Crime Returns to New Orleans
The New York Times
March 30, 2006
As Life Returns to New Orleans, So Does Crime
By ADAM NOSSITER
NEW ORLEANS, March 29 — The wail of police sirens is back, and gunfire again punctuates the night. As drug dealers move into flood-damaged houses, alarmed residents say that in the last few weeks, they have begun to sense a return to the bad old days before Hurricane Katrina, when crime was an omnipresent straitjacket on life in this city.
In a city that once led the nation in homicides per capita, crime has long been a leading indicator of New Orleans's health and prospects — an unavoidable part of the equation for a walk around the block or a trip to the grocery store.
That diminished greatly after the storm, when several hundred thousand people were evacuated. But there are signs that the past may be returning, with a new twist.
Police officials say the landscape of abandoned houses, stretching block after block, after Hurricane Katrina is being incorporated into a revived drug trade, with the empty dwellings offering an unexpected convenience to dealers returning from Houston and Atlanta.
Residents concur, pointing to this boarded-up house or that abandoned-looking shed as a place where they have seen young men congregating.
"It's coming back," said Capt. Timmy Bayard of the New Orleans police, who is in charge of narcotics investigations.
"It's not as plentiful as it was," Captain Bayard said. But, he added, "We're starting to grab some people." His men, searching abandoned houses in the Eighth Ward, have found drug stashes. He said it was like "looking for a needle in a haystack."
There are popping sounds of gunfire at night in the Central City and St. Roch neighborhoods flanking downtown — not as often as before, but enough to induce unease.
"Less, yeah, but it's started back up," said the Rev. A. P. Williby, who owns a house in Central City. "Shooting and killing — that's what we had before. It ain't going nowhere."
Two shootings, one of them fatal, occurred in January and earlier this month.
Parasol's, a classic old-line bar in the Irish Channel neighborhood, was held up at midnight recently. And a young man was killed after handing over his wallet in the Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood of popular bars and restaurants.
On Web forums, there are reports of robberies and break-ins.
In Houston, which reported a sharp spike in killings after Hurricane Katrina, police officials say they have noticed a decline since the beginning of the year. Homicides were up 24 percent in 2005, but Houston police officials say the number would have been down 2 percent, absent cases in which either the suspect or the victim was a storm evacuee.
Last fall, there were "multiple" hurricane-related killings in Houston nearly every weekend, said Sgt. Brian Harris of the Houston police, but the violence had significantly eased, he said.
New Orleans again appears to be drawing the people who wreaked havoc on its streets before the storm. A local murder suspect wanted in Houston, for example, drifted back here and was arrested this month in Kenner, a New Orleans suburb.
In the past, even when there were lulls in crime, many residents felt as if they were living in a city under siege. Perception became part of the reality, fueling an exodus of whites and blacks to the suburbs or out of state.
The drug culture has been deeply ingrained here and never fully disappeared. A local rapper called Juvenile, in his new post-hurricane album, declaims: "E'ybody need a check from FEMA/So he can go and sco' him some co-ca-een-uh."
But crime is nowhere near its pre-storm levels. With the city's population reduced by at least three-fifths, statistics indicate that crime is down 60 percent to 70 percent over all, the department said.
There have been 16 killings this year, compared with more than 60 for the same period last year, which means quieter days for the police but still works out to an annualized rate of 32 killings per 100,000 people, ahead of Cleveland and Chicago.
A gnawing sense of vulnerability, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, is returning. On any block, it may have no more concrete basis than the sight of young men hanging out, but it is real nonetheless.
"They're beginning to surface again," said Alfred Barrow, a newspaper deliverer, painting his porch on an empty-looking block at Third and Magnolia in Center City.
"I'm out here throwing papers at 3 a.m., and I see them. What reason is there for them to be out there?" The anxiety is not helped by the Police Department's struggle to return to normal. At about 1,400 officers, the department is not far from its strength of just under 1,600 officers before Hurricane Katrina.
But the department is operating out of trailers, much of its data-gathering capability is impaired because of storm damage, and about 80 percent of its officers lost their homes in the storm.
There is evidence that the non-working poor — the population most implicated in crime, as victims and perpetrators — may be returning in higher percentages, for now, than middle-class residents washed out by the storm. A population map prepared for the city appears to suggest as much.
"It looks like the worst have come back," said Andrew Jackson, a homeowner on Villere Street in the Eighth Ward.
"That house over there," he said, pointing to an empty-looking dwelling down the block where he said youths congregate. "You don't see 'em during the day, but you see them at night."
There are a few hopeful signs. Before, this was a city virtually awash in guns, experts say. The contractor who cleaned up the city's storm drains after Hurricane Katrina said his crews had recovered at least a dozen firearms. Guns are not as prevalent, the police say.
Another aid, officers and residents say, is a new level of cooperation from citizens who had traditionally mistrusted the New Orleans police.
For years, the police here had complained that witnesses and residents refused to help, fearing retribution from gangs and drug dealers.
Killings in broad daylight on busy blocks produced few or no witnesses.
Now, "the people who are here are the people who want to be here, and they don't want that back," said Kenny Zeiger, who described his block in the St. Roch area as "one of the three worst corners in the neighborhood" for drug activity before the storm.
"The people are calling the cops more," Mr. Zeiger said.
Capt. John Bryson commands the Sixth District in Central City, a high-crime area.
"It's incredible," Captain Bryson said. "People you normally wouldn't believe would want an association with the Police Department call us up."
He is confident about keeping the lid on, even as more people return.
"We have control," he said. "We have gained this ground."
Less than a mile away, Mr. Barrow, the newspaper deliverer, is skeptical — about the present, and the future.
"It don't take much to improve what it was," he said, "because what it was, was probably the most vicious killing scene in the U.S."
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
March 30, 2006
As Life Returns to New Orleans, So Does Crime
By ADAM NOSSITER
NEW ORLEANS, March 29 — The wail of police sirens is back, and gunfire again punctuates the night. As drug dealers move into flood-damaged houses, alarmed residents say that in the last few weeks, they have begun to sense a return to the bad old days before Hurricane Katrina, when crime was an omnipresent straitjacket on life in this city.
In a city that once led the nation in homicides per capita, crime has long been a leading indicator of New Orleans's health and prospects — an unavoidable part of the equation for a walk around the block or a trip to the grocery store.
That diminished greatly after the storm, when several hundred thousand people were evacuated. But there are signs that the past may be returning, with a new twist.
Police officials say the landscape of abandoned houses, stretching block after block, after Hurricane Katrina is being incorporated into a revived drug trade, with the empty dwellings offering an unexpected convenience to dealers returning from Houston and Atlanta.
Residents concur, pointing to this boarded-up house or that abandoned-looking shed as a place where they have seen young men congregating.
"It's coming back," said Capt. Timmy Bayard of the New Orleans police, who is in charge of narcotics investigations.
"It's not as plentiful as it was," Captain Bayard said. But, he added, "We're starting to grab some people." His men, searching abandoned houses in the Eighth Ward, have found drug stashes. He said it was like "looking for a needle in a haystack."
There are popping sounds of gunfire at night in the Central City and St. Roch neighborhoods flanking downtown — not as often as before, but enough to induce unease.
"Less, yeah, but it's started back up," said the Rev. A. P. Williby, who owns a house in Central City. "Shooting and killing — that's what we had before. It ain't going nowhere."
Two shootings, one of them fatal, occurred in January and earlier this month.
Parasol's, a classic old-line bar in the Irish Channel neighborhood, was held up at midnight recently. And a young man was killed after handing over his wallet in the Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood of popular bars and restaurants.
On Web forums, there are reports of robberies and break-ins.
In Houston, which reported a sharp spike in killings after Hurricane Katrina, police officials say they have noticed a decline since the beginning of the year. Homicides were up 24 percent in 2005, but Houston police officials say the number would have been down 2 percent, absent cases in which either the suspect or the victim was a storm evacuee.
Last fall, there were "multiple" hurricane-related killings in Houston nearly every weekend, said Sgt. Brian Harris of the Houston police, but the violence had significantly eased, he said.
New Orleans again appears to be drawing the people who wreaked havoc on its streets before the storm. A local murder suspect wanted in Houston, for example, drifted back here and was arrested this month in Kenner, a New Orleans suburb.
In the past, even when there were lulls in crime, many residents felt as if they were living in a city under siege. Perception became part of the reality, fueling an exodus of whites and blacks to the suburbs or out of state.
The drug culture has been deeply ingrained here and never fully disappeared. A local rapper called Juvenile, in his new post-hurricane album, declaims: "E'ybody need a check from FEMA/So he can go and sco' him some co-ca-een-uh."
But crime is nowhere near its pre-storm levels. With the city's population reduced by at least three-fifths, statistics indicate that crime is down 60 percent to 70 percent over all, the department said.
There have been 16 killings this year, compared with more than 60 for the same period last year, which means quieter days for the police but still works out to an annualized rate of 32 killings per 100,000 people, ahead of Cleveland and Chicago.
A gnawing sense of vulnerability, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, is returning. On any block, it may have no more concrete basis than the sight of young men hanging out, but it is real nonetheless.
"They're beginning to surface again," said Alfred Barrow, a newspaper deliverer, painting his porch on an empty-looking block at Third and Magnolia in Center City.
"I'm out here throwing papers at 3 a.m., and I see them. What reason is there for them to be out there?" The anxiety is not helped by the Police Department's struggle to return to normal. At about 1,400 officers, the department is not far from its strength of just under 1,600 officers before Hurricane Katrina.
But the department is operating out of trailers, much of its data-gathering capability is impaired because of storm damage, and about 80 percent of its officers lost their homes in the storm.
There is evidence that the non-working poor — the population most implicated in crime, as victims and perpetrators — may be returning in higher percentages, for now, than middle-class residents washed out by the storm. A population map prepared for the city appears to suggest as much.
"It looks like the worst have come back," said Andrew Jackson, a homeowner on Villere Street in the Eighth Ward.
"That house over there," he said, pointing to an empty-looking dwelling down the block where he said youths congregate. "You don't see 'em during the day, but you see them at night."
There are a few hopeful signs. Before, this was a city virtually awash in guns, experts say. The contractor who cleaned up the city's storm drains after Hurricane Katrina said his crews had recovered at least a dozen firearms. Guns are not as prevalent, the police say.
Another aid, officers and residents say, is a new level of cooperation from citizens who had traditionally mistrusted the New Orleans police.
For years, the police here had complained that witnesses and residents refused to help, fearing retribution from gangs and drug dealers.
Killings in broad daylight on busy blocks produced few or no witnesses.
Now, "the people who are here are the people who want to be here, and they don't want that back," said Kenny Zeiger, who described his block in the St. Roch area as "one of the three worst corners in the neighborhood" for drug activity before the storm.
"The people are calling the cops more," Mr. Zeiger said.
Capt. John Bryson commands the Sixth District in Central City, a high-crime area.
"It's incredible," Captain Bryson said. "People you normally wouldn't believe would want an association with the Police Department call us up."
He is confident about keeping the lid on, even as more people return.
"We have control," he said. "We have gained this ground."
Less than a mile away, Mr. Barrow, the newspaper deliverer, is skeptical — about the present, and the future.
"It don't take much to improve what it was," he said, "because what it was, was probably the most vicious killing scene in the U.S."
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
posted by Professor Segal | 3:31 PM
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