Seventy-five people were killed or wounded by gunfire in New Orleans in the first month of the year – more than twice the total in January 2016, according to a Times-Picayune tally of police reports. The staggering total this month, more than two a day, comes on the heels of a violent 2016 that saw increases in murders and nonfatal shootings.
The total includes victims of a double shooting Tuesday night (Jan. 31) that New Orleans police said left two people dead outside Edna Karr High School in Algiers. It also includes a woman killed and another woman injured in a second double shooting Tuesday night, this one in New Orleans East.
Tuesday’s killings raised January’s murder tally to 22, the highest since January 2012, when 25 people were killed. All but three homicides this year have been confirmed as caused by gunshots.
While too early to draw conclusions on the rest of the year, criminologists say New Orleans’ rising gun violence is evidence of a troubling trend playing out in cities across the country. Baltimore, for example, had 25 killings in the first 26 days of the year, according to The Baltimore Sun.
“The national trend doesn’t look good,” said Jay Corzine, a sociology professor at the University of Central Florida. “It’s pointing to, in large urban areas, more violence and more lethal violence. Right now, nobody has a good handle on it.”
NOPD Deputy Chief Paul Noel said any level of violence is concerning. But, he added, the department’s continued partnership with state and federal law enforcement agencies and the institution of a city-wide public safety plan announced by Mayor Mitch Landrieu earlier this month should bring down violence in New Orleans.
Two pieces of the Landrieu administration’s plan, crime cameras in hotspots and license plate readers, are “great intelligence tools,” Noel said.
“The men and women of the New Orleans police department are very committed to identifying and arresting individuals involved in violence,” Noel said. “Officers have a laser focus attacking these crime trends. I know our plans are going to be effective.”
It took 14 hours for NOPD homicide detectives to be called to the first murder scene of 2017. Joseph Smith, a 40-year-old father of two, was shot and killed in Mid-City – his body found lying in the front yard of a home in the 3800 block of D’Hemecourt Street.
By the time the month ended Tuesday, there were 22 murder victims. All but three of January’s murder victims were definitive shootings. The Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office has not released cause of death information for two of the remaining three, and the third remaining victim was not killed by gunshots. The January murder count does not include the Jan. 24 incident in which an NOPD officer shot and killed 26-year-old Arties Manning III, as that shooting remains under investigation to determine if it was a justified homicide.
In addition, 55 people were wounded by gunfire this January – more than double the total for non-fatal shooting victims in January 2016. Sixteen of this month’s shootings included multiple victims. Eight shooting victims were juveniles, the youngest a 5-month-old girl wounded Jan. 14 in Algiers.
Criminologists say the increase in violence across several cities can be attributed to usual factors: disputes over drug markets, access to guns, gang warfare, low staffing at police departments and the “Ferguson effect,” in which police officers are more reluctant to make proactive street stops in the wake of a fatal officer-involved shooting in Ferguson, Mo., and subsequent protests.
But Dee Wood Harper, a professor emeritus of sociology at Loyola University New Orleans, said two factors seem to suggest New Orleans would be in the midst of a decline in violent crime. The city continues to see a decline in its population of males 15-24, a group Harper said is typically linked to violent crime. New Orleans’ high school graduation rates continue to increase, Harper added.
“I was forecasting a decline,” he said. “Turns out I was wrong. It goes to show you how human behavior operates.”
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2017/02/71_shot_in_new_orleans_in_janu.html
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