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.
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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.”