New Orleans Struggles to Stem Homicides

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Mr. Dolliole, who was 22, was the 175th homicide victim in New Orleans this year, a tally that matched the previous year’s homicide count, but with more than a month before 2011 was out. Since Mr. Dolliole’s killing, there have been eight more victims, including two men shot dead in a pickup truck, two shot dead in a sedan and another shot on the street in broad daylight.

Of all the challenges facing the city of New Orleans, none is as urgent or as relentlessly grim as the city’s homicide rate. It was measured at 10 times the national average in 2010, long before shootings on Halloween night in the crowded French Quarter revealed to a larger public what was going on in poor neighborhoods around the city every week. There were 51 homicides per 100,000 residents here last year, compared with less than 7 per 100,000 in New York or 23 in similar-size Oakland, Calif.

“From September of last year to February of this year,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu in a recent speech, after reciting a litany of killings from one city high school, “a student attending John McDonogh was more likely to be killed than a soldier in Afghanistan.”

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New Orleans has long been a violent town; in 1994, there were 421 killings here, one of which was a hit ordered by a police officer. With federal intervention, the homicide rate dropped precipitously but began rising again around 2000 and has been fluctuating since Hurricane Katrina. The killers and their victims are overwhelmingly young black men, according to an analysis of homicide cases by outside experts last March, and sponsored by the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance. {snip}

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Many killings in New Orleans are a result of conflicts and vendettas among small, loosely organized groups, the analysis concluded, but in nearly half the cases, the experts listed the primary motive as uncertain or unknown. Only about half the homicide cases are cleared.

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Fighting the homicide epidemic is doubly hard with a police department already known for corruption and facing a major federal overhaul. {snip}

While that overhaul is being mapped out, scores of New Orleans police officers have been convicted, charged, terminated or pushed to resign over abuses, cover-ups or in some cases killings–this week began the federal trial of two officers who are charged with lying about the shooting of a man after Hurricane Katrina. {snip}

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