Posted on 08/30/2007 12:53:12 PM PDT by T.L.Sink
While New Orleans residents are courageously taking the initiative to rebuild their homes, they cannot build an effective police and prosecutorial force on their own. This past weekend, seven family members and friends were enjoying a quiet evening outside their home in a tranquil neighborhood on the city's east side, which was badly flooded by Katrina. Then, according to New Orleans police, gunmen forced them into their house, robbed them, and shot them all, killing two. It was the neighborhood's second such crime in two weeks. In fact, since Katrina, New Orlean's murder rate has been higher than that of any first-world city. It's 40 percent higher than before Katrina and twice as high as in other dangerous cities like Detroit, Newark, and Washington. What individual New Orleanians can't do by themselves is fix the city's long-broken attitude toward criminal justice. For generations now New Orleans has hobbled along without a real law-and-order presence. Criminals graduate from petty crimes to burglary to drug-dealing to carrying illegal weapons to gang robberies to murder, and face few consequences at any stage. The police, and especially the prosecutors, are ineffectual. Since Katrina things have gotten much worse, in part because criminals, finding life difficult in cities that enforce the law, have returned to the Big Easy in numbers disproportionate to those of law-abiding citizens. Mayor Roy Nagin doesn't try to fix things because he believes crime is a social problem, rooted in lack of opportunity for poor youth. Nagin and district attorney Eddie Jordan have failed to make clear that criminals will be prosecuted. Bush should tie federal money to measurable results: rational arrests and fewer crimes. Until politicians understand that basic difference, spending more money - or bragging about past billions spent - while tolerating intolerable conditions is nothing short of disgraceful.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Black = democrat = more crime and corruption.
Nagin isn't the only one who holds this view. Indeed, Jesse and Al have carved out a livelihood by getting Federal dollars to throw at what they want others to perceive to be the problem. That is, it's everybody else's fault but the blacks. People who offer real solutions to black problems (e.g., Bill Cosby) are tarred and feather for telling it like it is. Unless Nagin and his ilk admit to the real problem, NO is doomed.
Fascinating subject matter. Probably the most interesting social experiment happening in America today, if not the world, is the relocation of the New Orleans underclass to other cities around the South. A real sociologist would be going out and trying to get some data about how those people are doing, and especially WHAT those people are doing.
Thanks for posting this.
Nicole Gelinas
The Most Dangerous City
Two years after Katrina, New Orleans desperately needs law and order.
28 August 2007
This week, President Bush will visit New Orleans to mark the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, as will Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton, and Republican candidates Mike Huckabee and Duncan Hunter. The White House will probably release a fact sheet detailing how many billions of dollars the government has spent on Gulf Coast recovery. The Democrats, no doubt, will call for more money and action. Here’s hoping at least one political visitor will be brave enough to say the truth: that while many New Orleans residents are courageously taking the initiative to rebuild their homes, they cannot build an effective police and prosecutorial force on their own.
To understand how New Orleans is doing two years later, consider a few recent stories. This past weekend, seven family members and friends were enjoying a quiet evening outside their home in a tranquil neighborhood on the city’s east side, which was badly flooded by Katrina. Then, according to New Orleans police, gunmen forced them into their house, robbed them, and shot them all, killing two. It was the neighborhood’s second such crime in two weeks. Previously, gunmen had murdered a couple, Anjelique Vu and Luong Nguyen, leaving their infant and toddler unharmed.
“The slayings . . . were the latest in a series of armed home invasions and robberies in eastern New Orleans,” wrote the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “Several crews of gunmen . . . have robbed and shot workers . . . and homeowners in the area, where many residents are rebuilding their flood-damaged homes.” Also last week, gunmen lined up six laborers and shot three, killing El Salvadoran Julio Benitez-Cruz. (New Orleans has experienced a post-Katrina influx of Hispanic laborers, both legal and illegal, who are tempting targets for criminals because they carry so much cash from contracting jobs.)
In fact, since Katrina, New Orleans’s murder rate has been higher than that of any first-world city. Depending on fluctuating estimates of the city’s returning population, it’s perhaps 40 percent higher than before Katrina and twice as high as the rate in other dangerous cities like Detroit, Newark, and Washington. Families trying to make a home in this environment live in fear, even while many have taken to rebuilding their homes with their bare hands.
As Reverend Nguyen The Vien, pastor of one of eastern New Orleans’s churches, told me earlier this year, “We’re here and we’re rebuilding”—with or without federal assistance. Indeed, Nguyen and his parishioners seemed to treat the subject of government help almost as an afterthought: it may help pay the bills if it ever arrives, but it’s not expected. After Katrina, neighbors fixed up Nguyen’s church under his direction so that they would have a “home base” for eating, sleeping, and showering. Then they set to work rebuilding houses, one by one. Residents of many other neighborhoods—white, black, and Asian—have done the same. As New Orleanians have found out the hard way, the work is backbreaking, but not impossible.
What individual New Orleanians can’t do by themselves is fix the city’s long-broken attitude toward criminal justice. Over and over again during my February trip to New Orleans, I heard how demoralized residents feel when they buy and install new appliances, pipes, and furniture for their flooded-out houses, leave for a day or two, often to temporary homes—and return to find their hard-earned new handiwork ripped out and stolen.
For generations now—and this is the city’s deepest problem—New Orleans has hobbled along without a real law-and-order presence. Criminals graduate from petty crimes to burglary to drug-dealing to carrying illegal weapons to gang robberies to murder, and face few consequences at any stage. The police, and especially the prosecutors, are ineffectual. Since Katrina, things have gotten much worse, in part because criminals, finding life difficult in cities that enforce the law, have returned to the Big Easy in numbers disproportionate to those of law-abiding citizens. Mayor Ray Nagin doesn’t try to fix things, perhaps because, as he often says, he believes crime is a social problem, rooted in a lack of opportunity for poor youth.
The Bush administration has deployed extra federal law-enforcement agents to try to get the worst criminals off the street. The state of Louisiana, meanwhile, has sent the National Guard to patrol half-empty neighborhoods. But just as the U.S. military can only do so much in Iraq when Baghdad’s local government is ineffective, the federal government can’t do much in New Orleans until the city’s local government changes its attitude and behavior. Residents have no reason to think that criminal behavior has predictable negative consequences, because Nagin and New Orleans district attorney Eddie Jordan have failed to make clear that people who commit crimes in New Orleans will be prosecuted.
But President Bush can use federal dollars to try to convince them to do it. In his speech in New Orleans on Wednesday, Bush should announce that he’s ready to ask Congress for $500 million over two years to overhaul New Orleans’s police and prosecutorial forces. But he also should say that the money is contingent on a pledge from Nagin and Jordan that their city’s Number One priority will be law enforcement. Bush should also tie the federal money to measurable results: rational arrests (from quality-of-life crimes all the way up to homicide), effective prosecutions, and, ultimately, fewer crimes.
It’s an enduring mystery why Bush hasn’t used the Katrina disaster to show the world that America can rebuild a major city using a bedrock conservative principle: law and order first. Democrats are welcome to propose the same idea, of course. Obama, Edwards, and Clinton have all mentioned New Orleans’s crime problem in their recent speeches. But they often tie it to a lack of staff and equipment in the city after Katrina—as if it’s a question of rebuilding something that was lost, instead of building from scratch the most essential component of any city’s success. Until politicians understand that basic difference, spending more money—or bragging about past billions spent—while tolerating intolerable conditions in a first-world city is nothing short of disgraceful.
That is like saying to a guy having a heart attack "Hey, you are having a heart attack, due to your diet and the buildup of plaque in your arteries, so I'm going to write you a prescription for Zocor to bring down your cholesterol."
There are most likely many reasons for the disease-like crime in New Orleans, but you still have to treat the symptoms first and then fight the disease.
It will sounds hurtful but I just don’t care about New Orleans anymore except as an example of how not to run a city and how not to elect socialists. I know most of the victims are black but many made themselves victims. And you know what, you don’t have to be black to be a victim but much of the time you can choose not to be a victim if you just THINK.
No it won't. New Orleans has always been a city of cutthroats, pirates, brigands and ne'er-do-wells. It will continue to be as much until the gulf takes her back.
What is the difference between NO, Detroit, Newark, East St. Louis, East LA, and on, and on , and on, except that NO has a plumbing problem?
Prior to the Civil War, Louisiana was far and away the wealthiest state in the Confederacy...a substantial portion of that wealth was ill-gotten.
NO still has the National Guard on patrol.
Yep, New Orleans had all these problems before. They are just magnified by some of these issues.
I was taken aback to see here that the criminal element has come back to New Orleans from other cities that actually enforce the law. Hmmm.........That’s food for thought.
The smart people got their chance to get out, and they don’t want to go back. What would they be going back to? A worse Hell than what they left?
Many of the NO people came to Houston and our crime rate has spiked. My husband had his truck broken into during lunch today and his pistol stolen. I wonder if a NO native did it, or was it a Houston born thug.
On CNN’s Katrina anniversary coverage yesterday, an EMT person revealed that they have noticed a sharp spike in mentally ill returnees. They must not have enjoyed living among sane people in other places.
“Bush should tie federal money to measurable results: rational arrests and fewer crimes”
Idiotic policy that’s been tried before. End result? The police simply report fewer crimes - they get free money. Does ANYONE still understand why limited government is the way to go anymore?
They must like living in the middle of drive-by shootings.
Good catch. I prefer declaring NO a tax free zone for the next 20 years. Overnight, chocolate city would lighten preceptably causing the crime rate to drop through the floor. If I could shield my income for the next 20 years, I would be in NO the next morning buying property. The big down side to my plan would be that NO would not be big enough to accomodate the number of people wishing to relocate.
That is like saying to a guy having a heart attack "Hey, you are having a heart attack, due to your diet and the buildup of plaque in your arteries, so I'm going to write you a prescription for Zocor to bring down your cholesterol."
There are most likely many reasons for the disease-like crime in New Orleans, but you still have to treat the symptoms first and then fight the disease.
That is a superb analogy!
There is probably no sort of crisis, if it cannot be framed as social victimhood, about which (supposedly intelligent ) people would declare: Let us ignore the current crisis, and immediately begin treating what we advanced thinkers recognize as the root cause.
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