New Orleans Needs a Rudy, Violent crime is still the Big Easy’s biggest problem.

NRO ^ | April 21, 2006 | Nicole Gelinas

[ncountylee]

Voters in New Orleans go to the polls Saturday to choose the mayor who will shepherd the city through its slow and uncertain recovery. To give their city its best chance for renewal, old-line New Orleans Democrats should do the unthinkable. They should do what New Yorkers had to do to save their own city in 1993: suppress their natural instincts and vote for the Republican.

New Orleans hasn't had a Republican mayor since Reconstruction. But the credible Republican in the seven-person race of top-tier candidates, Rob Couhig, is the only candidate who, during this week's debates, correctly identified New Orleans's number-one city-killer: its violent-crime rate. (New Orleans doesn't hold separate party primaries: the two top vote-getters in Saturday's primary advance to a run-off May 20, unless one candidate wins a majority of votes.)

"The first thing we have to do is have a safe city," Couhig said when a debate moderator asked each candidate for his or her top three goals for the next mayoral term. "We're going to have a zero tolerance toward crime from day one." In interviews, Couhig has said that he would model his crime-fighting strategy after former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's successful strategy for New York in the nineties.

Couhig, a corporate lawyer, doesn't have Giuliani's prosecutorial experience, but at least he has diagnosed the top problem. By contrast, the three front-runners in the race — Democrats Ron Forman, Mitch Landrieu, and current mayor Ray Nagin — named top goals ranging from fixing the city's broken public-education system or encouraging the feds to build stronger levees to jumpstarting new-housing construction.

[griffmorpho]

It's a sad fact that U.S. cities dominated by black politicians will always suffer from high crime. It's because the vast majority of black Americans have been bamboozled by the Democrats into trusting collectivism as their only saviour. Communities conditioned to be heavily dependent on the government (i.e. the socialist-welfare state) inevitably descend into chronic poverty and crime.

(Crime in socialist countries is only low if the place is a total police state like the Soviet Union. Then you only have the low quality of life --- and the possibility of being sent to a forced labor camp.)

If New Orleans elects another liberal Democrat mayor, you can expect them to ignore crime, waste money on feel-good "solutions", then blame the whole mess on President Bush...again.

[griffmorpho]

The thugs are back already? Has the Louisiana state guard left already? Perhaps they need to construct a base there on the remains of the Lower Ninth Ward, and stay awhile.

I have many friends from Japan, where street crime is practically nonexistent. They can't believe there are huge sections of our major cities that look like Somalia. (I assured them that not all of America is as dangerous as most of Detroit. Not really.)

I always wanted to visit New Orleans, but I try to avoid spending vacation money in places I'm likely to be mugged --- like Washington, D.C., South Africa...or Paris, France.

[texgal]

I don't think the thugs ever really left as far as the State Guard, all I saw was a few (very few) police in cars. I would never choose to live in a place like New Orleans. It feels like the working class is there to be preyed upon by those who choose not to work for a living. I personally feel that the good Lord gave the place a much needed bath and gave some folks an opportunity to get out of Sodom & Gomorrah. I can't wait for my son-in-law to graduate and for them to come back home to Texas.

[griffmorpho]

It's a shame. Not to romanticize (old) New Orleans, but I understand it used to be a much better place to live years ago --- at least the crime rate hadn't yet reached the disgracefully high levels of the 1980s to the present.

You're absolutely right about the working class being the main victims of the people who don't care to work. In San Francisco, for example, there are plenty of limousine liberals who are insulated from the effects of their own stupid policies. The rich left-leaning Democrats in Pacific Heights don't have to rub shoulders with the vagrants and the drug dealers downtown, unlike the average working guy who has to ride the bus.

There could be an opportunity for real change in N.O. (i.e. bring law-and-order to the place), and clean up more than just the debris left over from Katrina, but I'm skeptical. Especially if the incompetent Ray "Chocolate City" Nagin retains his post.