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Loyola University • New Orleans • Volume 96 • Issue 9 • November 3, 2017
THE MAROON NOV. 3, 2017
By John Casey jecasey@my.loyno.edu @J_E_CASEY
Over the last decade... Most cases are going unsolved Fewer police are on patrol Hundreds are shot every year
The city of New Orleans is on a grim streak. The first of October marked the 46th consecutive year with over 120 homicides in the city. Only two other American cities with populations under a million can claim the same streak: Detroit and Baltimore. Homicides, however, are just a telling piece of a much bigger problem. For New Orleans, efforts to quell crime seem to be falling short as Uniformed Crime Reporting shows an 11 percent increase to date compared to last year. According to crime analyst Jeff Asher, spikes in car burglaries and shoplifting have largely contributed to the increase. Asher, a former analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense and the New Orleans Police Department, now runs his own consultant firm. Despite no longer working on the department's payroll, he still does New Orleans crime data analysis for public awareness. During a crime forum at Loyola in mid-October, Asher repeatedly mentioned one crucial statistic with a huge impact on the city's crime problem: a depleted police force. NOPD went from 1,366 officers in 2006 to only 1,092 as of the end of the third quarter in 2017, according to the department. Police statistics also show from 2006 to 2016, the number of robberies per year has nearly doubled from 761 to 1,445 and the number of assaults per year has increased from 1,245 to 2,093. During that same time span, burglaries have dropped significantly from 4,087 in 2006 to 2,427 in 2016, but theft numbers have seen an increase. In 2006, just over 5,000 thefts were reported but in 2016 that number had exceeded 10,000. The sheer amount of crime is not the only problem. According to NOPD data, murder clearance rates are also struggling. In 2010, the murder clearance rate was at 53.1 percent. In 2016, that number fell to 26.3 percent and as of the first quar-
ter of 2017 the number was at 18.3 percent. As of today, NOPD has removed clearance rate statistics from the section of their website intended to provide transparency on crime statistics. Asher said the decline in officers is directly correlated to the drop in clearance rates. "It's not just that NOPD lost these officers, it's that they lost these capabilities. The homicide unit went from 43 officers to 29 officers, so that's a 35 percent reduction. 35 percent reduction in homicide detectives means fewer cases solved which means more retribution which continues this cycle," he said. While shooting incidents are up over 10 percent on the year, murders are down 6.2 percent. New Orleans is on pace this year for the highest number of shooting victims in the past seven years, having reached 500 victims as of October 19. In previous years, the city reached that number in mid-to-late November or not at all. All of these numbers are significantly down from when the city murder rate skyrocketed in 2006, but Asher says comparing data now to then is misguided due to the shift in population caused by Hurricane Katrina. "So if you start in 2006, New Orleans' murder rate was largely driven by the fact that there were 200,000 people here, so the city shrunk by 260,000 people almost overnight, and so the city's murder rates in 2006-07 and 1993-94 were arguably the highest murder rates ever recorded for an American city. So if you start in 2006 and compare it to today, things look good but if you were to sort of assess the progress of the Saints, you wouldn't start with 1981 when they went 1-15, you would be more interested in how they are doing relative to the year they won the Super Bowl or years where you would sort of see success, which not to sort of belittle the concept of murder or the seriousness of the subject but from a pure data analysis perspective, starting in
See CRIME, page 8
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