There’s a beautiful hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. It’s rooms and suites are individually named and uniquely decorated, the floors tilt ever-so-slightly, and nothing is quite plumb.
I stayed there many times pre-Katrina — but I was always just a bit uncomfortable, because conversation with the doorman invariably went along these lines:
Doorman: Can I park your car, ma’am?
Polimom: No, I’ll be going back out in a half an hour or so. I’ve parked it beside/behind the hotel.
Doorman: [pause] That’s probably okay, but it’s much better if you let me park your car in the garage.
No. It was not okay. Not then, and especially not now — because behind that hotel is where numbers 4, 5, 10, and 11 are displayed on this NOLA.com map of the most recent murders.
We were playing the New Orleans PR game — the one that says New Orleans is safe to visit as long as one stays out of certain areas. The game that Warren Riley is playing still:
Three New Year’s Eve killings brought the city’s murder total to 161 for 2006, a figure New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley touted Monday as the lowest total in 30 years.
Riley’s an idiot, because murder and violent crime are absolutely out of control in New Orleans.
Of course, that’s been true for decades, but it’s been “okay”, because “they’re only killing each other”, and “as long as you stay in the safe areas”, New Orleans is great to visit.
“They”, of course, means the drug dealers who held their own communities hostage for so long.
Yes (the thinking went), life was tough for those folks in the projects who were just trying to live their lives, or the working poor in the Lower Nine… but “they” were doing this to “themselves”. It didn’t really require a lot of time or attention, as long as Uptown, or the French Quarter, were relatively safe.
Since Riley’s Pollyanna moment on Monday, there have been 7 more murders — a total that included six in less then 24 hours, and among them:
On Thursday, shortly before 6 a.m., police responded to reports of a shooting at a shotgun double on the corner of North Rampart and Spain streets in the Marigny neighborhood. Just inside the front door, Gailiunas was found on his knees, holding his toddler son and bleeding from gunshot wounds to his hand, forearm and cheek, police said.
Inside, his 36-year-old wife lay dead with a gunshot wound to the neck.
Both Hill and Gailiunas were community activists, volunteering at Food Not Bombs and local educational workshops, friends said.
This clearly isn’t “them”… right? This is different… right?
Wrong. It’s not different. What has always been true, but not embraced or admitted, was that every time a New Orleanian was murdered, whether in Central City, Algiers, the Quarter, or the Fauberg Marigny, it affected the entire city.
Not, it’s not new at all… but if the city continues to sweep its crime problem under the rug, it may very well be the final, fatal straw on the struggling camel’s back.
I don’t know what it will take to bring security to NOLA, but I do know that if the city’s leaders and residents don’t get this turned around, all the levees and wetlands in the world won’t keep NOLA from murdering itself.
* * * * *
Update: Oops. Did I say 7 murders so far this year? Make that 8:
According to Officer Sabrina Richardson, an NOPD spokesperson, the murder took place around 7:20 a.m. in the 7400 block of Pitt Street in Uptown. Second District officers responding to a burglary call found an unidentified African-American woman shot in the head inside her home. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Meanwhile, the game goes on:
The killings have occurred mostly in neighbourhoods far from tourist hot spots like the French Quarter, and are largely ascribed to rival gangs and drug dealers who began returning in large numbers last year.
“It’s black-on-black crime, for the most part,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on WWL-TV on Thursday. “It’s unfortunate.”
I posted about this but Nagin is right for the most part it is black on black crime. Because of political correctness and the race baiting poverty pimps(Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP, etc..) real solutions aren’t available. The police are not allowed to go on the offense.
Nagin And Riley babble and doubletalk on..
http://www.nola.com/newsflash/louisiana/index.ssf?/base/news-29/1168101553195380.xml&storylist=louisiana
This is gonna sound like a terrible suggestions, friends (and lots of y’all might very well yell at me…) — but it’s possible that martial law is required.
Moaning about Nola’s schools, or the dead-end job prospects, or the CJ system (all of which I’ve written about until my fingers bled, seems like) won’t make this problem go away. Neither will curfew. The situation is right now, today.
I was trying to do the math on the murder rate. It translates to 1 in every 995 people or something…
Martian law? If NOPD can’t handle things, how can you expect little green guys with death rays to do any better?
Oh, I see… you said martial law – my bad.
I don’t see that as a better solution than inviting the little green d00dz in, though. The military really isn’t trained in LE matters (and NOLA doesn’t really need the “kill people and blow up *$^” treatment, though some might disagree.) Sorry, but I think the city fathers and police need to do their freakin’ jobs – and if they can’t, throw them the hell out and bring in somebody who can.
~EdT.
” Sorry, but I think the city fathers and police need to do their freakin’ jobs – and if they can’t, throw them the hell out and bring in somebody who can.”
We tried that during the last Mayoral Election, Sadly it did not work…
Nagin got what he wanted. I wouldn’t authorize the expenditure of another penny of my tax dollars to assist in crime control in NO. The economy is done, you can stick a fork in it. The best that can happen now is we give those with a brain 6 months to get out and then we seal it off and let the remainder have at it.
Ouch, Glide.
I understand your frustration, though. Nagin is a complete disaster, and I’m sorry sorry that he won that election.
I’m nowhere near ready to give up on Nola, though. To coin an overworked Bushism — failure is not an option.
Yea, I flamed on that one, but I love NO and my wife’s family roots go back to the “beginning” complete with the original family home in the Quarter, and to see what’s happened there has made it too painful for us even to return. There are a number of factions to blame for the current situation, not the least of which is the Feds themselves and Nagin and company. What really has me fuming however is Nagin’s blatant racist remarks. Those remarks will, in my opinion be the undoing of New Orleans because such rhetoric is unforgettable and has the effect of being just the last nudge necessary to push a business type toward the door with their capital, deciding against investing in Orleans Parish.
Having practiced criminal law and having many friends in law enforcement, I can tell you that the primary problem with the murder rate in NO is an overwhelmed District Attorney’s office, insufficient jail space and a police department that has been decimated. Frankly, yes, I believe Martial Law should be invoked; Law Enforcement, (State, not NO) and the national guard should go door to door, confiscate all weaponry and arrest and deport to holding facilities those known to be out on “bond” pending trial for last months murder. The needs of NO are a mirror image of the needs of Baghdad.
Maybe it should be. Maybe, if the inhabitants of NOLA actually had to face that their city could collapse in a wave of crime and anarchy that would make Beirut and Baghdad look like model communities, and that a bailout from the Feds wasn’t a given, they would develop the cojones needed to face – and deal with – the deteriorating situation there. I seem to recall something similar happening to NYC and other large cities back in Jerry Ford’s day, and he had a simple response to their sitting-on-their-butts-expecting-Washington-to-bail-them-out attitude:
No.
Look at NYC today. Perfect it is not, but neither did it implode as was the expectation at the time. I suspect the NOLAinians have the same backbone that the rest of us do, they just need to be persuaded to exercise it.
~EdT.
Your comparison to Baghdad, Glide, was funny (not haha funny — odd funny) — since I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing.
And I know that your vent was the frustration bubbling up. I sooooo understand.
EdT — At one time, I thought the situation could be turned around. I’m far less hopeful now.
If in fact it is not possible to ‘turn the situation around’, then I certainly don’t see any value in prolonging the agony. Let Nature reclaim the land, and at least use it to protect other areas of the state from future devastation.
Unfortunately, if this proves to be the case, I think the bulk of the responsibility lies square on the shoulders of the New Orleanians (with some — very little — of it shared between the state and Federal governments.) Simply put, it was their decision to continue with a failed model. And, it would appear that the local tourism industry was heavily involved both in the decisions that led to the pre-Katrina debacle (where evacuation was delayed, because they were afraid of adverse reactions to the cancellation of events) and the current clusterfrakkage (thanks to their lack of support for a curfew.)
~EdT.
Ed T, with regard to the situation, pre-Katrina, a bit of history may serve to illume. At the time of the second world war, NOLA enjoyed a boom of sorts, fueled by the war effort, and built upon the port business and the businesses that had sprung up around it, see http://www.unitedfruit.org/ . That port business was highly labor intensive as were the war industries, (Higgins Boats) http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq60-5.htm and many black and white rural laborers from Louisiana and Mississippi moved to NOLA to work in these industries. In fact, the original “projects” such as Desire were built to house these workers by the government. The monied set of NOLA that largely ran many of the port and rail line businesses have their family roots back to pre-civil war days and their family histories are intimately tied to the Mardi Gras Krewe’s which were one of their “Social” outlets. That “Krewe” society was heavily patriarchal in nature. Their wives, (graduates of Sophie Newcomb) spent most of their time raising money for charities, etc. The “back story” to this is that the Good Ole Boys lead a pretty high flying life; wine, women and song and the pent up resentment of their wives was soon to bubble up in one of the strangest migrations of all time. Not long after the war, beginning in the 1950’s to the early 1960’s, the last of the Good Ole Boys started passing on. The pent up resentment of the Ladies resulted in their selling out, first the home on St. Charles or on the Metairie Country Club, then the Summer Home in Gulfport or Mandeville, and they relocated to North/South Carolina and the Virginias. They appear to have been resentful not only of the recently deceased dandy of a husband, but of their offspring as well whom many were heard to say were worthless neer-do-wells. And, the busineses were sold or merged and the silk stocking set dwindled rapidly in number. This diminishment accelerated in the 70’s and 80’s as the City of NOLA imposed ever higher taxes. That set of wealthy, who had, for generations been the actual leadership and builders of the city were replaced, if not displaced by nouveau riche oil money, (most of which has not returned since Katrina).
Now as all of this was going on, the jobs those workers had come to take dwindled and all but disappeared. This was aggravated by modernization of the port and the loss of the “domestics” industry. Hotel and tourism could hardly keep up; more and more business closed up and there are whole blocks of downtown NOLA that, by the mid 1990’s were completely vacant. Enter of course the 1965 Great Society give away programs and the unemployed were left to fend for themselves while housing was made free for generations of unwed mothers. Tax base fell to pieces and took with it the education system. What was left? Most of the areas that were so badly devestated were occupied by retirees; they won’t or can’t return. The point I’m trying to make is that you are correct that the city can’t come back as it had existed before. It shouldn’t! The job base disappeared PRE-KATRINA! What’s really going on now is that the city will and must contract like a raisin in the sun to a size that fits it’s natural job base. I’ve practically concluded that the only way to get a grip on the crime there is for either the State or the Feds to say enough and take the City over; hand Nagin a check to go-away; suspend city gov’t and assume it’s operations; buldoze the abandonned homes; compensate their owners and help them find lives and jobs in other locations.
this is sickening, what people are doing to each other. i live in philadelphia which closed out 2006 with well over 400 murders, and its like there is nothing being done. what is there really to do?
nyc- Manhattan- may be under controll, you drive around and see police on every corner, but what about the bronx, queens, brooklyn, yonkers….
there are so many cities in the same situation as you guys, and there just arent enough people to take care of it, let alone people who know how to take care of it.
for every gun that gets taken off the street, another one gets sold illegally. and most people that have guns legally have them to protect themselves from those who dont.
no win situation… i agree with Glide, lets put all the animals together, seal them off and see how long they last.