This just keeps coming up:
Katrina fatigue erupted into anger and frustration Wednesday night, as more than 1,700 west Houston residents urged Mayor Bill White to send evacuees home to New Orleans.
I’m going to say this as simply as possible:
For many evacuees, there is no “home” in New Orleans right now.
Roughly 100,000 Houstonians had a New Orleans mailing address a year ago, but they live here now. Some folks may eventually be able to move back, but it isn’t feasable today.
One year after the city of Houston welcomed at least 250,000 evacuees, more than 100,000 New Orleans natives still remain. West Houston residents who gathered Wednesday at Grace Presbyterian Church to address increases in violent crime over the past year in their community said evacuees are to blame.
Sorry, but Houston was not some kind of crime-free oasis prior to September 2005. The HPD is seriously understaffed… and has been. Yes, it’s true that some former New Orleanians are committing crimes, and Houston’s violent crime rate is up…. as are other cities across America (WaPo).
Crime is at a “tipping point” in America, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which organized the National Violent Crime Summit.
“We are turning the country over to our young people, and they are killing each other,” said Dean Esserman, police chief of Providence, R.I., where robberies have increased. “Violence has become gratuitous. Where is the moral outrage?”
[snip]
Anthony Braga, criminologist at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said criminals’ “rules of engagement” changed in the 1990s, when teenagers were increasingly shooting each other over petty disputes and perceived slights.
“The youth are clearly driving this,” he said. “The age of these kids is going down as the years pass.”
The heart of the problem is with the young people. “Youths” and “teens” are standard euphemisms for a national epidemic, and complaining that “evacuees aren’t getting jobs” sounds pretty silly when you’re talking about 15- or 16-year olds with guns and no boundaries.
Houston’s violent crime issue has more in common with the rest of the country, though, than the ages of most of its perpetrators: most of these municipalities’ police departments are under-resourced. Whether through attrition, low recruitment, or lack of attention, the focus has not been on local crime (Mercury News):
Some experts say that declining federal grants for crime-fighting could be contributing to the rise in crime. But they note that other factors are probably involved as well, including a generation of criminals incarcerated in the 1980s and `90s that is now returning to the streets.
“It is true that the federal support for local law enforcement and preventive programs has plummeted,” said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “I think that matters. I would say that’s not the only thing going on, but it does hurt.”
Senior lawmakers in Congress agree.
Houston has no corner on the crime market, but with all the Katrina-centric blame-gaming, it’s starting to sound like a mean-spirited, myopic city of whiners — very disappointing in the face of its reputation as an energetic beehive populated with creative, entrepreneurial problem-solvers.
Enough already.
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More related Polimom posts here, here, and here.
Others blogging: blogHOUSTON, Lou Minatti, Your Right Hand Thief, da po’ blog
More from the Houston Chronicle here and here.
Hi Mom;
I couldn’t agree with you more concerning the misguided blame for our problems in Houston. The saddest thing fo rme is how we are destroying ther repuation we earned post Katrina as a city with a heart. This sadness first struck me when I returned from a 10 hour morning volunteering at the Astrodome to go to work, and my boss asked me whether I saw any rapes in the parking lot. Talk show hosts were passing rumors of violent crimes being done in the Stadium bathrooms. This was less than a week later, and many citizens already were ready to throw everyone out and quit.
Hi Tom,
I lay a lot of the blame for this (though certainly not all) on the media, whose irresponsible coverage of the immediate aftermath in New Orleans led to an astounding number of fantasies and urban legends. (an old post on the subject can be found here.
Those early stories set a lot of this up… but then again, people tend to read, and believe, the things that support views already held.
From NOAA – … (Katrina) landfall in south Florida at around 6.30 EDT(A.M.) on August 25th, … Katrina spent only seven hours over (Flordia) … virtually all models showed the storm to increase (went to Cat 5, then down to Cat 4 by final landfall) and make landfall in the western Louisiana to eastern Mississippi coast.
That’s four days warning for the Big Easy of being in the center of the hurricane warnings. And the LOCAL government during those days should have evacuated the people.
The numbers don’t lie. It is a FACT. People who were former Louisiana (New Orleans and surrounding areas) residents have had an overwhelming effect on violent crime in Houston and the surrounding areas.
It can be shown on the city maps where so many of the evacuees live, the crime level there goes off the charts. You surely aren’t saying those punks with the stupid street names from Louisiana didn’t kill those people are you? What were they doing free anyway? They’d killed people in Louisiana and the police arrested them. *Sad*
It’s not just COMMITING crimes either. When the police check for ID of the dead person, and it is a Louisiana card, that’s an effect. And PLEASE don’t compare the two police departments. New Orleans is known as having the worse and lowest paid police in the nation. Yes, Houston could have used more police on the street before September last year but in some areas of the city now, they need rolling armored SWAT trucks on constant patrol.
You can’t honestly argue that this hasn’t harmed Houston greatly. Businesses that have been running for years closing their doors because of the repeated crimes directly traced back to evacuees. Certain gangs that have NEVER been in Houston area schools are using Louisiana gangbangers to recruit local punks and expand their criminal operations.
Check the percentage of violent crimes in the five preceding years and note the jump in the past year. Make a three-year chart of the rising crime rate in Houston you talk about and look at the HUGE spike that occurred starting in September last year.
Houston is a city with heart and we did take people in to help. Almost nobody else in the nation would. I didn’t see those Democrat cities and states like Los Angles, New York, Detroit, Pennsylvania, Boston, or such offering to take even part of the almost a quarter-million people we did without hesitation. Like I said, Houston has a big heart but it seems to many here a year later we’re getting stabbed in it repeatedly from the back.
Not all, but a lot of these “guests” have overstayed their welcome. Like the deadbeat relation that comes over to stay on your couch for a “few days” but never leaves, it’s getting old. The feds need to cut loose all those trailer homes and set them up and those folks who are criminals or welfare lifers not interested in finding work need to be bussed back home.
What happened in New Orleans was a tragedy but one almost everyone knew sooner than later was going to happen; and the hurricane didn’t really HIT New Orleans. You build a city in a hole with two sides consisting of a big lake and the Gulf of Mexico; it’s a perfect setup for a tragedy. Now that same storm that made shambles of coastal Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana a year ago is making for a second tragedy here in Houston.
And by the way, I’m talking about people 18 years of age and older.
The New Orleans gangbangers in the Houston schools have been mostly 17 and older because in Texas if you want to go to school you can until you are 21. They don’t want school for education they want it for recruitment.
But fear not, the crime will go down one way or another. Unlike Louisiana, Texas has no problem sentencing a 17-year-old killer to death and 15 year-old killer to 99years plus-one-dark-day .
Jezum, Lazarus — you packed so many myths, lies, irrelevancies, and legends into that first comment, it’s not even worth trying to sort out the sentence or two with value you buried in there. That’s too bad, actually; those might otherwise have been jump-off points for worthwhile discussion.
That’s an easy statement to make since you don’t give any particulars. Point out :
(1) myths
(2) lies
(3) irrelevancies
(4) legends ??
Still waiting.
Poli,
It isn’t simply the media. IIRC, Chief Hurtt made some sort of claim that the increase in crime in Houston over the past 12 months or so could be *directly attributed* to the influx of evacuees from the NOLA area – heck, if the chief of HPD says it, then it *must* be so, and if he said it then the mayor of the city must at least know of it (and most likely approve)… yes?
Of course, you make good points – and so did the spokesman for the area of Houston where the meeting was held, when he said that since the folks out there didn’t exercise their right to vote, why should they expect the elected officials to pay them any mind?
~EdT.
Still waiting
Hi Ed — No, it’s not just the media… and of cource there are criminals amongst those who came from New Orleans. Nobody knows that as well as the folks who tried to live among them prior to Katrina, too.
By repeating and amplifying unsubstantiated rumors, though, the media enabled (or in some cases re-affirmed) a prejudgment of all the evacuees.
And the whole “send them all back” meme just makes people look silly. Of course, the media might be over-amplifying that, too…. with similar effect on all Houstonians.
Still waiting :
Here is something to read while you make up ore BS
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4171615.html
Good job Lazarus. Polimom is another liberal full of you know what. Maybe when one of these thugs crawls through her window one night she’ll have a different perspective. I spent two years in New Orleans, and it was a hellhole. And yes, that police department was CORRUPT BEYOND BELIEF.
Plenty of these transplants are THUGS. That is a fact. In the two years I was in New Orleans attending graduate school on academic scholarship, I had a friend raped, another robbed at gunpoint, another carjacked, and another close-lined off of his bicycle by a 12 year old kid (who got on the bike and road off with it). Also, a law student was shot to death in a grocery store, and a fraternity kid was killed on a college campus.
Nobody is saying that every New Orleanian is a thug. But quit towing the liberal line and trying to make us believe there aren’t a large number of crooks in that bunch we took in. You never addressed Lazarus because you can’t. You are a typical liberal – you cannot backup anything you say. Why don’t you move to Berkeley?
You’ll be waiting for a while Lazarus. She has no response. Typical.