The New Orleans murder rate can't be downplayed: Jarvis DeBerry - NOLA.com
In the film "Dead Presidents" Anthony Curtis sits at the dinner table fending off his mother's demands for details about Vietnam. More than anything, she wants to know if Anthony has acquired any of the "bad habits" that've turned so many other soldiers into junkies.
"No bad habits, Ma," Anthony says, in what seems to be an attempt to put his mother at ease. But then he adds: "'Cept a little killin'."
"Except a little killing" is essentially the mantra of Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas and the entire Mitch Landrieu administration. Our city is generally safe, they tell us time and again, safer than most other cities our size. Believe it or not, we don't even have a crime problem, they say -- well, except for a little killing.
Except it's not just a little. The murder rate in New Orleans is 10 times the national rate, and it's been that way for years. So we measure quite poorly against everybody else.
But that's not all. New Orleans also measures poorly against itself. Leave aside 1999, the best year of Richard Pennington's Police Department, when our much larger city recorded 158 homicides; we're measuring poorly against the New Orleans of 2010. There were 175 homicides in New Orleans last year, and this year we had 175 before Thanksgiving. That's despite Serpas' announced plan to decrease homicides by an uninspiring 5 percent.
"That doesn't seem ambitious enough for me," the mayor said in July when he was asked about his police chief's goal to go from 175 homicides to 166. Serpas himself said "completely different times, completely different times" when asked why he wasn't promising a 50 percent reduction, as Pennington did when he was here.
Strange, then, that on Tuesday the mayor and police superintendent were vowing to adopt a plan that they said the police department in Milwaukee used between 2005 and 2009 to reduce its homicide rate by 52 percent.
"This model, from our research, is transferable," Landrieu said at a Gallier Hall press conference Tuesday. "It's innovative and it's proven, and New Orleans is one of the first cities that has been chosen by the Department of Justice as the one of the training cities."
Landrieu seems to have overstated the success of the Milwaukee Homicide Commission. There were 87 homicides in that city in 2004 and 121 in 2005, the year the program began. That number had dropped to 72 in 2009, a 40 percent reduction from its peak. Last year Milwaukee had 94 homicides.
But let's say that Milwaukee could only boast of a 40 percent reduction, and that only temporarily. In announcing his plan to follow suit, the mayor seems to be reiterating the point he made in the summer that a 5 percent plan is shockingly unambitious.
Even so, his administration is determined to keep claiming that New Orleans doesn't have a crime problem, despite the absolute absurdity of making that argument in a city where so many residents are slain.
The law doesn't treat all crimes equally, and neither do ordinary residents. Nothing makes the public as uneasy as murders do. Nothing should because nothing's worse.
Anthony says in the movie that he's been killing "for my country." Even so, his answer foreshadows his role in an armored truck robbery that goes tragically awry. The point directors Albert and Alan Hughes are making isn't subtle: A little killing is huge. It's reason for alarm.
It's reason for alarm here, too. Why is it then that our police chief, mayor and entire administration think they can deny that we have a crime problem? Who came up with the bright idea that the just a little killing retort would be just the thing to make us all feel safe?
Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3355. Follow him at http://connect.nola.com.user/user/jdeberry/indext.html and at twitter.com/jarvisdeberrytp.
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