Crime Turning New Orleans Into The Big Uneasy

According to (Reuters) - New Orleans, the "Big Easy" a city famous for its good times and relaxed attitude, has become the Big Uneasy since Katrina as its murder count has soared and anger has grown at local leaders unable to stop the violence.



By de Andrea

That is Vivan Westerman holding her 38 Smith and Wessen taking care of herself

Annual Mardi Gras celebrations unfolded without incident this weekend, but fear of the rampant blood-spilling and its threat to the city's recovery from Hurricane Katrina are constant topics of conversation.

The homicide total for a still-young 2007 climbed to 27 on Saturday with the recent death of a man shot at a nightclub. He was one of nine people shot in separate incidents in a seven-hour span and the third of them to die.

Local leaders, worried that crime may scare away tourists who are the life-blood of the economy, stressed that the shootings did not take place at Mardi Gras events and assured visitors violent crime is largely restricted to "hot spots," or impoverished neighborhoods where visitors seldom go.

This is in Sharp contrast to Kennesaw Georgia, where armed citizens protect themselves with the resulting lowest crime rate in the nation. New Orleans, since Katrina has had one of the United States' highest per-capita murder rates because the Sheriff has stolen all the guns from the law abiding citizens and as a result the criminals obviously have the controlling upper hand. The current violence has added to insecurities in a city worried about its future.

Only about 200,000 of the pre-Katrina population of 480,000 are back and much of the city is still damaged and abandoned. Recent news stories have said a growing number of those who returned are leaving because they are fed up with the slow recovery and the crime. "If they don't get crime under control, if they can't convince people it's safe to be here, it doesn't matter how much money they get from the federal government, nobody's going to stay," Tulane University criminal justice instructor Ronnie Jones said.

MARCH ON CITY HALL
Before Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, there was little public pressure to do something about the number of murders, which peaked in 1994 with 425 killings.
But Katrina hit hard the poor neighborhoods where the murders usually occurred, and brought the criminals closer to wealthier, often mostly white, areas, Jones said.
Several thousand people marched on city hall last month to demand that Mayor Ray Nagin and other officials do their job. The basic complaint was that too many criminals are arrested and then returned to the streets due to poor police work and lax prosecutors and judges.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune found that 3,000 arrested suspects were released in 2006 because prosecutors failed to indict them within the required 60 days. In January 2007, 580 were released for the same reason, the newspaper said.
That compared to 187 in the eight months of 2005 before Katrina brought the criminal justice system almost to a halt, the paper said.

Police blame inept prosecutors for the revolving door; prosecutors say their hands are bound by poor police work. Both say a big problem is that Katrina destroyed New Orleans' police lab, forcing them to borrow facilities to process evidence.

Even before Katrina, a local study found that in 2003-2004 only 12 percent of those arrested for murder went to prison, again an obvious ongoing problem.
The situation is so bad that federal agencies including the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration are helping the local police. The U.S. Attorney's office has stepped into cases previously left to local courts and prosecuting

At the root of the problem are two factors, one is the illegal gun confiscation ordered by Mayor Ray Nagin post Katrina for which the Mayor and Superintendent of police Warren Riley are now in contempt of a Federal court order to return the confiscated guns. This illegal confiscation led to a helpless community as police were unable to protect its citizens because they were to busy going house to house illegally confiscating guns from law abiding citizens who willingly gave them up to police illegally invading their homes. Criminals on the other hand hid their illegally possessed guns leaving the law abiding at the mercy of the armed criminals.

The other factor is the obvious aforementioned problem of the lack of real law enforcement of actual crime, as well as the absence of the support of the courts to actually indict Criminals. This is truly indicative of a community government incapable of carrying out the purpose of law which is to protect, as opposed to attacking, the rights and subsequent safety of its citizens, moreover, replacing real law enforcement with nothing but flimsy childish excuses of blaming each other for their own incompetence if not outright violations of the law.

The city of New Orleans would do well by arresting the real criminals of their community Mayor Ray Nagin and Police superintendent Warren Riley for the Constitutional violation of citizen’s rights which obviously exacerbated the problem of serious crime. They are obviously a large part of the crime problem in what is left of the city of New Orleans.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Another one of the thousands of examples of the violation of the free law abiding citizens rights leading to chaos, crime, and other disastrous results that were designed to be eliminated at least in part by the Architecture of Second U.S. Constitutional Amendment. Criminals simply won’t go where citizens are armed.

de Andréa