling men pulled a handgun and shot the other, killing him, police said.
City Journal Home.
Autumn 2005
Who’s Killing New Orleans?
Nicole Gelinas
President Bush’s advisers insist that he’s not abandoning conservatism in his commitment to rebuild the Gulf Coast. But a mark of conservative thinking is properly identifying problems before dedicating billions to solving them. The president hasn’t done that in New Orleans. Instead, in his September 15 speech from Jackson Square, Bush vowed to combat “poverty”—a foe that cities and the feds have never conquered in their long war against urban decay.
In the language of Lyndon Johnson, Bush ascribed the violence and desperation Americans saw in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina to “deep, persistent poverty in this region. . . . That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.” The president then issued a call to the nation: “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. . . . Let us rise above the legacy of inequality.”
But amorphous talk about poverty, racism, and inequality won’t help New Orleans rebuild. New Orleans has two more pressing—and much simpler—problems that need fixing right now.
The first is obvious: “Gulf Opportunity Zone” or no, businesses won’t invest in New Orleans again, and workers won’t live there again, unless the government protects the city with the best flood barriers that technology and money can provide. This job is hard—but civil engineering actually works, unlike the social engineering that Bush has invited with his lament about urban Southern poverty.
The second job is less obvious. New Orleans’s immutable civic shame, before and after Katrina, is not racism, poverty, or inequality, but murder—a culture of murder so vicious and so pervasive that it terrorizes and numbs the whole city.
In 2003, New Orleans’s murder rate was nearly eight times the national average—and since then, murder has increased. In 2002 and 2003, New Orleans had the highest per capita city homicide rate in the United States, with 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizens—compared to New York City’s seven. New Orleans is a New York with nearly 5,000 murders a year—an unlivable place. The city’s economy has sputtered over the past generation partly because local and state officials have failed to do the most elementary job of government: to secure the personal safety of citizens.
The president wasn’t alone in his misperception of what ails New Orleans. In the aftermath of the storm, hand-wringers wondered why they hadn’t noticed before that so many American blacks live in Third World conditions—supposedly only because they’re black. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer voiced white America’s knee-jerk best: “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. . . . So many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor, and they are so black,” he mused on the air.
But Americans didn’t notice this before because it’s not true. Despite the president’s rhetoric, and despite those indelible images from the Superdome and the Convention Center, New Orleans is just as much a black success story as a black failure story.
Yes, New Orleans has a 28 percent poverty rate, and yes, New Orleans is 67 percent black. But nearly two-thirds of New Orleans’s blacks aren’t poor.
Yes, it’s true that nearly 25 percent of New Orleans’s families live on less than $15,000 a year, according to the 2000 Census. But 19 percent of New York’s families live on less than $15,000—and it’s much more expensive for poor people to live in New York, making them poorer. The median monthly New York rent is $705, and the median monthly mortgage is $1,535—compared with monthly costs of $488 and $910 respectively in New Orleans.
Despite the images of collective helplessness broadcast after Katrina, New Orleans does not have a stratospherically high government-dependency rate. In 2002, it had 6,696 families on cash welfare, or 3.6 percent, compared with New York City’s 98,000 families, or 3.2 percent. In 2000, 7.8 percent of New Orleans households received Supplemental Security Income, compared with 7.5 percent in New York.
Anyone familiar with New Orleans knows that the city is filled with hard-working people—most of them black. Welfare reform, in New Orleans as in the rest of the country, worked; between 1996 and 2002, Louisiana cut its welfare rolls by 66 percent. The only virtue of New Orleans’s tourism-dependent economy is that those with few skills who want to work can work; the city’s unemployment rate was 5.2 percent during 2004, lower than New York’s 7.1 percent.
But not all black New Orleanians are consigned to working as busboys or hotel maids. The city long has had a substantial black middle class, and indeed a black affluent class.
After Katrina hit, Jarvis Deberry editorialized in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about a black New Orleans doctor who had evacuated to Houston before the storm: “Like so many of New Orleans’s black doctors, lawyers, accountants, dentists, politicians, professors and entrepreneurs, [Critty Hymes] made her home in eastern New Orleans, an area hit especially hard by the floodwaters,” Deberry wrote. “Despite its devastation, the area known as New Orleans East, the other part of the 9th Ward, hasn’t gotten much attention. . . . Despite the wealth, fame or stature of many of its residents, for too many people now covering New Orleans, the area simply doesn’t exist.”
New Orleans’s legacy of black achievement is part of the complicated race history of a complicated city, and dates back to before emancipation. “There has been a black middle class in New Orleans dating back to the antebellum period,” says native New Orleanian Edward F. Haas, a professor at Wright State University in Ohio who specializes in the history of the modern South.
During slavery, New Orleans had the largest urban population of free blacks after Baltimore. As Haas relates, the children who were the product of “mixed sexual unions” were often sent to Europe for education by their white fathers—and often returned better educated than many of their white local counterparts. With the help of substantial inheritances, they formed a black elite that persists in New Orleans to this day.
Likewise, less wealthy New Orleans blacks, “with their commitment to education, industry and self-reliance, defied all stereotypes of black inferiority” and formed New Orleans’s vibrant black middle class, Deberry wrote in his Times-Picayune piece. “[O]ther southern cities would develop black middle classes that would dwarf New Orleans’s. But that doesn’t mean the one in New Orleans ever went away.” The city’s historically black colleges—Dillard University, Southern University at New Orleans, and Xavier University—have never stopped churning out educated, middle-class black graduates.
The fruits of this culture of black achievement are evident. New Orleans’s government has been predominantly black for three decades. Its corporations fill white-collar and clerical jobs alike with qualified black workers. Ray Nagin, New Orleans’s current black mayor, embodies both of these trends: he was an executive at New Orleans’s Cox Cable (now part of Cox Communications) before he took office three years ago.
New Orleans does have its predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods. But though no land of perfect color blindness, it is more integrated on a day-to-day level, both in neighborhoods and in the workplace, than New York and certainly than a city like Boston. Moreover, it’s simply not true that black New Orleanians disproportionately lost their homes after Katrina because the whites built long ago on the only high and dry land available. Lakeview, a rich white area of $1 million homes (yes, because of the backyard views of Lake Pontchartrain), is devastated. St. Bernard, a parish of mostly working-class and middle-class white bedroom communities, was devastated too.
But what about the TV pictures of those black people in the Superdome and the Convention Center in the five days after Katrina, ragged, dirty, desperate, and screaming for help? Isn’t this a grave symbol of how unjustly “we” treat the black community?
It’s safe to assume that these were New Orleans’s poorest, all thrown together, with no way out of the city before the storm. Those who sought public shelter undoubtedly included many of New Orleans’s thousands of welfare families.
But even those images aren’t representative of New Orleans’s poorest. The people who took refuge in the Superdome and the Convention Center were photographed after days of stewing in filth and fear. The post-Katrina Superdome image was an emblem of a failure of local and state governments to evacuate vulnerable citizens before the storm, and an equal failure of the federal government to respond after the storm. It’s a symbol of the need for rational civic planning and for a rational approach to federal homeland security—not for a new government war on poverty.
However, one other aspect of New Orleans’s post-Katrina nightmare was representative: the murderous crime wave that seemed to grip the city just hours after the eye of the storm had passed. Unfortunately for New Orleans’s future, the media now are dismissing the terrible crimes that took place as a figment of hurricane survivors’, and of reporters’, imaginations.
“The media’s willingness to report thinly attributed rumors may . . . have contributed to a cultural wreckage that will not clean up easily. . . . Victims, officials and reporters all took one of the most horrific events in American history and made it worse than it actually was,” New York Times media reporter David Carr lectured in mid-September. “Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence,” the Times-Picayune concurred on September 26.
Even the Right now denies the violence that New Orleans suffered in the storm’s aftermath: “We now know, thanks to valuable post-mortems by the Los Angeles Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, that a great deal of the ‘great reporting’ was in fact great rumor mongering,” National Review’s Jonah Goldberg grumbled. “The stories of rape and murder in the Superdome were all unfounded. Six people died in there, tragically. But nobody was murdered. All of the major newspapers contributed to the hysterical environment.”
It’s true that one horrific rumor that Katrina spawned was indeed false—dozens of people weren’t raped or killed at the Superdome or at the Convention Center. But the media have extrapolated from this hollow relief a new myth: that New Orleans wasn’t a haven for mayhem after the flood. This is a comforting revision. But obscuring an already blurry truth won’t help New Orleans rebuild. New Orleanians did prey on their fellow citizens in the aftermath of Katrina—and some of their victims were killed.
The New York Times’s own Dan Barry, a longtime metro columnist with no history of lying, hallucinating, or repeating tall tales, witnessed the corpse of a murder victim that had been lying out for days smack in the middle of New Orleans’s central business district. “A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area,” Barry wrote on September 8.
Of a separate incident, the Times-Picayune reported on August 31: “Neighbors in the area near Hickory and Short Streets Uptown said a body has been floating nearby in five feet of water since the unidentified man was shot five times on Monday. Neighbors said the shooting was reported, but police and other officials apparently have been unable to respond.”
Further credible incidents of violence: the Times-Picayune reported August 30 that the day after the storm a New Orleans cop was “in surgery at West Jefferson Medical Center after being shot in the forehead . . . by a looter after he and another officer confronted a number of looters.” The paper reported September 7 that one 21-year-old man was in custody for allegedly “shooting at a relief helicopter from an apartment window.”
The New York Times has confirmed that one person was murdered at the Convention Center and one at the Superdome, and the Times-Picayune has confirmed that a National Guardsman was attacked by an assailant wielding a metal rod in the darkened Dome. The coroner’s early report implies that the murder rate among those stranded in Katrina’s aftermath was at least five times New Orleans’s normal murder rate. This real, not imagined, violence prevented New Orleans from getting the level of volunteer and professional help it needed after Katrina.
Adding to the confusion, multiple reports implicate the police in the violence, though whether the cops were justified or not isn’t clear. These reports haven’t been debunked. For example, the Associated Press reported September 4 that “police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six of them, a deputy chief said.” The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash offered evidence of another shooting by police during the week that New Orleans was in chaos: “On the street right in front of the Convention Center, I see a circle of chairs around a black tarp,” Labash wrote. “A body lies underneath it. It’s been there since the night before. I pull the tarp back and see a black man lying in a pool of blood. . . . Witnesses tell me what happened. Dwight Williams . . . says the night before, a New Orleans Police Department vehicle pulled up. ‘For whatever reason, the gentleman made a move to the car,’ he says. ‘It took five seconds, the entire incident. The cop opened the door, shot him, and that was it.’ ”
The Times-Picayune reported a similar incident on September 1; it’s unclear if this was the same one that Labash chronicled, as it occurred in a neighborhood “near” the Convention Center. “Near the former St. Thomas housing development, a squadron of police, some in tactical gear, were clustered in an intersection. . . . [A] man who appeared to be dead from a gunshot wound lay on the ground. It was unclear what had occurred. Police said there had been a shootout as they forced a reporter and a photographer out of a passing car at gunpoint . . . . They took away a reporter’s notebook and tossed the photographer’s camera on the ground before returning them and telling the pair to leave,” the Times-Picayune’s Gordon Russell reported.
What about rape? Jake Staples, an official of the National D-Day Museum near New Orleans’s central business district, stayed at the museum during and after Katrina. He told the Times-Picayune that he had watched, hidden, from the second floor as a gang rape occurred on the street below. “He could hear a young woman berating a group of five young men, alternatively cursing them and begging them not to abandon her,” according to the Times-Picayune’s report of Staples’s first-person account. “ ‘Then one of the men stopped and backhanded her,’ Staples said. Then he witnessed a gang rape. ‘Afterwards, she got up, pulled her pants up and kept following them. They were her meal ticket, I guess. . . . This area was a jungle.’ ” Police made two arrests at the Superdome for attempted sexual assault.
And what about the general atmosphere of lawlessness after Katrina? There is simply no question that the city was an acutely dangerous place after the storm hit. For example, as Brenda Austin and five family members walked from their eastern New Orleans home to the Convention Center, “their journey wasn’t without travail,” the Times-Picayune reported on September 1, because, according to Austin, “someone started shooting at them.”
On September 7, the Times-Picayune chronicled the experience of one group that had braved the storm in Algiers (a New Orleans neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi). “The day after the hurricane, [Vinnie] Pervel was carjacked as he tried to check on his other properties in the neighborhood,” the paper recounted. “Two guys clubbed him on the head with a sledgehammer, grabbed his keys and stole his van. . . . The next afternoon, as Pervel and his mother, [and neighbors Gregg] Harris and [Gareth] Stubbs[,] stood on their porch, a gunfight between armed neighbors and ‘looters’ erupted on the corner of Pelican and Valette streets. . . . The neighbors, whom Pervel would not identify, shot two of the men. . . . ‘We just couldn’t comprehend it, a gun battle in front of your house,’ said Stubbs.”
The next day, the paper reported the firsthand account of one prominent black New Orleans citizen, Antoinette K-Doe. “She’d heard the constant sound of gunfire and seen the marauders in her neighborhood,” the paper noted.
The New York Times confirmed that there had been yet further credible allegations of lawlessness, in a September 29 article that tried to separate fact from myth. “Police officers said shots were fired for at least two nights at a police station on the edge of the French Quarter. The manager of a hotel on Bourbon Street said he saw people running through the streets with guns,” the Times noted.
Just plain looting was rampant after Katrina—and most of it took place before floodwaters rose. (As of late September, police had arrested about 400 individuals in the aftermath, one official told me—more than half of them for alleged looting. In an emptied city with only a few thousand holdouts, that’s a significant number.)
“Looters seemed to rage almost at will, clearing out boutique clothing shops and drugstores alike,” the Times-Picayune reported on August 31. In a separate article: “Looting . . . was so widespread Wednesday that police were forced to prioritize their overwhelmed enforcement effort.” In yet another article the paper reported: “[O]ne New Orleans cop . . . loaded a shopping cart with a compact computer and a 27-inch flat screen television. Inside the store, the scene alternated between celebration and frightening bedlam.”
The Times-Picayune cataloged the extent of the looting nearly a month after the storm, on September 26: “Just as Katrina’s receding waters revealed acres of ruined houses . . . the post-storm cleanup also raised the curtain on a trail of mass looting that left even the most jaded New Orleans cop awestruck. As search-and-rescue crews staged house-to-house searches for survivors . . . they repeatedly stumbled upon stacks of merchandise—from large appliances still in the box to knotted tangles of hastily pilfered jewelry. . . . A large percentage of the items are still tagged with bar codes from . . . Wal-Mart, a store that was all but cleaned out during six hours of utter pandemonium the day after Katrina hit. . . . ‘The only things left on the shelves were the books and the educational materials,’ [said one officer]. . . . ‘Talk about a lot of effort for nothing,’ [another officer said]. ‘When that levee broke, they had to leave it all behind.’ ”
We may never know the extent of post-Katrina mayhem. As the New York Times noted on September 29: “A full chronicle of the week’s crimes, actual and reported, may never be possible because so many basic functions of government ceased early in the week, including most public safety record-keeping.”
But the grisly truth is that awful violence in New Orleans is never an aberration—whether before or after Katrina. Just consider the following snippets from the Times-Picayune, all printed in the month before Katrina hit. They seem just as hysterical as some of Katrina’s wildest tales.
“Violence tests the limits of mortician’s art.” “Some neighborhoods are being terrorized by thugs who have figured out that they have little to fear from the justice system.” “Almost nightly images of violent crime bludgeon New Orleans.” “Violent crime has emerged as . . . an ongoing source of national embarrassment.” “Murders are so common we have become numbed to their sting.” “Killers are killed, Orleans police say.” “The city is becoming scarier.” “Violence shows no signs of letup.” “Three men killed in seven hours; all are shot to death on New Orleans streets.” “After a short reprieve from murder and mayhem in New Orleans on Friday, six men lost their lives.” “This is Iraq right here in New Orleans. By 2020 there might not be any black people left.” “There’s a different type of murder occurring now and a different type of criminal out there.” “New Orleans area continues to log murder after murder.” “Something must be done to curb the violence festering in New Orleans.” “Now we’re in a bloody war nobody’s safe from.”
Day in and day out, Katrina or no Katrina, New Orleans is America’s most dangerous city. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. White and black residents, rich and poor, of good neighborhoods and bad, are afraid to go out at night beyond the clear boundaries of well-patrolled areas like the heart of the French Quarter—and night means 6:00 pm, not 2:00 am. Everyone in New Orleans knows someone who has been violently mugged—and everyone knows someone who knows someone who has been violently killed.
The violence is often random but never surprising: a young mother and her seven-year-old daughter shot to death in their home. A 90-year-old former school principal, the widow of the former chancellor of Southern University, and her adult daughter shot and stabbed to death in their home. A Vietnamese immigrant murdered in her grocery store. A middle-aged craftsman shot to death and burned in his home. A young, mentally impaired man shot as target practice in a housing project. A tourist bludgeoned to death near his business-district hotel.
And, of course, scores and scores of young black men get shot each year, so many that the deaths seem the same—the formulaic end of short lives marked with short, formulaic obituaries. Many of these murdered young men are in the drug trade, but many aren’t. Gregory Williams, who was set to attend Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College this fall, was shot to death outside his home earlier this summer, because he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the Times-Picayune reported. “Williams’s mother, Doris Williams, proudly fingered her son’s college acceptance letter while recounting his final moments on earth.”
Writes Times-Picayune crime-scene photographer Eliot Kamenitz of the work of documenting death in the Big Easy: “[E]ach Sunday after Easter . . . St. Louis Cathedral holds its Mass for victims of violent crimes. I work on Sundays and the yearly event is usually my assignment. Large placards line the outside gates of the church. On them are hundreds of photos of smiling faces of the deceased, many with their newspaper obituaries. It is years’ upon years’ worth of the slaughter in the streets of New Orleans. Before the service . . . I see the loved ones left behind. Sometimes I talk to them, and finally get to say I am sorry for their loss. . . . I’m sure I’ve met some of them before: they behind the yellow tape, I behind my camera.”
Most of New Orleans’s violence, like the killing of Gregory Williams, is black on black; working-class blacks in marginal neighborhoods suffer the most. New Orleans boasts (or boasted, before Katrina’s floodwaters) blocks and blocks of old, sturdy, abundantly cheap private housing stock. Many working-class blacks live on tree-lined streets just blocks away from the most affluent neighborhoods. But ceaseless open-air killing makes some of New Orleans’s predominantly black working-class neighborhoods, including much of the historic 9th Ward, terror zones.
Preachers put up hand-lettered billboards in ragged neighborhoods to remind residents, thou shalt not kill—but in vain. What then–police superintendent Eddie Compass said earlier this year of pre-Katrina violence became just as true of post-Katrina violence: it’s “a small group of nefarious individuals preying on the weak.” One 9th Ward holdout told the Times-Picayune a month after Katrina that he was enjoying his empty neighborhood after the storm, because there were “no more gunshots in the darkness.”
The shocking element of the bloody permanency of New Orleans’s pre-Katrina crime wave is this: the city already significantly cut crime once in the past decade, with help from some of America’s premier policing minds, including the late Jack Maple, onetime NYPD deputy commissioner of crime-control strategies.
In 1994, New Orleans’s murder rampage peaked at 424 killings (the equivalent of 7,100 in New York). As fear simmered to a boil, Richard Pennington, the police commissioner under former Mayor Marc Morial, overhauled the police department with input from Maple, federal officials, and others. Pennington and federal officials stripped the department of 300 corrupt and otherwise unfit officers (nearly one-fifth of the force, including two now-convicted murderers). Pennington also implemented New York’s Compstat, applying sophisticated statistical analysis and computer modeling to track crime trends. Murder fell steadily until 1999.
But it was way up again before Katrina—and the wholesale carnage of this past summer shocked even longtime observers of the city’s dangers. “If you aren’t fed up with the murder rate in New Orleans, you can only belong to one [group]: those people doing the killing,” the Times-Picayune editorialized on August 12. “The city is becoming scarier. New Orleans has logged more murders than it had at this time last year, and people weren’t feeling so safe then.”
But why?
New Orleans officials estimate that 70 percent of the city’s everyday murders are drug-related. New Orleans is still in the grip of a full-scale crack epidemic; the Times-Picayune stories of present-day “open-air crack markets” recall an earlier, bleaker era in urban America. Drug dealers kill for turf. Addicts kill for money for their next fix—or they are killed because they steal from their dealers, or they’re robbed for the money they bring into the projects. In 2003, the Times-Picayune reported, 40 percent of New Orleans’s murder victims tested positive for drugs, mostly cocaine. And after Katrina, Nagin wasn’t wrong when he said that “crazed drug addicts” and “violent gang members” were responsible for some of the post-flood violence.
Drug-turf wars in the violent underground economy have only worsened since the city closed one major housing project a couple of years back, as the project’s drug distributors have had to fight for new turf. Resettlement after Katrina could exacerbate this tension.
The culture of death that pervades New Orleans’s economy of pushers and addicts spills blood across the rest of society; the city’s drug dealers have no compunction about killing child witnesses to drug crimes, and regular, wholesale street shootouts claim many innocent victims.
New Orleans’s legions of weak, female-headed, underclass black families supply generation after generation of what George Will calls “lightly parented” young men to fuel the carnage. They also have a plentiful supply of weapons to do it with. One coroner notes that it takes twice as long to do an autopsy today than a decade ago, as the proliferation of AK-47s, and now of the SKS from China, means that bodies often are riddled with not just one or two bullet holes but a dozen.
Before Katrina, the New Orleans Police Department took much of the blame for the rising murder rate. The force is not up to professional standards of interrogating witnesses and suspects and of collecting evidence for prosecution. Worse, just a week before Katrina hit, one cop was arrested for alleged rape and kidnapping; ten others have been arrested on criminal charges over the past two years, “ranging from shoplifting to conspiracy to rob a bank,” the Times-Picayune reports.
But federal officials and outside observers say that in fact the department, before Katrina, was a vastly improved force compared with the pre-Pennington era. Moreover, a dysfunctional prosecutor’s office and a dysfunctional state judicial system, in which only one in four murder arrests ends in a conviction, undermine the force. Only 32 percent of felony drug distributors go to jail after conviction, compared with 66 percent nationwide. Some judges mysteriously and repeatedly release violent-crime suspects on bail. From improper collection of evidence to poor prosecution to lenient and inconsistent sentencing, New Orleans cannot keep its drug dealers and violent criminals behind bars. “The perception is that the state judicial system has failed,” says James Bernazzani, the FBI’s special agent in charge of New Orleans.
Because of these failures, witnesses are afraid to report crimes or violent suspects to the police, because they “know in two to three days, that individual will be back on the streets. They think: ‘I’ll become the next victim,’ ” says Bernazzani.
In addition, he reports, relatives and friends of those killed don’t go to the police but engage in “street revenge, as killings beget killings.”
Police booked one 20-year-old drug dealer for murder in three separate killings—but had to drop each set of charges because no one would testify against him. A year ago, he was killed on a street corner himself. Another suspect—charged, and released, on a first-degree murder charge in an unrelated case last summer—was found shot to death on the street this July.
“Our biggest challenge is that we continue to have to put the same violent criminals in jail over and over again. We honestly believe that our murder rate would be cut by 60 percent if the violent offenders stayed in jail and did their time,” then–deputy police superintendent (and now acting police superintendent) Warren Riley said in 2004.
Months before Katrina hit, New Orleans knew that it was in acute crisis. The city already had hired Louis Anemone, former NYPD chief of department, to devise a plan to combat the murder resurgence and to show commanders and officers how to carry it out. “It was a challenge,” Anemone told me, “but I was sanguine about our chances to improve the safety and security of the residents and visitors.” The city’s nonprofit Metropolitan Crime Commission also had devised some suggestions for judicial reform; above all, the commissioners concluded, “Criminal Court Judges should substantially increase the number of drug dealers sent to jail.”
But New Orleans’s long history of street carnage is not a topic for polite discussion in Katrina’s aftermath. Pols and pundits have a million solutions for the city, from building more affordable housing to ensuring better schools to creating an incubator for the nation’s “creative class” to offering tax credits for resettlement. But none addresses the city’s most obvious, and intractable, problem, the one that has kept New Orleans from thriving for years.
Hiding the truth doesn’t help New Orleans. The Big Easy’s evacuated citizens already know how violent their city is. And one reason that they might not come back is that their latent disgust with crime has now been overlaid by those images of rampant post-storm crime. Evacuees—and businesses—know that even Cat-5 levees can’t protect them from the day-to-day mortal fear of living in New Orleans. As Bernazzani told me: “What you saw after Katrina wasn’t done by outsiders.”
Nagin’s 17-member rebuilding commission, announced in late September, doesn’t boast one person with the expertise even to address the city’s festering crime—without which Nagin will never win the confidence needed for the city’s rebuilding. Likewise, every dime that the federal government spends on “community development”—and Senator Mary Landrieu has requested $50 billion—will be wasted unless the feds, in conjunction with state and local officials, tackle first things first: making the city safe enough to encourage the middle-class and working-class tax base, black and white, to return. Rebuilders who think that the criminal underclass will stay away while other residents repopulate the city will prove fatally mistaken.
Even before Katrina, Nagin was begging for a new mandate, and even a new dedicated property tax, to beef up the NOPD, which had one-third fewer officers per capita than Gotham. But the lack of departmental leadership after Katrina, and the alleged misdeeds of some cops, mean that the NOPD now must overcome an acute crisis of confidence. Police Superintendent Compass abruptly resigned four weeks after the storm, and nearly 250 cops are AWOL or still can’t get to work.
Counselors who debriefed rank-and-file cops after Katrina said that those who tried to protect their city after the floodwalls burst were angrier at their own commanders than at the storm itself or at any other level of government, “charging that their [department] let them down . . . and left individual groups of officers to care for desperate people on their own,” the Times-Picayune reported September 17. “Sad to admit it,” one counselor told the paper, “but the predominant dynamic here is anger and disillusionment.”
Moreover, since TV showed several cops looting consumer goods during the flood’s aftermath, and since it showed two cops allegedly beating an unarmed pedestrian in the French Quarter in early October, the department’s years of work to overcome its long-standing public image of entrenched corruption and malfeasance have gone down the drain. One hotel proprietor, with some film corroboration, told CNN that eight armed cops commandeered a floor of his hotel as a way station to bus valuable looted goods out of the city.
So what can the feds do with some of the billions they’re so bent on spending? If Bush wants to rebuild New Orleans, his administration must take the lead in creating a permanent safety zone in the city. He can start by beefing up New Orleans’s police force, committing funds to double its size over the next five years, as the key element of the city’s civic infrastructure. But the feds should do this only if they tie the money to a real policing plan like the one Anemone was working on—and tie it to real results as well. Bush has ample precedent for such a plan, in the Clinton administration’s 1990s grants to cities for community policing, and in his own No Child Left Behind Act, which ties federal money to local accountability.
Nothing will work, of course, unless the Louisiana government first creates a functional prosecutor’s office and state judicial system.
Governor Kathleen Blanco has called for two special sessions of the state legislature to enact a menu of tax credits and other rebuilding initiatives, but her proposals don’t begin to address the systemic pre-Katrina failures that will hobble post-Katrina recovery. It’s at least as important for her to call a special legislative session to enact Rockefeller-style drug laws to take this generation’s violent criminals off the streets permanently. The legislature should mandate automatic prison sentences for those convicted of possession of drugs with intent to distribute, and for those convicted of possession of illegal firearms. The state also must stop releasing on bail suspects charged with violent crimes. Only with the support of a working judicial system—from prosecutors to judges to prisons—can New Orleans implement the policing strategies that have worked so well in New York.
Only when New Orleans can assure safety can it begin to make up some of the losses it has sustained over a generation of mismanagement. Only then can it build a real private economy and robust public institutions that will attract a thriving middle-class population.
New Orleans has lost more than a fifth of its population since the 1960s. According to a 2001 study, those who left between 1990 and 2000 were mostly young and educated. City officials blame these losses on oil-industry consolidation over the past generation, which took New Orleans jobs to Texas.
But that’s not the whole story. New Orleans has lost middle-class jobs partly because investors are fed up with the city’s entrenched public corruption. “Outside companies don’t invest because they are sick and tired of the kickbacks,” Bernazzani says. “New Orleans is deprived of a tax windfall.” (Just this summer, the feds indicted four cronies of previous mayor Morial, including Morial’s uncle, for alleged public-contract abuses—and before Katrina, the FBI was investigating alleged widespread corruption at the city’s school board, which isn’t under mayoral control.) A corrupt government cannot police itself or its city, nor can it provide adequate public services of any kind. As taxpayers and businesses decamp in disgust, the city thus has fewer fiscal resources with each generation.
Those who remain, if they are not part of the problem, try to insulate themselves with private security guards or a sense of fatalistic resignation. Nagin made an impassioned speech about the lack of civic outrage over the skyrocketing murder rate just two days before Katrina hit: “I think this is kind of a put-up-or-shut-up moment,” he said. “How concerned are you, city of New Orleans, about fixing this problem? . . . Are we going to be entertained by the violent nature of these murders, or are we really going to try to fix it? . . . I just don’t see . . . the outrage. I see people sad, I see them kind of bewildered, I see them kind of looking out in space. But I don’t see enough, ‘Goddammit, I’ve had enough of this.’ ” But many of those who were outraged had already voted with their feet.
Unfortunately, too, the city’s attempts to encourage investment have only made things worse. In the two decades since much of New Orleans’s oil industry left for good, city leaders have concentrated on one business to replace it: tourism.
Tourists in New Orleans pay high hotel and sales taxes, and demand few government services (and most don’t know enough about New Orleans’s high crime rate to be afraid of visiting). But tourism doesn’t create good jobs that form the basis for a strong middle class. Even so, during the horrid early 1990s, when crime skyrocketed and thousands left, New Orleans and Louisiana spent nearly a decade’s worth of political capital cajoling Harrah’s to complete construction of its once-abandoned Canal Street casino. And one of Nagin’s first instincts in Katrina’s wake was to propose a special “casino zone” to lure tourists back to town.
The cumulative tragedy of New Orleans is the slow but violent wasting away of a strategic port city with a legacy of priceless physical assets. Those who care about New Orleans often fret that the city’s underclass youth grow up in isolated neighborhoods and attend execrable schools in an insular city that offers no opportunity. They’re right. But New Orleans offers no opportunity partly because it has no real private economy to speak of besides the drudgery of tourism and the violence of drugs. That’s why two early post-Katrina local moves are promising. The elected school board voted one month after Katrina to convert all 13 schools on the city’s smaller west bank to charter schools to get them up and running again quickly, while the mayor has asked the governor to help him create a citywide charter system, to be run in partnership with foundations, universities, and businesses. In addition, Nagin has proposed that the federal and state governments slash income and business taxes in New Orleans and in surrounding areas across the board, so that the private sector can pump new investment into the city.
The federal government can build floodwalls that hold up during storms—and the feds can commit to assuring personal safety while New Orleans rebuilds its city and its tax base.
But only New Orleans, and Louisiana, can build a city that holds up day after day.
It’s hard to worry about racism and poverty after you’ve been murdered.
City Journal Autumn 2005.
CONTACT INFO:
phone: (212) 599-7000 • fax: (212) 599-0371
Copyright The Manhattan Institute
Monday, January 16, 2006
3 wounded by gunfire near second-line parade
Three people were wounded Sunday afternoon on Orleans Avenue after the conclusion of a nearby second-line parade that attracted thousands of people, including hurricane-displaced residents who came back to town for a day of celebration.
Police were busy Sunday night trying to figure out what prompted the shootings, which broke out at least twice between Claiborne Avenue and Broad Street, the end point of a procession that started in front of the Backstreet Cultural Museum on St. Claude Avenue. One onlooker said there were two gunmen.
The parade ended around 4 p.m. Police officers patrolling the parade route heard gunfire around 4:30 p.m, and first found a 34-year-old man with multiple wounds at Orleans Avenue and Dorgenois Street, police spokesman Gary Flot said.
Minutes later, after more shots rang out, officers found an 18-year-old woman wounded in the leg at the Orleans and North Rocheblave Street, and a 20-year-old man, also shot in the leg, in the same general area along Orleans Avenue.
All three were taken to local hospitals, where the oldest was listed in guarded condition and the other two were said to be in good condition Sunday night, Flot said. Their names were not immediately available, he said.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
• N.O. murders hit 161 for year
Three New Year's Eve killings brought the city's murder total to 161 for 2006, a figure New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley touted Monday as the lowest total in 30 years.
I am perplexed by the chief's statement. Is he insane? In the first half of 2006 the city had very few of its hard criminals back from their Katrina induced exodus and murder was almost non-existent. The great majority of these 161 murders happened in just one half of one year. Also the population is half of its Pre-K count. So from a per-capita perspective combined with the fact that most of the murders happened in the second half of the year makes this not a year to be talking about lowest murder counts in 30 years but rather to be admitting just the opposite, violent crime is at almost unprecendented record pace.
Maybe it will get better, maybe so. Here's today's news--New Orleans logs 5 murders in 14 hours...Update---Six New Orleanians killed in less than a day, 12 slain during the last week (1/4/07)
Monday, October 15, 2007, from the NOTP
Litany of violence
The weekend's violence began just after midnight Saturday, when a man with a gun approached two men renovating a house in the 1600 block of Touro Street, according to police logs. They gave the gunman their money, but one of the victims went to the door as he fled. When the gunman saw the man in the doorway, he fired, hitting him in the stomach.
Later that morning, Gregory Hayes, who was on Bienville Street near the Iberville housing development, died at University Hospital. Police say the 18-year-old was shot near the housing complex, but was taken to the hospital from South Johnson and Perdido streets.
Nineteen-year-old Charles Miller was shot to death Saturday evening in the Irish Channel. Just after 9 p.m., Miller's brother got a phone call tipping him off that Miller had been shot near Annunciation and Phillip streets, said Sgt. Joe Narcisse, an NOPD spokesman.
Miller's brother drove to the area, found Miller, and put him in his car to bring him to the hospital. At the corner of Magazine and Josephine streets, Miller's brother was able to flag down an officer, who called emergency medical technicians to the scene. They pronounced Miller dead.
The killing continued Sunday at 11 a.m., when Eddie Bernard, 23, from Algiers, was shot in the left side of his face in the 2900 block of Dryades Street, according to a police log. Bernard was pronounced dead less than an hour later after he was taken to University Hospital. Just a few blocks away and a few hours later, Ernest Taylor, 50, met a similar fate in the 2500 block of Danneel Street: He also was shot in the head. He was found by police about 3 p.m., and died at University Hospital.
Police were called to Gentilly later in the day, receiving a report about a woman found in a grassy area of the 1400 block of Mandolin Street, according to an NOPD news release. Although officials have yet to identify the woman, described as being in her early 20s, they arrested Trave Wilson, in the killing.
The woman had been shot several times and appeared to have been dead for several hours before her body was found, said John Gagliano, chief investigator for the Orleans Parish coroner's office.
She was 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed 115 pounds, with reddish-brown hair, green eyes and two tattoos. The tattoo on her right leg is of a rose with the name "Carmen" intertwined in the leaves. Underneath the rose is the name, "Leona." A tattoo on the woman's left buttock is of a cupcake with a cherry on top. The phrase "G.B. and $" is written over the cupcake.
Monday morning brought the 163rd killing of the year, when police at 3:25 a.m. found a 32-year-old man dead in the courtyard of the Iberville housing complex. Cedrick Brooks was killed by one gunshot to his back, the coroner's office said.
Citizens with information about any of the shootings can call CRIMESTOPPERS at (504) 822-1111 or toll-free at 1 (877) 903-STOP(7867).
Staff writers Walt Philbin and Bob Ussery contributed to this report.
Laura Maggi can be reached at lmaggi@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3316.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
In deadly day in N.O., three men fatally shot
Three men were killed in a seven-hour span Saturday in shootings across New Orleans.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
5 killed in 24 hours
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In New Orleans news reporting sometimes the headlines will read "5 shot within 4 hours," and other times such facts must be pieced together by faithful readers, and supplemented with TV news. It was from TV that I got the numbers I wrote about the other day, 7 shootings, two of them deaths, in a two-day period ending at 5p.m. Saturday.
So the good news is the city is experiencing a period where there are not shootings and murder every day of the week. The bad news is the shootings we are having here are relatively high profile: children armed with guns murdering other children; teenage bystanders getting hit in crossfire; 8-year-old girls being shot in the back; a pregnant local girl killed by stray gunfire on a Mardi Gras parade route; a Jazzfest tourist murdered near the fairgrounds; aging rock stars chasing purse snatchers and being shot in the leg; cars burning on the side of the road with bullet-riddled bodies in the trunk.
A large part of the yearly murders in New Orleans are gangster killing gangster. As long as their aim is true and no innocents are nicked in crossfire, nobody, as far as I can tell, really gives a fuck about these murders. We won't admit it but we think it is cost effective justice. The perpetrators are scary people we can't seem to or don't want to understand. Born of us, maybe, but these hoodlings are foreigners on our soil. They cannot be of us because then we would be of them and that is too scary to conceive. We suppress the memory of 200--400 murdered bodies every year and glorify the travesty of the occasional tourist or upstanding citizen who will every so often get shot dead in New Orleans.
I think the criminals are either crying out for help or are merciless purveyors of irony because over the years sure as a local politician or police chief reports that crime is down the next month is filled with bizarre and heinous violent crime. Most recently our police chief was all over the local media patronizing all us dumb locals with his poor imitation of the Gore/Kerry sigh of condescension--murder is down by twenty percent people, I don't know what to tell you, you people who persist that crime is up, this perception that crime is up is wrong. Well Ok, I stand corrected.
By the way, Sunday, about one in the morning, I heard four loud gunshots, maybe two blocks away. No sirens, no subsequent reports from the media. Today, in Tuesday's paper, is an unrelated Sunday shooting that resulted in death, in Central City at 4th and Daneel.
So, a Monday headline could have, but did not, read--New Orleans weekend, at least 8 shot, 3 dead. We are not allowed to behave as if it is pertinent but all the victims may be presumed black, and poor.
And now, late in the succeeding week of a weekend where 8 people were shot, I feel not too much at all about it. It is a completely forgotten series of events. We all have our lives to get on with; there is no point in remembering. And our consciences as represented by media coverage are quiet. I would like to suggest that there is something wrong with all of us for forgetting so easily but that's all I'm going to do is suggest, I'm not going to point any fingers, or indulge in self-recrimination.
Lastly, almost daily NO media updates inform us that justice will be served if you are stupid enough to kill a very white tourist. There is motion towards trying as adults the four teenagers involved in the Jazzfest slaying. First the 14-year-old shooter has to pass a psych exam and then it must be proved the juvenile detention system will be incapable of reforming the alleged young killer. So if the kid passes all his tests and the state (juvenile system) fails its' tests, then ostensibly there will be a go ahead for the adult-style prosecution of this 14-year-old. In which case the state will undoubtedly begin conversations about the death penalty. I have been on record as not being against every instance of state sanctioned death so I would have to in this case look again at the facts, see what I feel.
Ok, well, I've thought about it. I think we should just round up all bad people, and kill them. Then only good people would have guns, and the world would be safer, for, um, more killing. The benefits of this in New Orleans would be immeasurable. If only good people were doing the killing then killing would be a good thing. It could be celebrated. We could have more parades, more tourists, more money, more guns, more killing, more parades…
- jimlouis 5-13-2004 8:38 pm
All excerpts in this thread, posted by me, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the New Orleans Times Picayune online version. I am collecting these stories as notes for an unknown purpose. You may assume that any comment to the original post, Weekend In New Orleans, is not uplifting or in anyway entertaining, and therefore you may well be advised to pass over these posts. jml.
"Man shot dead, pregnant woman hurt
A 27-year-old New Orleans man was killed and an eight-month pregnant woman was injured when someone walked up to the car they were in and opened fire Thursday evening in Hollygrove, marking the fourth slaying in the neighborhood in less than a week, police said. A 2-year-old boy also was in the car but was unhurt, police said." (6/3/04)
- jimlouis 6-04-2004 8:32 pm [add a comment]
Troy Williams, 24, walked into the BG Mart, 2248 West Bank Expressway, shortly before 9:30 p.m. and began arguing with another customer at the counter, said Col. Robert Garner, sheriff's spokesman.
The man followed Williams outside to the gas pump and shot him once with a handgun, then got into a Nissan Quest and fled southbound on Scottsdale Drive, the spokesman said. (DOA) (6/6/04)
***************************************************************************
Shortly before 5 p.m., two officers saw Tehopile and a group of other people standing at Ursulines Avenue and North Rocheblave Street, police spokeswoman Jonette Williams said. As the officers got out of their car to question the people, Tehopile ran, Williams said.
One officer chased Tehopile into an alley between two houses, where Tehopile turned and began pulling a gun out of his waistband, Williams said. The officer fired one shot and missed. The chase continued and Tehopile was caught by the officer behind one of the houses, Williams said.
The officers recovered a loaded .40-caliber gun dropped by Tehopile, who was carrying small amounts of crack cocaine and heroin, police said. (6/6/04)
- jimlouis 6-06-2004 3:45 pm [add a comment]
Carwash suspect surrenders at Central Lockup
3-week hunt comes to an end; he's blamed in string of violence
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
By Tara Young
Staff writer
A three-week hunt for New Orleans' most wanted man came to an end Tuesday evening when Antoine Johnson strode into Central Lockup and identified himself to jailers, just minutes after professing his innocence to a local news station, police said.
Johnson, 19, of 1206 S. Galvez St., is wanted in a May 9 shooting that killed one man and wounded a 14-year-old girl. In another, unrelated incident, police said Johnson shot at 13-year-old and another juvenile earlier this month.
The recent string of violent incidents in which Johnson is the prime suspect began May 9, just two days after Johnson was released from jail. Johnson was released after Orleans Criminal Court Judge Arthur Hunter found no probable cause to hold him and two other suspects on charges related to the shooting of two men at TCL Car Wash in Central City last July.
- jimlouis 6-10-2004 3:09 am [add a comment]
Monday, July 05, 2004
• Metairie teen is slain in Iberville complex
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
• Teen was changing his life, mom says
Brandon Kirby seemed to be making a comeback, after falling into drug abuse and leaving school. The 18-year-old Metairie resident had completed drug rehabilitation, earned his general equivalency diploma and found a girlfriend, and he was looking for a job.
• Three men are killed in separate shootings
Three men were found fatally shot early Monday within 90 minutes, in separate parts of New Orleans, police said.
Friday, July 9, 2004
Street in eastern N.O. is jolted by killings of 3 men in 2 days
Saturday, July 10, 2004
• Abused baby's father sought
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office is asking the public's help in locating a Metairie father accused of beating his 11-month-old son and burning the child's face with a cigarette lighter, authorities said.
• Cop suspended after DWI charge
A New Orleans police officer was suspended without pay Friday after she was arrested on a driving while intoxicated charge, New Orleans police said.
• Hollygrove victim is identified
A New Orleans man fatally shot in the Hollygrove neighborhood Thursday night has been identified, the Orleans Parish coroner's office said.
• POLICE REPORTS
ST. CHARLES ARRESTS
• Sheriff pushes Âumflex;-cent sales ta
Jack Strain takes pride in saying that in his eight years as St. Tammany Parish sheriff he has doubled the number of deputies and spent millions of dollars on the latest crime-fighting technology without a tax increase.
• Summer is mean season in New Orleans
Summer is a hot time for arguments and accidents. Take, for instance, the Central City domino duo whose playing days ended July 4 when one allegedly shot the other dead during a heated match. Or ponder the Slidell area shooting Tuesday of a 10-year-old boy; his 11-year-old cousin told detectives he was fiddling with a pellet gun and accidentally fired it.
• Two men are fatally shot, third in serious condition
Two men were shot fatally in New Orleans on Friday, and another was injured in a shooting at a Broadmoor barbershop as his 2-year-old son was getting a haircut.
Sunday, July 11, 2004
• Injured officer's life slips away
Alva Simmons' family knew that the day inevitably would come.
• Rising murder rate has police retooling tactics
As they investigated the latest New Orleans murder and grappled with grieving family members Saturday, this time in Central City, New Orleans Police Department officials announced plans for sending more officers into high-crime areas.
- jimlouis 7-12-2004 5:00 am [add a comment]
Monday, July 12, 2004
• Woman is found shot dead
An woman was found shot to death in her Algiers apartment late Saturday, the New Orleans Police Department said.
- jimlouis 7-12-2004 3:58 pm [add a comment]
N.O. man killed in 9th Ward sports bar
Gunman walked in, shot him in the head
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
By Tara Young
Staff writer
A New Orleans man was shot and killed inside a Lower 9th Ward sports bar Tuesday as frightened patrons scattered and ducked, the New Orleans Police Department said.
- jimlouis 11-18-2004 4:07 am [add a comment]
3 slain Sunday in N.O. boost total to 6
Bloody weekend began on Friday
Monday, November 15, 2004
By Tara Young
Staff writer
Three men were killed in unrelated shootings Sunday, ratcheting up the weekend death toll to six people slain within less than 72 hours in New Orleans.
- jimlouis 11-18-2004 4:09 am [add a comment]
N.O. man found slain in Cooper complex
Another N.O. slaying victim is identified
Monday, November 15, 2004
From staff reports
Police found the body of a man in a courtyard of the B.W. Cooper public housing complex Sunday morning, the New Orleans Police Department reported.
Anthony Mitchell, 33
- jimlouis 11-18-2004 4:11 am [add a comment]
4 people are killed in stabbings, arson
Police say suspect confesses; he, girlfriend had argued
Thursday, November 11, 2004
By Rob Nelson
West Bank bureau
A Marrero man enraged by a domestic dispute went on a stabbing rampage Wednesday, then set fire to a Harvey apartment, killing his girlfriend, their 1-year-old daughter and two others who lived there, authorities said.
- jimlouis 11-18-2004 4:13 am [add a comment]
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
• Shooting, stalking, shooting again, gunman kills 9th Ward motorist
A woman stood in silence as she watched a gunman walk up to her boyfriend's car, fire a single shot into the driver's side window and then stroll over to the passenger side and shoot him again as he attempted to crawl to safety, the New Orleans Police Department said.
Monday, December 06, 2004
• 2 families are caught in Uptown crossfire
Just three days after a Terrytown woman was seriously wounded when a stray bullet ripped through her car and pierced her neck on Earhart Boulevard, two other carloads of unsuspecting locals were caught in the crossfire of an Uptown shooting, but escaped injury, police said.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
• 23-year-old shot, killed in Algiers
A 23-year-old New Orleans man was shot dead Saturday about 5 p.m. in the Cut Off area of Algiers, police say.
• Man shot in neck on Fourth Street
A man was hit in the neck Saturday shortly after 3 p.m. during a shooting in the 2200 block of Fourth Street, at South Galvez Street, the New Orleans Police Department said. He was taken to Charity Hospital to be treated for an injury that was not life-threatening, police said. Police were still investigating the incident.
• Shooting spoils a Classic weekend
Three people, including a 15-year-old New Orleans girl, were wounded when an unknown gunman fired into a thick Bourbon Street crowd during the annual post-game Bayou Classic festivities that jammed the French Quarter early Sunday, police said.
The dispute had nothing to do with the rivalry-stoked football game. It wasn't a spin-off from the pulse-pumping Battle of the Bands. And, by all accounts, it had nothing to do with the raucous street party featuring tricked-up cars blasting bass-heavy rap jams amid a crowd sporting enough bling-bling to light up the night sky.
- jimlouis 12-08-2004 5:17 pm [add a comment]
Gunmen in van rake street with bullets
1 dead, 2 wounded in drive-by shooting
Saturday, December 11, 2004
By Michael Perlstein
Staff writer
The first gunshots sounded faint and few, so the longtime Uptown resident rolled over in his bed, even as his wife bolted into the kitchen. Maybe her intuition was telling her something, the man said, because moments later his house was being raked by bullets and a bleeding man was crawling up to his porch.
- jimlouis 12-11-2004 5:59 pm [add a comment]
8 people killed within 24 hours
Six victims found in N.O., two in Jeff
Sunday, February 06, 2005
By Gordon Russell
and Wayne Knabb%%par%%Staff writers
The final weekend of Carnival got off to a bloody start as eight people, six in New Orleans and two in Jefferson Parish, were killed within a 24-hour span that began Friday evening, officials said.
- jimlouis 2-07-2005 11:11 pm [add a comment]
Sunday, March 13, 2005
• Man killed in home robbery
A man was found shot dead inside his home southwest of Slidell early Saturday in the first homicide in unincorporated St. Tammany Parish since May, the Sheriff's Office said.
• Two killed in shootings
Two men were fatally shot and another wounded in two separate incidents Saturday night, New Orleans police said.
Friday, March 11, 2005
• N.O. man killed inside Canal bar
A 24-year-old New Orleans man early Thursday became the third person killed inside or near the Canal Bus Stop bar in five years. And the club's owner, who is facing obstruction charges in the January death of a patron in another bar he owns, was booked with illegally carrying a weapon and possession of illegal drugs after investigators found marijuana and a pistol behind the bar, New Orleans police said.
• N.O. teen acquitted in parade shooting
An Orleans Parish jury Thursday acquitted the teenager accused of gunning down a woman during a Carnival parade last year while sparring with street rivals along the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground.
• Slidell man's killer sentenced to death
A jury decided in less than three hours that Jesse Montejo should be executed for killing Slidell businessman Louis Ferrari, the first death sentence handed down in St. Tammany Parish in seven years.
Tuesday, March 8, 2005
• Mother says son was killed due to dispute over jacket
An Avondale mother said goodbye to her dying son Monday before he entered surgery to remove his organs for donation, as police continued to search for the Kenner man accused of shooting him in the head.
- jimlouis 3-14-2005 6:16 pm [add a comment]
Sunday, March 20, 2005
• 2 killed, 1 hurt in shootings
Two people were killed and another critically injured in separate incidents in a 70-minute span Saturday evening, including the shooting of two men in a car in a St. Bernard neighborhood, police said.
Monday, March 21, 2005
• Gunshot victim dies on stoop
A man on his way to church was shot and killed in the doorway of his grandmother's home Sunday, police and witnesses said.
Thursday, March 25, 2005
• Teen, 15, convicted of killing fest-goer
A 15-year- old was convicted Wednesday of killing a Jazzfest fan leaving the Fair Grounds last spring and will be incarcerated in an adult prison until he is 31, under mandatory sentencing rules
Saturday, March 26, 2005
• Doubts raised in police killing in N.O.
A large pool of blood stained the grass in front of a back-yard woodpile where Jenard "Nordy" Thomas was fatally shot by two New Orleans police officers Thursday night. The officers, Scott Rodrigue and Joseph Waguespack Jr., fired seven or eight shots after Thomas, according to police, stuck a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol in Rodrigue's ribs.
- jimlouis 3-26-2005 5:54 pm [add a comment]
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
• N.O. man killed in 9th Ward
A New Orleans man was fatally shot in the chest during a fight Tuesday afternoon in the Lower 9th Ward, police said.
• Killing suspect facing trial as adult
An Algiers youth, accused of killing a Marrero teen during a fight over money last month, will be tried as an adult and faces life in prison if convicted, a Jefferson Parish prosecutor said.
• Acquitted killer gets time after all
A Metairie teenager who eluded a life sentence when a jury acquitted her of murder two years ago has been sent to prison for 10 years because she violated conditions of her probation on a narcotics conviction, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
Thursday, April 7, 2005
• Student is shot near N.O. school
Minutes before 16-year-old Jerome Brown was shot in the neck outside Alfred Lawless High School in New Orleans Wednesday afternoon, his principal stopped him in the hallway, telling him to get to class. He laughed and assured her he would.
Friday, April 8, 2005
• N.O. man arrested in pair of slayings
New Orleans police have arrested one man in two shooting deaths. In another case, two other men were arrested in an unrelated slaying.
• 2 men shot dead 15 minutes apart
Less than a day after a student was shot outside a New Orleans school, two men were shot dead on Mid-City streets Thursday morning within blocks of two other schools, prompting a lockdown at one school and heightening security at the other.
- jimlouis 4-09-2005 3:38 am [add a comment]
Thursday, April 21, 2005
• Man is shot to death in West Carrollton
A man was shot dead Tuesday afternoon in the West Carrollton neighborhood, the third person killed in New Orleans in a 24-hour period.
• Rocker is absent for holdup trial
British rock-and-roll star Ray Davies, longtime lead singer of The Kinks, did not return to New Orleans on Wednesday to testify against the man who allegedly drove the getaway car for a gunman who robbed Davies' girlfriend and shot the singer in the leg.
- jimlouis 4-21-2005 3:58 pm [add a comment]
Thursday, May 19, 2005
• Wave of gunfire kills four people in 1 day
A 24-year-old Algiers man was gunned down Wednesday afternoon as he left his mother's apartment in an apparent dispute over a woman, relatives of the man said.
- jimlouis 5-19-2005 11:34 pm [add a comment]
Friday, May 20, 2005
• Shootings leave 5 dead in 26 hours
In life, they were second cousins who never knew each other. On Wednesday, they became linked in another way: Both were gunned down, two of five New Orleans murder victims in a 26-hour surge of shootings.
Saturday, May 21, 2005
• Intruder cut Mid-City woman, police say
Police are asking for help in identifying a man who entered a woman's Mid-City residence Wednesday and cut her face with a knife while demanding money.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
• Man killed, another hurt in Central City shooting
A 26-year-old New Orleans man was killed and a second was seriously wounded Saturday night in a Central City shooting, police said.
Monday, May 23, 2005
• N.O. pair wounded in Bywater shooting
A double shooting in the Bywater on Sunday morning left two men hospitalized, one in critical condition, New Orleans police said.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
• Block party turns violent
A 9th Ward block party in memory of a man gunned down by police last year erupted into violence Sunday, with one woman stabbed in the face and 11 people arrested, police said.
- jimlouis 5-24-2005 4:59 pm [add a comment]
Friday, June 3, 2005
• New Orleans teen fatally shot
A 17-year-old New Orleans man was shot dead Thursday night in the St. Bernard public housing complex, New Orleans police said.
Saturday, June 4, 2005
• Man is slain in Algiers home
An 88-year-old retired Navy pilot was bludgeoned to death in his home in the Aurora Gardens neighborhood in Algiers on Thursday, with $300 and some credit cards stolen but no sign of forced entry, New Orleans police and relatives of the victim said.
Sunday, June 5, 2005
• DEADLY FORCE
The fatal shooting of 16-year-old Antoine Colbert by Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies last week was unusual because deputies fired more than 100 bullets at Colbert and two other teens who, though they had no guns, nearly ran over officers during a wild chase in a stolen truck.
Monday, June 6, 2005
• N.O. man dies in Uptown shooting
A 30-year-old New Orleans man was shot dead Sunday morning and a 22-year-old woman was wounded in what police are calling an Uptown drug deal that turned violent.
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
• Man tells local deputies he was shot while in N.O.
A wounded man showed up in St. Bernard Parish on Saturday night saying he had been shot in New Orleans, the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office said.
• Gunmen wound 2 in Abita Springs shooting
Two men in a car were shot by gunmen who opened fire from another vehicle Saturday night in the Abita Springs area, authorities said.
• Gentilly man killed in home invasion
Two days before his 34th birthday, a New Orleans man was shot to death Sunday by assailants who ransacked his Gentilly apartment but left his girlfriend and her infant son unharmed, police said.
• Bank teller shot in stickup at Gretna area bank
A 23-year-old teller was shot in the back during a robbery of the Iberia Bank near Gretna on Monday morning, about an hour before the bank was scheduled to open, authorities said.
• 4 busted with pot, pistols, police say
A group of New Orleans men, said by police to be smoking pot and armed with pistols, were arrested Monday after one responded to an officer's knock on the front door holding a smoking cigar of marijuana.
- jimlouis 6-08-2005 3:02 am [add a comment]
Saturday, June 11, 2005
• 8 people shot at 3 sites, 2 fatally
Eight people were shot, two fatally, during an apparent rolling shootout in Hollygrove on Friday night that spanned three crime scenes in the neighborhood, police said.
- jimlouis 6-13-2005 12:11 am [add a comment]
Tuesday, July 12,2005
• Two New Orleans men are killed in shootings
The New Orleans Police Department is investigating two apparently unrelated shooting deaths, one near the site of the old Desire public housing complex late Sunday night and the other in the 9th Ward early Monday.
• Man killed during speeding dispute
As his 5-year-old daughter rode her Barbie jeep nearby, a LaPlace man joining his neighbors for a "prehurricane party" on their front lawns Saturday night was shot in the head after an altercation stemming from a complaint of a car speeding past the gathering.
• Jilted lover shot pair, then self, police say
Three women were found shot to death Monday morning in a Chalmette home in an apparent double murder-suicide linked to a love-triangle dispute, authorities said.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
• Man found fatally shot in N.O.
An unidentified man was found fatally shot Tuesday afternoon in an 8th Ward neighborhood.
• Man booked with throwing bottle
More than two days after a LaPlace man was killed during a dispute about a beer bottle thrown at a moving car, the man accused of chucking the bottle was arrested, the St. John Parish Sheriff's Office said Tuesday.
• Harvey man killed in his driveway
A 23-year-old Harvey man is dead and three others are recovering from gunshot wounds after three separate West Bank shootings early Tuesday morning, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office said.
• Gunman bursts into store on Magazine, kills grocer
A 46-year-old Magazine Street grocer was shot to death Tuesday afternoon by a man who entered the store cursing and then fired a single shot at her as she ran to the back of the business to warn her husband, police and family said.
• Child rapist OKs surgical castration
In a rare penalty for a sex crime, a Covington child rapist agreed Tuesday to undergo surgical castration and serve 25 years in jail rather than face a possible life sentence.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
• Man kills wife, self, 1 other in Elmwood
By Michelle Hunter
Saturday, July 16, 2005
• Man kills burglar, police say
A 20-year-old Destrehan man, who authorities say was attempting to burglarize a home, was killed Friday when the resident shot him in the side.
• Former murder suspect is killed
A 21-year-old eastern New Orleans man, arrested for first-degree murder last summer but freed after the case was dropped, became a murder victim himself Thursday night, police said.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
• Two found shot dead in Gentilly residence
A man and a woman were found shot to death early Saturday in the man's home at 2910 Mandeville St. in Gentilly, the New Orleans Police Department said.
• N.O. police called too heavy-handed
Outraged by a rash of shootings of suspects by New Orleans police, a crowd of community leaders and residents met in search of answers Saturday morning at the Treme Community Center.
• Fight proves deadly for Kenner resident
A 29-year-old Kenner man died Friday night from a head injury suffered when he fell during a fight with two men in Kenner, police said.
• 2 women killed by suicide gunmen
By Walt Philbin
Monday, July 18, 2005
• 7 in N.O. wounded in drive-by shooting
In one of the most violent shooting sprees New Orleans has seen this year, seven people were shot Sunday night when several individuals open-fired on a small crowd in what police say was retaliation for a killing the night before.
• Nightclub shooting injures five
A shooting early Sunday left four people wounded outside a 7th Ward nightclub, according to New Orleans police.
- jimlouis 7-19-2005 4:06 am [add a comment]
"chucking the bottle" -- isn't that a bit colloquial for a newspaper?
- mark 7-19-2005 4:48 am [add a comment]
Not at all, Mark. That is proper usage. I foolishly lobbed a full beer can at a friend's retreating car, back in Dallas as teenager, and when I see the guy I always say--remember when I chucked that beer can at your Mustang? Almost thirty years later and he still remembers and he finds it not amusing at all. Ok, maybe it is a bit colloquial for newspaper.
- jimlouis 7-19-2005 5:59 pm [add a comment]
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
• Pair sought in bicyclist's death
A 26-year-old New Orleans man was shot to death as he rode a bicycle on North Prieur Street late Sunday, police said.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
• Harvey man, 19, shot dead in car
A 19-year-old Harvey man was fatally shot in the head early Tuesday morning in Terrytown as he sat in his sister's car, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office said
• Boy, 12, testifies in murder trial
A 12-year-old boy, whose life allegedly had been the subject of a jailhouse plot to silence the state's only witness in a first-degree murder trial, testified Tuesday that he saw 22-year-old Bryan Mathieu kill his uncle James Robinson Jr. two years ago.
- jimlouis 7-20-2005 2:48 pm [add a comment]
Thursday, July 28, 2005
• Man dies in Pigeon Town shooting
A 21-year old man was killed in Pigeon Town Wednesday night when a gunman walked up to him in the 1700 block of Eagle Street and opened fire, New Orleans police said.
• 17-year-old identified in fatal shooting
The Orleans Parish coroner's office has identified a 17-year-old who was fatally shot Tuesday in Algiers.
Monday, August 1, 2005
• Man found shot dead in car that hit utility pole
A man was found shot dead in a car that struck a utility pole in Gert Town Sunday night, the New Orleans Police Department said.
• N.O. man, 28, shot dead on his birthday
As Brian Craig Jr.'s body lay chest up and arms spread wide on North Prieur Street near Orleans Avenue on Sunday morning, his mother's tears and anguish flooded her eyes and throat as she begged the city's killers to put down their guns.
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
• Six men killed over bloody span of 3 days
After a short reprieve from murder and mayhem in New Orleans on Friday, six men lost their lives in a fresh spate of violence between Saturday morning and Monday night.
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
• 2 killed, 2 injured in series of shootings
Two men were killed in unrelated shootings Tuesday and a third man, critically wounded, burst into a 7th Ward church as he fled from a gunman, authorities said.
- jimlouis 8-03-2005 2:39 pm [add a comment]
Tuesday, August 9, 2005
• Three men killed in seven hours
Three men were killed late Sunday night and early Monday morning, raising this year's murder tally to 177, police said.
... Carter, who did not own the Jeep, was "pretty badly hit" by bullets from the AK-47, and died inside the vehicle...
- jimlouis 8-09-2005 7:21 pm [add a comment]
Thursday, August 11, 2005
• Child, 7, mother gunned down at home
A 7-year-old girl and her mother were killed Wednesday after police said at least one gunman entered their Hollygrove home and shot them both in the head.
- jimlouis 8-11-2005 4:59 pm [add a comment]
Friday, August 12, 2005
• Violence shows no signs of letup
In one slaying, a 22-year-old New Orleans woman was shot in the back while clutching a 2-year-old boy in her arms in Hollygrove. A few hours later, a 30-year-old man was near death in the 9th Ward after being shot multiple times early Thursday. He died later at Charity Hospital.
- jimlouis 8-12-2005 7:20 pm [add a comment]
Saturday, August 13, 2005
• N.O. teen dies in Algiers shooting
A teenager died Thursday after being shot in Algiers, the Orleans Parish coroner's office said.
• N.O. man shot dead on city street
A man was shot and killed Friday about 1 a.m. in Central City, police said.
• Killers are killed, Orleans police say
For the second time in a week, the New Orleans Police Department has closed a murder case by saying that the suspects became murder victims themselves.
- jimlouis 8-13-2005 5:02 pm [add a comment]
Christopher Hitchens was suggesting that some American municipalities adopt Baghdad as a sister city. (This was right before Baghdad's secular mayor was relieved of his duties by armed Shiites.) Anyway, my vote would be New Orleans.
- tom moody 8-13-2005 7:49 pm [add a comment]
I had to read the Hitchens Slate article to get more meaning and then finally it hit me that you meant that some American municipalities should adopt New Orleans, instead of Baghdad, not that New Orleans should adopt Baghdad. I agree. New Orleans would be a start, anyway. The crime postings on this page are not a new trend in New Orleans. Crimes of this nature have been happening pretty consistently for the past 20 years in New Orleans.
- jimlouis 8-13-2005 11:29 pm [add a comment]
Whoops, I meant-- New Orleans should be Baghdad's sister city because both have whopping levels of violence that aren't officially admitted. My Comcast cable start page runs news that's mostly Administration spin. Today there's a picture of 2 smiling Iraqi leaders and the headline "Constitution to be finished soon." That's because the country's blowing itself to pieces and Bush wants to hang his exit on an advanced Constitution-writing timetable. I don't know why more people don't know that New Orleans is a killing ground--I guess it's at odds with the tourist image of the Big Easy. New York used to be like that, violent as hell, until some control freaks came into the constabulary with "advanced police methods" (e.g., statistically tracking where crimes were being committed and increasing patrols there). New York isn't as fun anymore but the control freaks proved a city can be made less murderous. There's no excuse for New Orleans to be like this. Is deeply entrenched racism the main reason, would you say?
- tom moody 8-13-2005 11:42 pm [add a comment]
I supect this reveals more than a little about the police: "For the second time in a week, the New Orleans Police Department has closed a murder case by saying that the suspects became murder victims themselves." I think there may be a bit of the "let them kill each other" attitude.
I know that despite being right next to a police station house, the Treme is more lightly patrolled than any of the NorCal 'burbs I've lived in.
- mark 8-13-2005 11:53 pm [add a comment]
Actually, New Orleans adopted the NY method of crime tracking, Comstat or whatever, one of the NY architects of that system, Maples, came down about, oh, nine or ten years ago and helped set it up. However, certain aspects of the zero tolerance concept just wouldn't work in New Orleans. The zero tolerance for loitering lasted about one week, and then it became clear that the New Orleans culture sort of depends on loitering and to outlaw it would further alienate from the people a police force that, especially at that time, 94 and 95, was fairly reeling from corruption and abuse scandals, and needed to appear more street friendly. As for increased patrols in high crime areas, they do that too, but the amount of police they would need to police all high crime areas would, I think, bankrupt the city. I really don't know that the underlying cause can be summed up as deeply entrenched racism, although that certainly does exist in Louisiana. And I don't know the origin of the phrase, "New Orleans, the city that care forgot" but I have yet to find fewer words that better sum up the reality there.
- jimlouis 8-14-2005 6:19 pm [add a comment]
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
• Teen shot, killed; 3-year-old hurt
A 16-year-old male was shot and killed in the 3000 block of Toledano Street late Monday night. A 3-year-old girl received minor injuries in the incident but was expected to be treated and released from the hospital, said Capt. Marlon Defillo, New Orleans Police Department spokesman.
• Man is shot dead in quarrel
An early afternoon argument in Central City turned violent Monday, when one of two quarreling men pulled a handgun and shot the other, killing him, police said.
- jimlouis 8-16-2005 5:06 pm [add a comment]
City Journal Home.
Autumn 2005
Who’s Killing New Orleans?
Nicole Gelinas
President Bush’s advisers insist that he’s not abandoning conservatism in his commitment to rebuild the Gulf Coast. But a mark of conservative thinking is properly identifying problems before dedicating billions to solving them. The president hasn’t done that in New Orleans. Instead, in his September 15 speech from Jackson Square, Bush vowed to combat “poverty”—a foe that cities and the feds have never conquered in their long war against urban decay.
In the language of Lyndon Johnson, Bush ascribed the violence and desperation Americans saw in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina to “deep, persistent poverty in this region. . . . That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.” The president then issued a call to the nation: “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. . . . Let us rise above the legacy of inequality.”
But amorphous talk about poverty, racism, and inequality won’t help New Orleans rebuild. New Orleans has two more pressing—and much simpler—problems that need fixing right now.
The first is obvious: “Gulf Opportunity Zone” or no, businesses won’t invest in New Orleans again, and workers won’t live there again, unless the government protects the city with the best flood barriers that technology and money can provide. This job is hard—but civil engineering actually works, unlike the social engineering that Bush has invited with his lament about urban Southern poverty.
The second job is less obvious. New Orleans’s immutable civic shame, before and after Katrina, is not racism, poverty, or inequality, but murder—a culture of murder so vicious and so pervasive that it terrorizes and numbs the whole city.
In 2003, New Orleans’s murder rate was nearly eight times the national average—and since then, murder has increased. In 2002 and 2003, New Orleans had the highest per capita city homicide rate in the United States, with 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizens—compared to New York City’s seven. New Orleans is a New York with nearly 5,000 murders a year—an unlivable place. The city’s economy has sputtered over the past generation partly because local and state officials have failed to do the most elementary job of government: to secure the personal safety of citizens.
The president wasn’t alone in his misperception of what ails New Orleans. In the aftermath of the storm, hand-wringers wondered why they hadn’t noticed before that so many American blacks live in Third World conditions—supposedly only because they’re black. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer voiced white America’s knee-jerk best: “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. . . . So many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor, and they are so black,” he mused on the air.
But Americans didn’t notice this before because it’s not true. Despite the president’s rhetoric, and despite those indelible images from the Superdome and the Convention Center, New Orleans is just as much a black success story as a black failure story.
Yes, New Orleans has a 28 percent poverty rate, and yes, New Orleans is 67 percent black. But nearly two-thirds of New Orleans’s blacks aren’t poor.
Yes, it’s true that nearly 25 percent of New Orleans’s families live on less than $15,000 a year, according to the 2000 Census. But 19 percent of New York’s families live on less than $15,000—and it’s much more expensive for poor people to live in New York, making them poorer. The median monthly New York rent is $705, and the median monthly mortgage is $1,535—compared with monthly costs of $488 and $910 respectively in New Orleans.
Despite the images of collective helplessness broadcast after Katrina, New Orleans does not have a stratospherically high government-dependency rate. In 2002, it had 6,696 families on cash welfare, or 3.6 percent, compared with New York City’s 98,000 families, or 3.2 percent. In 2000, 7.8 percent of New Orleans households received Supplemental Security Income, compared with 7.5 percent in New York.
Anyone familiar with New Orleans knows that the city is filled with hard-working people—most of them black. Welfare reform, in New Orleans as in the rest of the country, worked; between 1996 and 2002, Louisiana cut its welfare rolls by 66 percent. The only virtue of New Orleans’s tourism-dependent economy is that those with few skills who want to work can work; the city’s unemployment rate was 5.2 percent during 2004, lower than New York’s 7.1 percent.
But not all black New Orleanians are consigned to working as busboys or hotel maids. The city long has had a substantial black middle class, and indeed a black affluent class.
After Katrina hit, Jarvis Deberry editorialized in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about a black New Orleans doctor who had evacuated to Houston before the storm: “Like so many of New Orleans’s black doctors, lawyers, accountants, dentists, politicians, professors and entrepreneurs, [Critty Hymes] made her home in eastern New Orleans, an area hit especially hard by the floodwaters,” Deberry wrote. “Despite its devastation, the area known as New Orleans East, the other part of the 9th Ward, hasn’t gotten much attention. . . . Despite the wealth, fame or stature of many of its residents, for too many people now covering New Orleans, the area simply doesn’t exist.”
New Orleans’s legacy of black achievement is part of the complicated race history of a complicated city, and dates back to before emancipation. “There has been a black middle class in New Orleans dating back to the antebellum period,” says native New Orleanian Edward F. Haas, a professor at Wright State University in Ohio who specializes in the history of the modern South.
During slavery, New Orleans had the largest urban population of free blacks after Baltimore. As Haas relates, the children who were the product of “mixed sexual unions” were often sent to Europe for education by their white fathers—and often returned better educated than many of their white local counterparts. With the help of substantial inheritances, they formed a black elite that persists in New Orleans to this day.
Likewise, less wealthy New Orleans blacks, “with their commitment to education, industry and self-reliance, defied all stereotypes of black inferiority” and formed New Orleans’s vibrant black middle class, Deberry wrote in his Times-Picayune piece. “[O]ther southern cities would develop black middle classes that would dwarf New Orleans’s. But that doesn’t mean the one in New Orleans ever went away.” The city’s historically black colleges—Dillard University, Southern University at New Orleans, and Xavier University—have never stopped churning out educated, middle-class black graduates.
The fruits of this culture of black achievement are evident. New Orleans’s government has been predominantly black for three decades. Its corporations fill white-collar and clerical jobs alike with qualified black workers. Ray Nagin, New Orleans’s current black mayor, embodies both of these trends: he was an executive at New Orleans’s Cox Cable (now part of Cox Communications) before he took office three years ago.
New Orleans does have its predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods. But though no land of perfect color blindness, it is more integrated on a day-to-day level, both in neighborhoods and in the workplace, than New York and certainly than a city like Boston. Moreover, it’s simply not true that black New Orleanians disproportionately lost their homes after Katrina because the whites built long ago on the only high and dry land available. Lakeview, a rich white area of $1 million homes (yes, because of the backyard views of Lake Pontchartrain), is devastated. St. Bernard, a parish of mostly working-class and middle-class white bedroom communities, was devastated too.
But what about the TV pictures of those black people in the Superdome and the Convention Center in the five days after Katrina, ragged, dirty, desperate, and screaming for help? Isn’t this a grave symbol of how unjustly “we” treat the black community?
It’s safe to assume that these were New Orleans’s poorest, all thrown together, with no way out of the city before the storm. Those who sought public shelter undoubtedly included many of New Orleans’s thousands of welfare families.
But even those images aren’t representative of New Orleans’s poorest. The people who took refuge in the Superdome and the Convention Center were photographed after days of stewing in filth and fear. The post-Katrina Superdome image was an emblem of a failure of local and state governments to evacuate vulnerable citizens before the storm, and an equal failure of the federal government to respond after the storm. It’s a symbol of the need for rational civic planning and for a rational approach to federal homeland security—not for a new government war on poverty.
However, one other aspect of New Orleans’s post-Katrina nightmare was representative: the murderous crime wave that seemed to grip the city just hours after the eye of the storm had passed. Unfortunately for New Orleans’s future, the media now are dismissing the terrible crimes that took place as a figment of hurricane survivors’, and of reporters’, imaginations.
“The media’s willingness to report thinly attributed rumors may . . . have contributed to a cultural wreckage that will not clean up easily. . . . Victims, officials and reporters all took one of the most horrific events in American history and made it worse than it actually was,” New York Times media reporter David Carr lectured in mid-September. “Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence,” the Times-Picayune concurred on September 26.
Even the Right now denies the violence that New Orleans suffered in the storm’s aftermath: “We now know, thanks to valuable post-mortems by the Los Angeles Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, that a great deal of the ‘great reporting’ was in fact great rumor mongering,” National Review’s Jonah Goldberg grumbled. “The stories of rape and murder in the Superdome were all unfounded. Six people died in there, tragically. But nobody was murdered. All of the major newspapers contributed to the hysterical environment.”
It’s true that one horrific rumor that Katrina spawned was indeed false—dozens of people weren’t raped or killed at the Superdome or at the Convention Center. But the media have extrapolated from this hollow relief a new myth: that New Orleans wasn’t a haven for mayhem after the flood. This is a comforting revision. But obscuring an already blurry truth won’t help New Orleans rebuild. New Orleanians did prey on their fellow citizens in the aftermath of Katrina—and some of their victims were killed.
The New York Times’s own Dan Barry, a longtime metro columnist with no history of lying, hallucinating, or repeating tall tales, witnessed the corpse of a murder victim that had been lying out for days smack in the middle of New Orleans’s central business district. “A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area,” Barry wrote on September 8.
Of a separate incident, the Times-Picayune reported on August 31: “Neighbors in the area near Hickory and Short Streets Uptown said a body has been floating nearby in five feet of water since the unidentified man was shot five times on Monday. Neighbors said the shooting was reported, but police and other officials apparently have been unable to respond.”
Further credible incidents of violence: the Times-Picayune reported August 30 that the day after the storm a New Orleans cop was “in surgery at West Jefferson Medical Center after being shot in the forehead . . . by a looter after he and another officer confronted a number of looters.” The paper reported September 7 that one 21-year-old man was in custody for allegedly “shooting at a relief helicopter from an apartment window.”
The New York Times has confirmed that one person was murdered at the Convention Center and one at the Superdome, and the Times-Picayune has confirmed that a National Guardsman was attacked by an assailant wielding a metal rod in the darkened Dome. The coroner’s early report implies that the murder rate among those stranded in Katrina’s aftermath was at least five times New Orleans’s normal murder rate. This real, not imagined, violence prevented New Orleans from getting the level of volunteer and professional help it needed after Katrina.
Adding to the confusion, multiple reports implicate the police in the violence, though whether the cops were justified or not isn’t clear. These reports haven’t been debunked. For example, the Associated Press reported September 4 that “police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six of them, a deputy chief said.” The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash offered evidence of another shooting by police during the week that New Orleans was in chaos: “On the street right in front of the Convention Center, I see a circle of chairs around a black tarp,” Labash wrote. “A body lies underneath it. It’s been there since the night before. I pull the tarp back and see a black man lying in a pool of blood. . . . Witnesses tell me what happened. Dwight Williams . . . says the night before, a New Orleans Police Department vehicle pulled up. ‘For whatever reason, the gentleman made a move to the car,’ he says. ‘It took five seconds, the entire incident. The cop opened the door, shot him, and that was it.’ ”
The Times-Picayune reported a similar incident on September 1; it’s unclear if this was the same one that Labash chronicled, as it occurred in a neighborhood “near” the Convention Center. “Near the former St. Thomas housing development, a squadron of police, some in tactical gear, were clustered in an intersection. . . . [A] man who appeared to be dead from a gunshot wound lay on the ground. It was unclear what had occurred. Police said there had been a shootout as they forced a reporter and a photographer out of a passing car at gunpoint . . . . They took away a reporter’s notebook and tossed the photographer’s camera on the ground before returning them and telling the pair to leave,” the Times-Picayune’s Gordon Russell reported.
What about rape? Jake Staples, an official of the National D-Day Museum near New Orleans’s central business district, stayed at the museum during and after Katrina. He told the Times-Picayune that he had watched, hidden, from the second floor as a gang rape occurred on the street below. “He could hear a young woman berating a group of five young men, alternatively cursing them and begging them not to abandon her,” according to the Times-Picayune’s report of Staples’s first-person account. “ ‘Then one of the men stopped and backhanded her,’ Staples said. Then he witnessed a gang rape. ‘Afterwards, she got up, pulled her pants up and kept following them. They were her meal ticket, I guess. . . . This area was a jungle.’ ” Police made two arrests at the Superdome for attempted sexual assault.
And what about the general atmosphere of lawlessness after Katrina? There is simply no question that the city was an acutely dangerous place after the storm hit. For example, as Brenda Austin and five family members walked from their eastern New Orleans home to the Convention Center, “their journey wasn’t without travail,” the Times-Picayune reported on September 1, because, according to Austin, “someone started shooting at them.”
On September 7, the Times-Picayune chronicled the experience of one group that had braved the storm in Algiers (a New Orleans neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi). “The day after the hurricane, [Vinnie] Pervel was carjacked as he tried to check on his other properties in the neighborhood,” the paper recounted. “Two guys clubbed him on the head with a sledgehammer, grabbed his keys and stole his van. . . . The next afternoon, as Pervel and his mother, [and neighbors Gregg] Harris and [Gareth] Stubbs[,] stood on their porch, a gunfight between armed neighbors and ‘looters’ erupted on the corner of Pelican and Valette streets. . . . The neighbors, whom Pervel would not identify, shot two of the men. . . . ‘We just couldn’t comprehend it, a gun battle in front of your house,’ said Stubbs.”
The next day, the paper reported the firsthand account of one prominent black New Orleans citizen, Antoinette K-Doe. “She’d heard the constant sound of gunfire and seen the marauders in her neighborhood,” the paper noted.
The New York Times confirmed that there had been yet further credible allegations of lawlessness, in a September 29 article that tried to separate fact from myth. “Police officers said shots were fired for at least two nights at a police station on the edge of the French Quarter. The manager of a hotel on Bourbon Street said he saw people running through the streets with guns,” the Times noted.
Just plain looting was rampant after Katrina—and most of it took place before floodwaters rose. (As of late September, police had arrested about 400 individuals in the aftermath, one official told me—more than half of them for alleged looting. In an emptied city with only a few thousand holdouts, that’s a significant number.)
“Looters seemed to rage almost at will, clearing out boutique clothing shops and drugstores alike,” the Times-Picayune reported on August 31. In a separate article: “Looting . . . was so widespread Wednesday that police were forced to prioritize their overwhelmed enforcement effort.” In yet another article the paper reported: “[O]ne New Orleans cop . . . loaded a shopping cart with a compact computer and a 27-inch flat screen television. Inside the store, the scene alternated between celebration and frightening bedlam.”
The Times-Picayune cataloged the extent of the looting nearly a month after the storm, on September 26: “Just as Katrina’s receding waters revealed acres of ruined houses . . . the post-storm cleanup also raised the curtain on a trail of mass looting that left even the most jaded New Orleans cop awestruck. As search-and-rescue crews staged house-to-house searches for survivors . . . they repeatedly stumbled upon stacks of merchandise—from large appliances still in the box to knotted tangles of hastily pilfered jewelry. . . . A large percentage of the items are still tagged with bar codes from . . . Wal-Mart, a store that was all but cleaned out during six hours of utter pandemonium the day after Katrina hit. . . . ‘The only things left on the shelves were the books and the educational materials,’ [said one officer]. . . . ‘Talk about a lot of effort for nothing,’ [another officer said]. ‘When that levee broke, they had to leave it all behind.’ ”
We may never know the extent of post-Katrina mayhem. As the New York Times noted on September 29: “A full chronicle of the week’s crimes, actual and reported, may never be possible because so many basic functions of government ceased early in the week, including most public safety record-keeping.”
But the grisly truth is that awful violence in New Orleans is never an aberration—whether before or after Katrina. Just consider the following snippets from the Times-Picayune, all printed in the month before Katrina hit. They seem just as hysterical as some of Katrina’s wildest tales.
“Violence tests the limits of mortician’s art.” “Some neighborhoods are being terrorized by thugs who have figured out that they have little to fear from the justice system.” “Almost nightly images of violent crime bludgeon New Orleans.” “Violent crime has emerged as . . . an ongoing source of national embarrassment.” “Murders are so common we have become numbed to their sting.” “Killers are killed, Orleans police say.” “The city is becoming scarier.” “Violence shows no signs of letup.” “Three men killed in seven hours; all are shot to death on New Orleans streets.” “After a short reprieve from murder and mayhem in New Orleans on Friday, six men lost their lives.” “This is Iraq right here in New Orleans. By 2020 there might not be any black people left.” “There’s a different type of murder occurring now and a different type of criminal out there.” “New Orleans area continues to log murder after murder.” “Something must be done to curb the violence festering in New Orleans.” “Now we’re in a bloody war nobody’s safe from.”
Day in and day out, Katrina or no Katrina, New Orleans is America’s most dangerous city. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. White and black residents, rich and poor, of good neighborhoods and bad, are afraid to go out at night beyond the clear boundaries of well-patrolled areas like the heart of the French Quarter—and night means 6:00 pm, not 2:00 am. Everyone in New Orleans knows someone who has been violently mugged—and everyone knows someone who knows someone who has been violently killed.
The violence is often random but never surprising: a young mother and her seven-year-old daughter shot to death in their home. A 90-year-old former school principal, the widow of the former chancellor of Southern University, and her adult daughter shot and stabbed to death in their home. A Vietnamese immigrant murdered in her grocery store. A middle-aged craftsman shot to death and burned in his home. A young, mentally impaired man shot as target practice in a housing project. A tourist bludgeoned to death near his business-district hotel.
And, of course, scores and scores of young black men get shot each year, so many that the deaths seem the same—the formulaic end of short lives marked with short, formulaic obituaries. Many of these murdered young men are in the drug trade, but many aren’t. Gregory Williams, who was set to attend Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College this fall, was shot to death outside his home earlier this summer, because he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the Times-Picayune reported. “Williams’s mother, Doris Williams, proudly fingered her son’s college acceptance letter while recounting his final moments on earth.”
Writes Times-Picayune crime-scene photographer Eliot Kamenitz of the work of documenting death in the Big Easy: “[E]ach Sunday after Easter . . . St. Louis Cathedral holds its Mass for victims of violent crimes. I work on Sundays and the yearly event is usually my assignment. Large placards line the outside gates of the church. On them are hundreds of photos of smiling faces of the deceased, many with their newspaper obituaries. It is years’ upon years’ worth of the slaughter in the streets of New Orleans. Before the service . . . I see the loved ones left behind. Sometimes I talk to them, and finally get to say I am sorry for their loss. . . . I’m sure I’ve met some of them before: they behind the yellow tape, I behind my camera.”
Most of New Orleans’s violence, like the killing of Gregory Williams, is black on black; working-class blacks in marginal neighborhoods suffer the most. New Orleans boasts (or boasted, before Katrina’s floodwaters) blocks and blocks of old, sturdy, abundantly cheap private housing stock. Many working-class blacks live on tree-lined streets just blocks away from the most affluent neighborhoods. But ceaseless open-air killing makes some of New Orleans’s predominantly black working-class neighborhoods, including much of the historic 9th Ward, terror zones.
Preachers put up hand-lettered billboards in ragged neighborhoods to remind residents, thou shalt not kill—but in vain. What then–police superintendent Eddie Compass said earlier this year of pre-Katrina violence became just as true of post-Katrina violence: it’s “a small group of nefarious individuals preying on the weak.” One 9th Ward holdout told the Times-Picayune a month after Katrina that he was enjoying his empty neighborhood after the storm, because there were “no more gunshots in the darkness.”
The shocking element of the bloody permanency of New Orleans’s pre-Katrina crime wave is this: the city already significantly cut crime once in the past decade, with help from some of America’s premier policing minds, including the late Jack Maple, onetime NYPD deputy commissioner of crime-control strategies.
In 1994, New Orleans’s murder rampage peaked at 424 killings (the equivalent of 7,100 in New York). As fear simmered to a boil, Richard Pennington, the police commissioner under former Mayor Marc Morial, overhauled the police department with input from Maple, federal officials, and others. Pennington and federal officials stripped the department of 300 corrupt and otherwise unfit officers (nearly one-fifth of the force, including two now-convicted murderers). Pennington also implemented New York’s Compstat, applying sophisticated statistical analysis and computer modeling to track crime trends. Murder fell steadily until 1999.
But it was way up again before Katrina—and the wholesale carnage of this past summer shocked even longtime observers of the city’s dangers. “If you aren’t fed up with the murder rate in New Orleans, you can only belong to one [group]: those people doing the killing,” the Times-Picayune editorialized on August 12. “The city is becoming scarier. New Orleans has logged more murders than it had at this time last year, and people weren’t feeling so safe then.”
But why?
New Orleans officials estimate that 70 percent of the city’s everyday murders are drug-related. New Orleans is still in the grip of a full-scale crack epidemic; the Times-Picayune stories of present-day “open-air crack markets” recall an earlier, bleaker era in urban America. Drug dealers kill for turf. Addicts kill for money for their next fix—or they are killed because they steal from their dealers, or they’re robbed for the money they bring into the projects. In 2003, the Times-Picayune reported, 40 percent of New Orleans’s murder victims tested positive for drugs, mostly cocaine. And after Katrina, Nagin wasn’t wrong when he said that “crazed drug addicts” and “violent gang members” were responsible for some of the post-flood violence.
Drug-turf wars in the violent underground economy have only worsened since the city closed one major housing project a couple of years back, as the project’s drug distributors have had to fight for new turf. Resettlement after Katrina could exacerbate this tension.
The culture of death that pervades New Orleans’s economy of pushers and addicts spills blood across the rest of society; the city’s drug dealers have no compunction about killing child witnesses to drug crimes, and regular, wholesale street shootouts claim many innocent victims.
New Orleans’s legions of weak, female-headed, underclass black families supply generation after generation of what George Will calls “lightly parented” young men to fuel the carnage. They also have a plentiful supply of weapons to do it with. One coroner notes that it takes twice as long to do an autopsy today than a decade ago, as the proliferation of AK-47s, and now of the SKS from China, means that bodies often are riddled with not just one or two bullet holes but a dozen.
Before Katrina, the New Orleans Police Department took much of the blame for the rising murder rate. The force is not up to professional standards of interrogating witnesses and suspects and of collecting evidence for prosecution. Worse, just a week before Katrina hit, one cop was arrested for alleged rape and kidnapping; ten others have been arrested on criminal charges over the past two years, “ranging from shoplifting to conspiracy to rob a bank,” the Times-Picayune reports.
But federal officials and outside observers say that in fact the department, before Katrina, was a vastly improved force compared with the pre-Pennington era. Moreover, a dysfunctional prosecutor’s office and a dysfunctional state judicial system, in which only one in four murder arrests ends in a conviction, undermine the force. Only 32 percent of felony drug distributors go to jail after conviction, compared with 66 percent nationwide. Some judges mysteriously and repeatedly release violent-crime suspects on bail. From improper collection of evidence to poor prosecution to lenient and inconsistent sentencing, New Orleans cannot keep its drug dealers and violent criminals behind bars. “The perception is that the state judicial system has failed,” says James Bernazzani, the FBI’s special agent in charge of New Orleans.
Because of these failures, witnesses are afraid to report crimes or violent suspects to the police, because they “know in two to three days, that individual will be back on the streets. They think: ‘I’ll become the next victim,’ ” says Bernazzani.
In addition, he reports, relatives and friends of those killed don’t go to the police but engage in “street revenge, as killings beget killings.”
Police booked one 20-year-old drug dealer for murder in three separate killings—but had to drop each set of charges because no one would testify against him. A year ago, he was killed on a street corner himself. Another suspect—charged, and released, on a first-degree murder charge in an unrelated case last summer—was found shot to death on the street this July.
“Our biggest challenge is that we continue to have to put the same violent criminals in jail over and over again. We honestly believe that our murder rate would be cut by 60 percent if the violent offenders stayed in jail and did their time,” then–deputy police superintendent (and now acting police superintendent) Warren Riley said in 2004.
Months before Katrina hit, New Orleans knew that it was in acute crisis. The city already had hired Louis Anemone, former NYPD chief of department, to devise a plan to combat the murder resurgence and to show commanders and officers how to carry it out. “It was a challenge,” Anemone told me, “but I was sanguine about our chances to improve the safety and security of the residents and visitors.” The city’s nonprofit Metropolitan Crime Commission also had devised some suggestions for judicial reform; above all, the commissioners concluded, “Criminal Court Judges should substantially increase the number of drug dealers sent to jail.”
But New Orleans’s long history of street carnage is not a topic for polite discussion in Katrina’s aftermath. Pols and pundits have a million solutions for the city, from building more affordable housing to ensuring better schools to creating an incubator for the nation’s “creative class” to offering tax credits for resettlement. But none addresses the city’s most obvious, and intractable, problem, the one that has kept New Orleans from thriving for years.
Hiding the truth doesn’t help New Orleans. The Big Easy’s evacuated citizens already know how violent their city is. And one reason that they might not come back is that their latent disgust with crime has now been overlaid by those images of rampant post-storm crime. Evacuees—and businesses—know that even Cat-5 levees can’t protect them from the day-to-day mortal fear of living in New Orleans. As Bernazzani told me: “What you saw after Katrina wasn’t done by outsiders.”
Nagin’s 17-member rebuilding commission, announced in late September, doesn’t boast one person with the expertise even to address the city’s festering crime—without which Nagin will never win the confidence needed for the city’s rebuilding. Likewise, every dime that the federal government spends on “community development”—and Senator Mary Landrieu has requested $50 billion—will be wasted unless the feds, in conjunction with state and local officials, tackle first things first: making the city safe enough to encourage the middle-class and working-class tax base, black and white, to return. Rebuilders who think that the criminal underclass will stay away while other residents repopulate the city will prove fatally mistaken.
Even before Katrina, Nagin was begging for a new mandate, and even a new dedicated property tax, to beef up the NOPD, which had one-third fewer officers per capita than Gotham. But the lack of departmental leadership after Katrina, and the alleged misdeeds of some cops, mean that the NOPD now must overcome an acute crisis of confidence. Police Superintendent Compass abruptly resigned four weeks after the storm, and nearly 250 cops are AWOL or still can’t get to work.
Counselors who debriefed rank-and-file cops after Katrina said that those who tried to protect their city after the floodwalls burst were angrier at their own commanders than at the storm itself or at any other level of government, “charging that their [department] let them down . . . and left individual groups of officers to care for desperate people on their own,” the Times-Picayune reported September 17. “Sad to admit it,” one counselor told the paper, “but the predominant dynamic here is anger and disillusionment.”
Moreover, since TV showed several cops looting consumer goods during the flood’s aftermath, and since it showed two cops allegedly beating an unarmed pedestrian in the French Quarter in early October, the department’s years of work to overcome its long-standing public image of entrenched corruption and malfeasance have gone down the drain. One hotel proprietor, with some film corroboration, told CNN that eight armed cops commandeered a floor of his hotel as a way station to bus valuable looted goods out of the city.
So what can the feds do with some of the billions they’re so bent on spending? If Bush wants to rebuild New Orleans, his administration must take the lead in creating a permanent safety zone in the city. He can start by beefing up New Orleans’s police force, committing funds to double its size over the next five years, as the key element of the city’s civic infrastructure. But the feds should do this only if they tie the money to a real policing plan like the one Anemone was working on—and tie it to real results as well. Bush has ample precedent for such a plan, in the Clinton administration’s 1990s grants to cities for community policing, and in his own No Child Left Behind Act, which ties federal money to local accountability.
Nothing will work, of course, unless the Louisiana government first creates a functional prosecutor’s office and state judicial system.
Governor Kathleen Blanco has called for two special sessions of the state legislature to enact a menu of tax credits and other rebuilding initiatives, but her proposals don’t begin to address the systemic pre-Katrina failures that will hobble post-Katrina recovery. It’s at least as important for her to call a special legislative session to enact Rockefeller-style drug laws to take this generation’s violent criminals off the streets permanently. The legislature should mandate automatic prison sentences for those convicted of possession of drugs with intent to distribute, and for those convicted of possession of illegal firearms. The state also must stop releasing on bail suspects charged with violent crimes. Only with the support of a working judicial system—from prosecutors to judges to prisons—can New Orleans implement the policing strategies that have worked so well in New York.
Only when New Orleans can assure safety can it begin to make up some of the losses it has sustained over a generation of mismanagement. Only then can it build a real private economy and robust public institutions that will attract a thriving middle-class population.
New Orleans has lost more than a fifth of its population since the 1960s. According to a 2001 study, those who left between 1990 and 2000 were mostly young and educated. City officials blame these losses on oil-industry consolidation over the past generation, which took New Orleans jobs to Texas.
But that’s not the whole story. New Orleans has lost middle-class jobs partly because investors are fed up with the city’s entrenched public corruption. “Outside companies don’t invest because they are sick and tired of the kickbacks,” Bernazzani says. “New Orleans is deprived of a tax windfall.” (Just this summer, the feds indicted four cronies of previous mayor Morial, including Morial’s uncle, for alleged public-contract abuses—and before Katrina, the FBI was investigating alleged widespread corruption at the city’s school board, which isn’t under mayoral control.) A corrupt government cannot police itself or its city, nor can it provide adequate public services of any kind. As taxpayers and businesses decamp in disgust, the city thus has fewer fiscal resources with each generation.
Those who remain, if they are not part of the problem, try to insulate themselves with private security guards or a sense of fatalistic resignation. Nagin made an impassioned speech about the lack of civic outrage over the skyrocketing murder rate just two days before Katrina hit: “I think this is kind of a put-up-or-shut-up moment,” he said. “How concerned are you, city of New Orleans, about fixing this problem? . . . Are we going to be entertained by the violent nature of these murders, or are we really going to try to fix it? . . . I just don’t see . . . the outrage. I see people sad, I see them kind of bewildered, I see them kind of looking out in space. But I don’t see enough, ‘Goddammit, I’ve had enough of this.’ ” But many of those who were outraged had already voted with their feet.
Unfortunately, too, the city’s attempts to encourage investment have only made things worse. In the two decades since much of New Orleans’s oil industry left for good, city leaders have concentrated on one business to replace it: tourism.
Tourists in New Orleans pay high hotel and sales taxes, and demand few government services (and most don’t know enough about New Orleans’s high crime rate to be afraid of visiting). But tourism doesn’t create good jobs that form the basis for a strong middle class. Even so, during the horrid early 1990s, when crime skyrocketed and thousands left, New Orleans and Louisiana spent nearly a decade’s worth of political capital cajoling Harrah’s to complete construction of its once-abandoned Canal Street casino. And one of Nagin’s first instincts in Katrina’s wake was to propose a special “casino zone” to lure tourists back to town.
The cumulative tragedy of New Orleans is the slow but violent wasting away of a strategic port city with a legacy of priceless physical assets. Those who care about New Orleans often fret that the city’s underclass youth grow up in isolated neighborhoods and attend execrable schools in an insular city that offers no opportunity. They’re right. But New Orleans offers no opportunity partly because it has no real private economy to speak of besides the drudgery of tourism and the violence of drugs. That’s why two early post-Katrina local moves are promising. The elected school board voted one month after Katrina to convert all 13 schools on the city’s smaller west bank to charter schools to get them up and running again quickly, while the mayor has asked the governor to help him create a citywide charter system, to be run in partnership with foundations, universities, and businesses. In addition, Nagin has proposed that the federal and state governments slash income and business taxes in New Orleans and in surrounding areas across the board, so that the private sector can pump new investment into the city.
The federal government can build floodwalls that hold up during storms—and the feds can commit to assuring personal safety while New Orleans rebuilds its city and its tax base.
But only New Orleans, and Louisiana, can build a city that holds up day after day.
It’s hard to worry about racism and poverty after you’ve been murdered.
City Journal Autumn 2005.
CONTACT INFO:
phone: (212) 599-7000 • fax: (212) 599-0371
Copyright The Manhattan Institute
- jimlouis 11-15-2005 8:48 pm [add a comment]
Monday, January 16, 2006
3 wounded by gunfire near second-line parade
Three people were wounded Sunday afternoon on Orleans Avenue after the conclusion of a nearby second-line parade that attracted thousands of people, including hurricane-displaced residents who came back to town for a day of celebration.
Police were busy Sunday night trying to figure out what prompted the shootings, which broke out at least twice between Claiborne Avenue and Broad Street, the end point of a procession that started in front of the Backstreet Cultural Museum on St. Claude Avenue. One onlooker said there were two gunmen.
The parade ended around 4 p.m. Police officers patrolling the parade route heard gunfire around 4:30 p.m, and first found a 34-year-old man with multiple wounds at Orleans Avenue and Dorgenois Street, police spokesman Gary Flot said.
Minutes later, after more shots rang out, officers found an 18-year-old woman wounded in the leg at the Orleans and North Rocheblave Street, and a 20-year-old man, also shot in the leg, in the same general area along Orleans Avenue.
All three were taken to local hospitals, where the oldest was listed in guarded condition and the other two were said to be in good condition Sunday night, Flot said. Their names were not immediately available, he said.
- jimlouis 1-17-2006 7:03 am [add a comment]
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
• N.O. murders hit 161 for year
Three New Year's Eve killings brought the city's murder total to 161 for 2006, a figure New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley touted Monday as the lowest total in 30 years.
I am perplexed by the chief's statement. Is he insane? In the first half of 2006 the city had very few of its hard criminals back from their Katrina induced exodus and murder was almost non-existent. The great majority of these 161 murders happened in just one half of one year. Also the population is half of its Pre-K count. So from a per-capita perspective combined with the fact that most of the murders happened in the second half of the year makes this not a year to be talking about lowest murder counts in 30 years but rather to be admitting just the opposite, violent crime is at almost unprecendented record pace.
Maybe it will get better, maybe so. Here's today's news--New Orleans logs 5 murders in 14 hours...Update---Six New Orleanians killed in less than a day, 12 slain during the last week (1/4/07)
- jimlouis 1-04-2007 8:45 pm [add a comment]
Monday, October 15, 2007, from the NOTP
Litany of violence
The weekend's violence began just after midnight Saturday, when a man with a gun approached two men renovating a house in the 1600 block of Touro Street, according to police logs. They gave the gunman their money, but one of the victims went to the door as he fled. When the gunman saw the man in the doorway, he fired, hitting him in the stomach.
Later that morning, Gregory Hayes, who was on Bienville Street near the Iberville housing development, died at University Hospital. Police say the 18-year-old was shot near the housing complex, but was taken to the hospital from South Johnson and Perdido streets.
Nineteen-year-old Charles Miller was shot to death Saturday evening in the Irish Channel. Just after 9 p.m., Miller's brother got a phone call tipping him off that Miller had been shot near Annunciation and Phillip streets, said Sgt. Joe Narcisse, an NOPD spokesman.
Miller's brother drove to the area, found Miller, and put him in his car to bring him to the hospital. At the corner of Magazine and Josephine streets, Miller's brother was able to flag down an officer, who called emergency medical technicians to the scene. They pronounced Miller dead.
The killing continued Sunday at 11 a.m., when Eddie Bernard, 23, from Algiers, was shot in the left side of his face in the 2900 block of Dryades Street, according to a police log. Bernard was pronounced dead less than an hour later after he was taken to University Hospital. Just a few blocks away and a few hours later, Ernest Taylor, 50, met a similar fate in the 2500 block of Danneel Street: He also was shot in the head. He was found by police about 3 p.m., and died at University Hospital.
Police were called to Gentilly later in the day, receiving a report about a woman found in a grassy area of the 1400 block of Mandolin Street, according to an NOPD news release. Although officials have yet to identify the woman, described as being in her early 20s, they arrested Trave Wilson, in the killing.
The woman had been shot several times and appeared to have been dead for several hours before her body was found, said John Gagliano, chief investigator for the Orleans Parish coroner's office.
She was 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed 115 pounds, with reddish-brown hair, green eyes and two tattoos. The tattoo on her right leg is of a rose with the name "Carmen" intertwined in the leaves. Underneath the rose is the name, "Leona." A tattoo on the woman's left buttock is of a cupcake with a cherry on top. The phrase "G.B. and $" is written over the cupcake.
Monday morning brought the 163rd killing of the year, when police at 3:25 a.m. found a 32-year-old man dead in the courtyard of the Iberville housing complex. Cedrick Brooks was killed by one gunshot to his back, the coroner's office said.
Citizens with information about any of the shootings can call CRIMESTOPPERS at (504) 822-1111 or toll-free at 1 (877) 903-STOP(7867).
Staff writers Walt Philbin and Bob Ussery contributed to this report.
Laura Maggi can be reached at lmaggi@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3316.
- jimlouis 10-16-2007 6:36 am [ comments]
Sunday, October 21, 2007
In deadly day in N.O., three men fatally shot
Three men were killed in a seven-hour span Saturday in shootings across New Orleans.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
5 killed in 24 hours
- jimlouis 10-26-2007 3:01 am [ comments]
wow nice to see a post here
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- bill 6-04-2020 9:37 pm [ comments]
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- Alex Cohen (guest) 7-16-2020 6:16 am [ comments]
I messaged previously about how explainer videos became an absolute must for every website in 2020. Driving relevant traffic to your site is hard enough, you must capture this traffic and engage them!
As you know, Google is constantly changing its SEO algorithm. The only thing that has remained consistent is that adding an explainer video increases website rank and most importantly keeps customers on your page for longer, increasing conversions ratios.
My team has created thousands of marketing videos including dozens in your field. Simplify your pitch, increase website traffic, and close more business.
Should I send over some industry-specific samples?
-- Alex Cohen
Email: a.cohen@explainervideoguys.com
Website: http://explainervideoguys.com
- Alex Cohen (guest) 7-21-2020 11:52 am [ comments]
Do you need help explaining your business to customers? It's time to get serious about streamlining your pitch and leveraging your value points on your website and social media.
Homepage videos have proven to have a great return on investment.
Telling your story is all we do.
Have you ever thought about adding an Explainer video?
You can smiply reply back to this email or email me directly at david@explainervidscompany.com or check out my website for some samples- http://explainervidscompany.com
--David Stern
- David Stern (guest) 7-24-2020 2:21 am [ comments]
Hello email from NOLA comments team,
My name is Laura and I’m working for FirstMan,
I just made an audit of your website digitalmediatree.com and find out that you can really increase your traffic and sales with a better ranking on search engines. Just like your competition does.
At Firstman we offer a complete SEO work for just 69$ / month.
You can try it just here : https://bit.ly/339Uz8o
It would definitely bring you great results !
I look forward working with you and if you have any question, you can reach out to me at hello@firstman.co.
Kind regards,
Laura from FirstMan.co
- Laura from FirstMan.co (guest) 11-18-2020 2:31 pm [ comments]
You've never heard of me. Hi, I'm Daniel. I got your website from top secret servers using a biorythmic metaspyder with a 100GB nutro-plasmic VPN that I….
Ok, I got it by just googling you.
Let me get right down to it…
I don't know if this is a problem you have, but I GROW companies like yours by assisting them in acquiring their competitors or other complimentary businesses so that they do not have to do any additional marketing, getting new employees, or increasing time and energy input.
I work with a team of acquisition experts who are all better than me, and they take care of the whole business acquisition process even up to funding. You do not have to lift a finger.
I'm not sure if this is a problem you have, and if it's not, that's totally cool.
If it is, here's how our CEO explains the process. Â https://youtu.be/2020DY5EPH0Â
If you are even slightly curious about what our CEO is offering, I promise to be somewhat useful and give you some ideas you’re free to steal. If you play your cards right, I might even tell you the lamest joke I know if you book a call here: https://www.nationaldiversified.org/calendar
Finally, it's time to release my favorite weapon. A picture of Rufus the cat nervously anticipating a response... (Don’t lie, you are looking for the Cat…LOL)
I await your deservedly annoyed response.
Have a more than tolerable day!
Daniel Udezi, MD, MBA.
Nattionaldiversified[.]com
Team 3500 Businesses Bought / Feeding 200 Kids/Month / Below Average Runner
- Galen Shand (guest) 10-26-2023 11:05 pm [ comments]