In New Orleans, Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing

[Moloch]

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 4 — When the body was brought out, the two little boys did not stop chewing their sticky blue candy or swigging from their pop bottles. The 18-year-old mother wheeling her baby came to watch, and the teenager with the spiky hair and the bulky duffle coat was laughing up on the worn stoop.

Only the cries of Linda Holmes — “Oh, Lord, have mercy on me, Jesus, oh my baby!” she said, over and over — were a tip-off that this was her teenage son Ronald the man in the lab coat was laboring to pull out of the empty apartment in the Iberville housing project.

It was another death in New Orleans — violent, casual, probably drug related and, by the time the sobbing and the laughter had faded, covered over in the silence that is the only resolution of many such killings here. The gurney holding Ronald was pushed into the coroner’s van, the gawkers stepped back from their balconies and the police furled their yellow tape. “It’s messed up around here,” said the mother with the stroller, Ariane Ellis.

There has been no arrest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/us/05crime.html?ei=5090&en=3fa9f5e76ffadba7&ex=1328331600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

[KamaAina]

1. Bring back community policing this instant!

From 1994 to 1999, New Orleans' murder rate dropped by 65% (that is, into the barely tolerable range :P ) The reason: effective community policing, as much a novelty down there as a Saints winning season. :-)

Now it's once again reached the point where many thousands of us (I just happened to be in town) marched on City Hall on Jan. 11, to try and make the Baghdad-style violence stop. The breakout speaker: community activist and blogger Bart Everson (though Rev. Raphael, mentioned in the article, kicked tail as well).

http://b.rox.com/archives/2007/01/11/speech/

Fueling our anger is the perception that our leaders do not share our fear and our sense of shame. And so today I want to say shame on you, Mayor Nagin, Superintendent Riley, District Attorney Jordan. You’ve really let us down. You have failed us. The criminal justice system and the government is broken. And I want to communicate to you the level of outrage that my friends and neighbors are feeling, because we don’t think you get it. Families that have lived in New Orleans for over 300 years are talking about leaving. People displaced by the flood are saying they are afraid to come back. That is the level of hopelessness and despair. They’d like you to step up and just do your jobs — but they don’t think you can. They’d like you to step down and resign — but they’re afraid you’d be replaced with equally incompetent people. Many of my neighbors believe that we need to see the federal government step in and literally take over New Orleans, or at least the criminal justice system. The feeling seems to be that even FEMA couldn’t screw up any worse than we have. At first I thought that was a joke. But it seems more possible every day, and there’s nothing funny about that.

Leaders, you need to do something that many of us think you can’t do. You need to be honest. You need to admit that what you’re doing isn’t working, and plan a return to true community policing. I’ve got an article here from six years ago that praises New Orleans as a model for how to reduce violent crime. Between 1994 and 1999 the murder rate here went down 65%. The credit goes to something called community policing, decentralizing personnel into neighborhoods, with increased responsibilities and accountability for district commanders. Of course to do community policing we will need more police, and that means better pay, so that a cop can get assigned to just one or two zones and really get to know that neighborhood, and neighbors can know them. Let’s get back to that.

But we also need to think of creative solutions outside traditional law enforcement strategies. We desperately need to experiment with some kind of decriminalization, to eliminate the black market for drugs. Some will say that’s too radical, but we say there’s nothing too radical when the stakes are this high.

Of course we want action, not rhetoric. Above all we want results. We must have a higher felony conviction rate. The national average is 57%. Our current rate is 7%. We must see a reduction in crime, and especially violent crime, and that is the bottom line. But how will we know whether or not this is being achieved? That is why we must have full, independently audited, disclosure of crime statistics.

Oh, by the way, why are we reading this in the Paper of Record, rather than in New Orleans' own Times-Picayune (or as I used to call it when I lived there years ago, the "Cat Box Liner")?

[youngdem]

5. Yes, I agree KamaAina, but there is also two other steps I would add

I too live in NOLA, and work in restoring homes throughout the ninth ward, gentilly, lakeview and old Metairie, and I think we should also attack crime on two other fronts.

First, there are scores of kids who returned to New Orleans WITHOUT their parents. These kids are running crazy. In my work, I have come across barely teens who were without parents. These kids are ticking time bombs as well as appealing targets. The city and school district should endeavor to have the public report unaccompanied children, and ban such a practice with criminal penalty specific to the Emergency declaration, and publicize it ala Crime Stoppers.

Secondly, some neighborhoods with the worst crime (Ninth, Midcity and Hollygrove)are also the areas of town with the largest concentration of abandoned but slightly(arguably) livable structures. These should be secured with riot windows like some of the projects are (which I don't agree with) and try to reduce the number of locations that criminals can hide without detection. Right now, you can kill someone in Hollygrove, and go into 9 out of 10 houses in any direction to hide in which are still vacant on every block. I think the city should set a deadline (after Road Home of course) that says if the property is not renovated, scheduled for demo, or has a permit on file for future construction it will be seized and sold at a Sherriff's sale to assist the housing inventory to return to productive commerce. And certain areas that have no residences should be CLOSED until residents return, with criminal trespass being charged against anyone found in certain blocks where recovery is not yet occurring.

I have high hopes for my city despite this horrible (and oh so predictable) crime wave.

[KamaAina]

6. Wow! That's the first I'd heard of kids going "Home Alone"!

First, there are scores of kids who returned to New Orleans WITHOUT their parents.

While I do not live in the city at present, I do try to keep my ear to the ground, reading the blogs as well as the "Cat Box Liner" site. And I've neard nothing like this! Sounds like it would make a great article for maybe the Gambit.

and ban such a practice with criminal penalty specific to the Emergency declaration

Aren't minors living without adults already technically wards of the state or something? Then again, that begs the question of where you would put all these children. There never would have been enough foster homes to house them all. There certainly wouldn't be now.

Secondly, some neighborhoods with the worst crime (Ninth, Midcity and Hollygrove)

Mid-City has some of the worst crime? I was just there twice during my visit (the second place is actually in Faubourg St. John). My host there describes his part of Mid-City as the "Triangle of Hope". Is there a particular area that's bad?

And certain areas that have no residences should be CLOSED until residents return

Wasn't the National Guard supposed to be in those areas, so NOPD could patrol the populated areas? (Oh, right, half of them are in Iraq. :P ) A compromise might be to block off various side streets, thereby turning the area into a sort of "gated community" with only one or two entrances (and exits).

I too live in NOLA, and work in restoring homes throughout the ninth ward, gentilly, lakeview and old Metairie

Bravo! :yourock: What organization are you with?

Right now, you can kill someone in Hollygrove, and go into 9 out of 10 houses in any direction to hide in which are still vacant on every block.

Eurghh. I'd heard at least one organization (Trinity Christian Community) had AmeriCorps volunteers in Hollygrove working to rebuild. What, then, of other neighborhoods that don't even have that?

If there's a neighborhood that's so down it doesn't have its own group yet, I might be tempted to come back and start one, along the lines of Tulane/Gravier's Phoenix of New Orleans ( http://www.pnola.org ), with whom I met during my all-too-brief visit.

[Acadia Blue]

2. People like Rush Limburger use this tragedy to justify continuing

their hatred of the victims. More police are needed. All laurg urban centers with a large underclass have drug problems, just look at La and others.

[truthisfreedom]

3. If anyone should know about drugs, oxycontin rushbo should.

His hillbilly heroin days aren't that far in the past, and his ears are testament to his abuse of that drug. obviously he was grinding it up and snorting it, just like the real back-alley drug addict he is.

[progressivebydesign]

4. It's messed up all over.

This is why violent crime is up in most cities.. same dysfunction.

[KamaAina]

7. I missed this at first: The NYT tried to make a racial thing out of the march

:puke:

Props to the NOLA blogosphere, specifically da po' blog ( http://dapoblog.blogspot.com ) and Gentilly Girl ( http://gentillygirl.com ), for the catch:

Most of the violence involves black men killing other black men. Out of the 161 homicide victims last year, 131 were black men. Most of the suspects were also black men.

When the pattern of black-on-black violence is occasionally broken, white fear and outrage are redoubled. This happened earlier this month after the killing of a white filmmaker, when thousands of people marched on City Hall to demand change, a majority of them whites.

The small showing of black marchers saddened Mr. Raphael, the minister. In the 2006 murders, he said, "99 percent of them were black-on-black, and we did not march. As a community, we could not bring ourselves to respond to that."

Ohhh-kay. Firstly, there were three separate marches on the 11th, one from the foot of Canal (largely white, present company included), one from Mid-City (racial composition unclear), and one from Central City (overwhelmingly African American). Naturally the one up Poydras near the hotels got all the attention from the out-of-town press. All, however, converged on City Hall, where the Central City contingent, many wearing T-shirts bearing Rev. Raphael's slogan "Enough!", got a huge ovation from all as they entered the rally area. And every speaker who mentioned Helen Hill also mentioned Dinerral Shavers and/or other nonwhite victims. By this time, I presume, the reporters for the Paper of Record had moved on to their expense-account lunch in the French Quarter.

[Jonathan50]

8. Decriminalization will do nothing to the black market

But we also need to think of creative solutions outside traditional law enforcement strategies. We desperately need to experiment with some kind of decriminalization, to eliminate the black market for drugs. Some will say that’s too radical, but we say there’s nothing too radical when the stakes are this high.

Decriminalization does nothing to eliminate the black market. There will still remain a demand for drugs and if selling those drugs is still not legal then there will be an illegal black market to provide them to the buyers.

Only legalization and retail sales of drugs will eliminate the black market and the attendent violence.