Baghdad on the Bayou

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_new_orleans.html

Baghdad on the Bayou

Nicole Gelinas

SPRING 2007 - CITY JOURNAL

To recover from Katrina, New Orleans must defeat the criminals who terrorize

its streets.

You don't have to go to Baghdad to see what happens when government loses

its monopoly on force; just visit New Orleans. More than a year and a half

after Katrina hit in late August 2005, violent crime-already a grave problem

long before the storm-pervades the city, endangering its recovery by driving

some good people away and keeping others from returning. In recent months,

the federal and state governments, confronting a murder rate that currently

exceeds that of any first-world city, have brought law-and-order forces to

the Big Easy to try to wrest its streets back from criminals. But any

long-term solution to the city's crime woes must be local. Unless New

Orleans itself can find the moral and political will to control the

violence, it will only be trying to rebuild the dying city that it was

before Katrina.

When New Orleans began slowly to come back to life after Katrina, it enjoyed

a respite from violent crime, one that residents and their elected leaders

thought would continue indefinitely. New Orleanians had a "sense of euphoria

about the city being a new city, that the violent crimes just weren't

there," says U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, who handles federal cases for

Louisiana's eastern district. But after roughly ten weeks of peace,

murders-many drug-related and acquaintance-based-started to appear in the

headlines again. Then, as the city's population began returning in greater

numbers last spring, violent crime roared back "with a vengeance," as Letten

puts it. The highly publicized shooting death in March 2006 of 28-year-old

Michael Frey at the hands of a street robber in the Faubourg Marigny, a

funky neighborhood on the outskirts of the French Quarter, seemed to trigger

in many New Orleans residents the realization that things were now back to

"normal."

The numbers tell the grim story. In 2004, the year before Katrina, New

Orleans suffered 265 murders, yielding a murder rate of 56 per 100,000

residents-already four and a half times higher than the average for

similar-size cities. In 2006, the year after Katrina, the flood-ravaged,

much smaller city logged 162 murders-a rate of at least 77 per 100,000

people, even assuming the most generous quarter-by-quarter repopulation

figures available. (New Orleans has recovered less than half its pre-Katrina

population of about 470,000.) In the first 64 days of 2007, New Orleans's

murder rate scaled even higher-more than 87 per 100,000 residents. Such a

rate in New York City would mean nearly 7,000 murders a year, well over the

2,262 it experienced at the height of its Dinkins-era violent-crime crisis

17 years ago. Other violent-crime indexes-from assault to armed robbery-have

moved in a similar direction.

The rocketing crime rate suggests that New Orleans's bad guys are coming

back to the city in disproportionate numbers. That shouldn't come as a

surprise. The hoodlums, mostly members of an entrenched underclass, are

impulsive and mobile, while working- and middle-class New Orleanians face

big roadblocks to returning, such as shuttered schools. Some of the

lawbreakers may have hustled back, too, because they were having a hard time

adjusting to functional cities like Houston, which initially took in more

than 200,000 storm evacuees. Unlike New Orleans, which has long failed at

crime fighting, Houston actually arrests, charges, convicts, and imprisons

its criminals (see "Houston's Noble Experiment," Spring 2006).

Relentless crime was the main reason New Orleans had lost 22 percent of its

pre-1960 peak population (mostly middle-class young people, black and white)

long before Katrina. But the hurricane took a slow process of decline-more

middle-class hemorrhaging, more disorder, fewer livable neighborhoods-and

instantly fast-forwarded it to urban nightmare.

First, New Orleans's "legacy drug dealers"-as James Bernazzani, special

agent in charge of the city's FBI office, classifies those who were dealing

before Katrina, almost invariably single-parented young black males-learned

a lot during their months away. In Houston, still a major drug hub despite

its better policing and justice system, Big Easy dealers met new suppliers

and have now "flooded New Orleans with drugs," says Bernazzani. Thanks to

the increased quantity on the street, the price of a kilo of cocaine has

declined nearly 20 percent since Katrina. Dealers who can't profit from such

low prices eliminate competition through violence.

Many dealers and other criminals haven't returned to their old blighted

neighborhoods, since four-fifths of New Orleans's public housing remains

closed and some of the city's poorest tracts are still flood-ruined.

Instead, they've spread out to neighborhoods that were already struggling

before the storm-Central City, a sprawling, low-rise area to the east of

elegant St. Charles Avenue, for instance, as well as ample pockets of

Uptown, where residents of dilapidated housing have long lived in proximity

to university students and professionals-and made those places much more

dangerous. A study earlier this year found that 31 percent of Central City

residents feel safe today, compared with 45 percent before Katrina; 85

percent said that "people being murdered" was a concern.

Some returning criminals take advantage of abandoned housing on

half-occupied streets; others crowd with relatives in legal housing. "You

have families living doubled up, people who have serious problems," says Al

Mims, Jr., a Central City native who came back to New Orleans a week after

Katrina. "Before Katrina," he explains, "you had [drug] rivals who stayed

miles apart. Now, it's like having Wal-Mart and Kmart across the street from

each other." Mims, who lost his father in a Central City murder nearly two

decades ago and was shot himself at 19, notes that most of his neighbors are

hardworking. "Maybe 10 to 15 percent" of the area's young people are

criminals, he believes, but it's enough. "To have this come back after the

most terrible natural disaster . . . " says Mims, his voice trailing off.

It's not just the violence; New Orleanians also face a dispiriting crush of

property theft as they struggle to rebuild. In recovering neighborhoods,

criminals wait for a returning resident to install new appliances into his

damaged home, and then steal them when he returns to his temporary housing

at night. David Kent, a former deputy chief of police who retired from the

New Orleans Police Department in 1982 and who lives in the Mid-City

neighborhood, says that "salvage artists" regularly cut and remove brass and

copper pipes. "People are trying to build their homes and their lives, and

they find that their pipes are stolen," laments Latoya Cantrell, who is

rebuilding her home alongside her neighbors in the flooded Broadmoor area.

Quality-of-life infractions are endemic, too. When I walked through the

Marigny, a neighborhood that Katrina left unflooded, a couple asked if I had

any pills to share; residents all over the city complain of blatant drug use

and open-air drug sales. Of quality-of-life crimes, says Cantrell, "there's

no comparison" with before Katrina.

Wealthier areas of the city, never impervious to crime, haven't been immune

to its post-Katrina escalation. All along the river, in well-off

neighborhoods that didn't flood, "we're seeing a spike in crime," says

Bernazzani.

Intensifying the city's crime woes further, family relationships that were

tenuous pre-Katrina-in underclass neighborhoods, mothers and grandmothers

raised children alone, with few exceptions-are now completely broken. David

Bell, chief justice of New Orleans's juvenile court, tells me that 20

percent of the kids who appear before him today-for the most part, 15 or

younger-are utterly without parental supervision; he calls this a "tragic

story no one is telling." Some of these children have left mothers or

grandmothers behind in Houston and other locales and returned to stay with

relatives, who often don't watch out for them. Others, separated from their

families in Katrina's chaotic aftermath, never reconnected with them. "They've

returned home, looking for their only parent," Bell observes. Many of the

kids whom Bell sees have been arrested for nonviolent crimes such as drug

possession or sale, but as New York's policing experience has shown, such

crimes tend to lead to more serious offenses.

You can drive through the vast, now-empty C. J. Peete housing project in

Central City, and if you look just at the sealed windows and doors, you

would think that no one's been there since the hurricane. But unsupervised

teens stroll in the courtyards. In one, an SUV idles while its occupants

likely complete a drug deal, according to the narcotics officer with whom I'm

riding. Just blocks away, as the project opens onto a main thoroughfare,

black-and-white signs reading enough! enough! enough! festoon telephone

poles, decrying the frequent violence in the area. Before Katrina, the signs

had read merely-merely!-thou shalt not kill, illustrating how a

crime-ravaged community's sense of impotent desperation has worsened.

New Orleans has yet another Katrina-related crime problem: it has become a

kind of frontier town. Contractors and laborers have come from all over

America to work on the city's damaged property (and from south of the

border: one joke in town is that FEMA means "Find Every Mexican Available").

Often without their families, some buy entertainment on the streets,

including drugs and sex.

The psychological consequences for law-abiding New Orleanians of all this

chaos and criminality have been profound. In the Marigny, resident Nora

Natale expresses a common sentiment: New Orleans may have the same number of

criminals that it did two years ago, but since there are fewer potential

victims to target, things are much worse. Since Frey's murder in her

neighborhood, Natale says, "I've changed my lifestyle. I don't take morning

walks." Last summer, she called 911 to report a shooting in front of her

house during an attempted robbery; the victim, a neighbor, survived-and

moved. Another acquaintance was run over by an attempted-robbery getaway car

(she survived, too). Natale is candid about the corrosive toll: "I take a

lot of little vacations" away from the city, she says. "It's been a rough

year."

Katrina's protracted aftermath would challenge the nation's best police and

prosecutorial forces. But the fact that New Orleans hasn't had a functional

criminal-justice system for years has made its post-hurricane crime

predicament graver still.

No one would deny the city's acute criminal-justice challenges since the

storm. Floodwaters heavily damaged court and police buildings; hundreds of

police officers and prosecutors lost their homes; the police department lost

its crime lab. But earlier this year, the DA's office released news showing

that the city's criminal-justice system wasn't just strained, but shattered:

in 2006 and early 2007, 3,581 suspects, some charged with murders and armed

robberies, walked free from jail or from bond, in many cases because the

prosecutor didn't have the physical evidence to indict them within the 60

days mandated by the state constitution. Blame the continued absence of a

crime lab. But what kind of a city doesn't immediately replace its wrecked

lab so that it can keep hard-core criminals off the streets?

Mayor Ray Nagin's failure to replace the lab, even after 18 months had

elapsed, didn't come from nowhere. New Orleans was pathetically lax about

its criminal-justice system before the storm, as its weak murder-conviction

and sentencing rates show. Four months before Katrina, district attorney

Eddie Jordan-who is elected, not appointed by the mayor-found that "a

murderer in New Orleans has a less than one in four chance of being

convicted of that crime." While Jordan wins no prizes for his performance,

the problems long predate his taking office in 2003. An independent 2002

study by the nonprofit Metropolitan Crime Commission found that New Orleans's

felony conviction rate (as a percentage of arrests) was the second-lowest of

the 11 cities studied; just 12 percent of those arrested in a given year

were eventually convicted and imprisoned. For the other 88 percent, the

report concluded, "the criminal-justice system was little more than a

revolving door back to the street."

Police and prosecutors blame each other for these disastrous results:

prosecutors say that the police prepare poor reports, often based on

unreliable witness testimony, while the cops retort that prosecutors throw

out perfectly good cases.

It's obvious what New Orleans should do, and should have done long before

Katrina. The city needs to train its police and prosecutors better, pay them

more, and manage them more professionally, in order to boost low morale and

end high turnover. Before Katrina, New Orleans's crime-fighting staffing

levels, while modest compared with New York's (even relative to population),

were comparable with those of other southern cities with lower murder rates,

such as Atlanta and Houston. Since the storm, the police force has shrunk

more than 10 percent, despite new recruits; the rate of attrition is double

what it was before Katrina.

The city also must allocate its policing resources more effectively. The

NOPD should have a massive street-crimes unit to do undercover drug buys and

bust serial robbers, for example. Further, the city can't just temporarily

ramp up its policing resources whenever it detects a "violent crime wave,"

as it has done for decades; rather, it must treat crime as a chronic

condition, as New York does. And New Orleans needs to prosecute those

individuals it does arrest and pressure judges to imprison the ones

convicted.

Most important, the city's mayor, DA, and judges must recognize that

tolerating nonviolent offenses leads directly to violent crimes. Because

they don't feel any incentive from the authorities to stop their disorderly

behavior, too many juveniles graduate from loitering to drug use to drug

sales to carrying weapons to armed robbery . . . to murder.

In the mid-1990s, New Orleans got a tiny taste of what good policing can do.

Then-mayor Marc Morial, confronting murder numbers that rival today's

shocking rates-424 in 1994, or about 80 per 100,000 residents-hired outsider

Richard Pennington as police superintendent. Pennington cut corruption and

implemented statistics-based policing and other crime-fighting innovations,

slashing the city's murder rate by nearly two-thirds by the end of the

decade. But absent legal, prosecutorial, and sentencing reforms, New Orleans

never lowered crime to a level that any other city would consider

acceptable, and it didn't sustain its gains. When Pennington ran for mayor

in 2002, moreover, he lost to Nagin.

Good policing and prosecution cost money-and after Katrina, New Orleans's

regular annual revenues are down 23 percent. So it's reasonable for the city

to ask the feds and the state for operating cash for its police and

prosecutor's forces over the next few years, in order to give its tax base a

chance to recover from the biggest weather-related disaster in U.S. history.

What's more, since Louisiana is running a surplus, Governor Kathleen Blanco

could send the city one-time funds to upgrade the justice system's

equipment. Over the long term, though, New Orleans, always a low-tax city

relative to its income, must get used to taxing more and spending more to

maintain a professional crime-fighting force. Violent crime will drive

middle-class taxpayers out, or keep them out, before higher taxes will.

But fixing the city's dysfunctional criminal-justice system isn't just a

matter of tactics and resources, because the mess reflects a deeper cultural

problem. For over a decade, when I have pointed out to well-off New

Orleanians that the city suffers high crime because it won't control its

predominantly underclass criminals, I have received lectures on how the real

problem is anything but failure to enforce the law. I just don't understand,

I'm told, how bad schools, bad parenting, a lack of inner-city jobs, or some

combination of the three must be fixed first. New Orleans's moneyed, mostly

white, elite-which could have played a vital role in changing the political

debate about crime, just as such citizens did in New York-often voices this

"root causes" theory. As one longtime resident bluntly noted, "the white

elite is cowed by political correctness."

Anger about crime in New York didn't just come from elites; worried

working-class and middle-class voters turned out for Rudy Giuliani in

droves. In New Orleans, such citizens, mostly black, often complain about

crime, but they don't support the measures necessary to combat it. Just look

at Jordan's pre-Katrina report, which concluded that New Orleans often

suffered from "both jury and judge nullification"-that is, ignoring the

law-especially in cases against small-time drug dealers and users,

"regardless of the evidence" (italics mine). In 2004, juries found nearly 60

percent of narcotics defendants not guilty, and that was after the DA had

thrown out thousands of cases. "Some trial observers have suggested that . .

.. nullification . . . is based on distrust of the police. . . . Others think

it may be due to judges and juries being unwilling to impose what they see

as draconian sentences for drug use and petty dealing," the DA concluded.

Before Katrina, prosecutors chose to treat marijuana possession, being found

with "crack pipe residue," and prostitution as misdemeanors, because jurors

wouldn't convict in such cases.

Citizens also directly thwart the law in some neighborhoods. Central City

native Mims notes that the mothers and grandmothers of suspects arrested for

nonviolent crimes often beg neighborhood ministers to persuade prosecutors

to release their sons and grandsons. Underclass mothers are often perfectly

aware that their kids are involved in crime, and even encourage it, says

Mims.

One post-Katrina case illustrates the point. In early February, 17-year-old

Robert Dawson boarded a bus in Dallas and made the ten-hour trek to New

Orleans with his mother, happy, according to news reports, to be returning

to Central City after nearly a year and a half. Four hours after Dawson came

home, he was dead-shot on the street multiple times, allegedly by a teenage

acquaintance, Clarence Johnson. Johnson's mother had reportedly given him

the gun that she kept in her housing-project apartment, and urged him to

seek revenge on Dawson, with whom he had already gotten into a fight. After

the murder, police found a family photo proudly displayed in Johnson's home:

a snapshot of the boy, posing with a fistful of cash in one hand, a pistol

in the other.

Lousy policing contributes to the general contempt for the criminal-justice

system. The NOPD does have some heroic officers; but many are poorly managed

and poorly trained, have poor morale, and do their jobs poorly. The result

is yet more jurors unwilling to convict, since they've had, or their

children have had, bad personal experiences with these cops. Flawed arrests

and dropped prosecutions, too, mean that many witnesses won't cooperate,

since they know, as Mims says, that violent thugs "will be back on the

streets before sundown." And everybody-from white society folk who hire

off-duty cops to patrol their streets to poor black kids who carry guns

while walking theirs-knows that the only real security in New Orleans is

private, not public.

Since Katrina, things have gotten so bad that New Orleans's only effective

criminal-justice presence has come from outside the city. Early this year,

the Department of Justice gave federal agencies in New Orleans extra

resources, including nearly three dozen new agents and attorneys, to get

criminals off the streets by bypassing the local justice system altogether.

The FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,

and Firearms have embedded agents with NOPD officers in some crime-ridden

neighborhoods, and they take suspects into immediate custody if it looks as

if a federal crime has been committed-carrying an illegal weapon, say, or

peddling a rock of cocaine. Letten, the U.S. attorney, secures indictments

and prosecutes the defendants. "Our goal is to detain, imprison, prosecute,

convict, and incarcerate these violent criminals," he says, "to get as many

individuals into the federal system as possible."

The federal government is doing on a modest scale what successful cops and

prosecutors have done in New York and other cities for years now: taking

people with illegal weapons or illegal drugs off the streets, because they're

the same people who commit violent crimes. In just two weeks' worth of

cases, feds caught one man with an illegal loaded gun and charged him in the

federal system, one day after a local court had given him a suspended

sentence for crack possession. They caught another suspect on a gun charge

who'd been convicted of robbery less than five years ago. And they have

charged Clarence Johnson's mother with illegal weapons possession.

(Garden-variety murder isn't a federal crime.)

The feds emphasize that they're not trying to take over in New Orleans, and

they're hesitant to criticize local officials. They're also working within

Jordan's system, funding a small team of assistant DAs who screen the huge

backlog of pre-Katrina cases and look, too, at difficult cases since the

storm. And the FBI has deployed nine agents, all former homicide detectives,

to work in New Orleans alongside the NOPD on its backlog of unsolved

murders.

To combat unbridled property crime, meanwhile, Governor Blanco deployed a

300-troop Louisiana National Guard contingent, Task Force Gator, last June

to patrol lightly populated neighborhoods; Mayor Nagin and the police

department had requested the help. "These are crimes of opportunity," says

Gator's commander, Major Dirk Erickson, pointing out an abandoned school

where guardsmen recently caught looters stripping copper from insulated

pipes. The guard's task is vast: Erickson notes that his troops must patrol

hundreds of miles of road in neighborhoods often less than half populated.

Since June, Erickson's soldiers, acting as deputized state troopers, have

made nearly 2,000 arrests, many of them of looters. And while the force

usually patrols and arrests without violent incident, in early March the

guardsmen encountered a bicyclist transporting a hacksaw at 1 am in a

looter-plagued area of the Ninth Ward. The man brandished a knife, threw

glass at the troops when they attempted to question him, and then ran. When

they pursued him into a flood-ruined house, he pointed what looked like a

rifle (later determined to be a BB gun) at the troops, one of whom opened

fire and killed him.

Feds and state alike are doing something more than just helping out a

strapped city: they're reconditioning criminals, as well as victims and

terrified residents, to understand that a functional government metes out

predictable consequences for criminal acts.

New Orleanians knew that their city was troubled before Katrina. But today

many know that the city will die unless it changes. Many law-abiding

citizens are coming home, and they're bringing with them a hardiness and

resourcefulness that New Orleans hasn't seen in decades, with tens of

thousands of individuals rebuilding their homes by hand.

Some of these brave souls have become political activists, insisting that

they simply won't live with violent crime any more, no matter how

politically difficult-and politically incorrect-it is to change things.

Citizens' anger about crime reached fever pitch in January, after two

high-profile murders: Dinerral Shavers, the snare drummer of the Hot-8 Brass

Band featured in Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke, lost his

life in a drive-by shooting (the killer was aiming at the musician's teenage

son); and independent filmmaker Helen Hill was shot in her home, as she and

her husband shielded their toddler from the unknown assailant. After the two

murders, 4,000 citizens-not members of special-interest groups, but real

citizens who took time off from work and school-marched on City Hall to

protest both crime and the impotence of Nagin and Jordan. A measure of their

anger: they did not allow Nagin, who attended, to speak.

Individuals and groups are launching freelance anticrime proposals,

insisting that the city government act on them. Ruthie Frierson is a

prominent New Orleans citizen (her husband was once crowned Rex, the king of

Mardi Gras) now wading into politics. In February, the group that she

originally founded after Katrina to reform-successfully-Louisiana's

patronage-ridden levee boards joined ten other organizations to unveil a

"War on Career and Violent Criminals." The campaign's proposals-they include

increasing DA resources devoted to violent crime and repeat offenders,

starting a nonprofit effort to record prosecutors' successes and failures,

and improving coordination between police and prosecutors-wouldn't be

revolutionary in functional cities. But in New Orleans, acknowledging that

the city needs an effective criminal-justice system before it can solve its

other problems is revolutionary.

The Marigny's Natale has started a website to fight not just crime but

elected officials who refuse to address it. First on her list to achieve:

the "resignation of [DA] Eddie Jordan." Natale represents another necessary

evolution for New Orleans. When she speaks of drug dealers, she says that

the decision to sell "is an individual choice," rather than excusing

criminals because of their poverty and bad educations. And Cantrell, who

returned to the flooded Broadmoor neighborhood with her neighbors to rebuild

long before the government started giving out grants, is mobilizing citizens'

patrol groups to walk block by block and deter property crimes.

Responding to the intense pressure, Nagin and Jordan are making modest

attempts to improve policing and prosecution. New Orleans's police

superintendent, Warren Riley, said in March that prosecutors and cops would

try to cooperate with each other, and he has launched new undercover

operations and checkpoints to net drug dealers, weapons, and wanted

criminals. The city is also installing more crime cameras, so that it doesn't

have to rely on witness testimony. But New Orleans has seen such responses

to a "crime wave" before.

The key to sustained change is strong leadership, not treating citizens'

safety, the basic responsibility of government, as though it were the

request of some newly powerful special-interest group. Although Nagin

narrowly won reelection last spring, slow political evolution away from

business-as-usual may be occurring. In the same election, voters elected two

new city council members, Shelley Midura and James Carter, who have begun to

insist on some accountability on crime, calling Riley and Jordan to a

special session in February to grill them publicly about the city's failure

to police and prosecute its criminals. The session exposed to television

viewers the troubling fact that Riley and Jordan were so uncooperative that

they wouldn't even look at each other. Long-standing tension between the two

departments had reached the nadir this winter, when Jordan, indicting seven

cops for two shooting deaths in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, referred

to police officers as "rabid dogs."

Because New Orleans never gave its citizens the freedom from fear that is

the foundation of any healthy city, it has long failed to make progress on

other serious troubles: bad schools, dysfunctional underclass behavior, and

few job opportunities. "There is no village," says Mims of the proposition

that it takes a village to fix the inner city. "The village is afraid. Old

people are afraid of young kids." So long as New Orleans remains a

terrifying city, potential investors and residents will stay away, and the

national taxpayers who must spend billions of dollars to replenish Louisiana's

wetlands, which protect the city from hurricanes, will balk.

But with its cheap office space, beautiful architecture, real culture, good

universities, and location that's a reasonable flight from both coasts, New

Orleans could thrive. And Katrina did the city one great favor: in the weeks

of calm just after the hurricane, many citizens saw a different city. "We

accepted before Katrina that to live in New Orleans was to live in crime and

poverty," Natale says. "But we saw what New Orleans could be like in the

months after the storm."

Sidebar

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Ignoring Reality

To calculate New Orleans's 2006 murder rate, I divided the raw crime totals

provided by the NOPD into generous quarter-by-quarter estimates of New

Orleans's population from various sources, including the U.S. Census, the

Louisiana Public Health Institute, and the city's own emergency operations

center. The result was a shocking 77 murders per 100,000 residents-up from

56 in 2004, the year before Katrina. Using less generous population figures,

Tulane professor Mark VanLandingham has found a 2006 murder rate of 96 per

100,000.

Whichever estimate is closer to the truth, the conclusion is beyond dispute:

post-Katrina New Orleans is a horrifically dangerous place, even compared

with such other hazardous cities as Detroit (41 murders per 100,000

residents annually) and St. Louis (32). But instead of facing reality,

police superintendent Warren Riley held a press conference on New Year's Day

to boast that the total number of murders in 2006 was the lowest in 30

years-ignoring the fact that 30 years ago, the city's population was as much

as three times higher!

The NOPD has argued that these reckonings of the city's murder rate are too

high because they don't include people who work in the city during the day

in their population estimates. But no city includes its typically

much-larger daytime population in its murder rate.

The police department has also tried to minimize fear by saying that the

crime rate is driven by "criminals killing criminals." And in March,

Times-Picayune writer Jarvis DeBerry agreed. "Yes, the situation has been

bad," he wrote. "Yet-and it's very difficult to make this point without

implying that certain lives don't matter-nearly all the homicides have been

a consequence of turf wars that more often than not have involved the drug

trade."

But as Louisiana political commentator C. B. Forgotston noted in his

near-daily e-mail update on New Orleans crime, "Who cares who perpetrates a

murder . . . unless one believes that in America, vigilantism is

appropriate?" If New York newspaper columnists had excused their city's

crime crisis in the late eighties and early nineties by saying that crack

dealers could be expected to shoot one another, New York would never have

fixed its problems. It's strange, too, that while New Orleans's elected

leaders and elite citizens seem to balk at putting petty drug dealers in

prison, they have no problem with those dealers' regularly getting the death

penalty out on the street.

But at least Riley and the talking heads say something. Mayor Ray Nagin

usually chooses to avoid discussing the violence altogether. Contrast his

lack of leadership with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's frank State of

the City address this January, absent any public pressure: "Today, crime is

more than 20 percent lower than it was five years ago. One reason we've been

so successful is because we've always been ready to look the facts

straight-on-whether we liked them or not. And last year, the fact was that .

.. . homicides in our city went up."

After VanLandingham's study came out, Riley's chief spokesman, Joseph

Narcisse, seemed more wounded by the messenger than upset by the message.

"It hurts the city, and it hurts us all, when we look at murder rates with

those per-capita numbers," he said. What's really hurting the city, New

Orleans's leaders need to realize, is murder-and their own refusal to

acknowledge it.