Post-Katrina resettlement may have led to more crime

15th April 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Travis Andrews
Contributing Writer

Part IV of a series entitled “What causes crime in New Orleans?”

Warring over territory is nothing new.

Hit television series like “The Wire,” co-created by David Simon (the same man who created “Treme”) carefully plot and depict how precious territory is to both drug dealers and drug users, but the reality always seemed a step removed. Dr. Lance Hill, the executive director of the Tulane-based Southern Institute for Education and Research, doesn’t think it is. Poor urban planning, he said, can be horrifically destructive for cities, and New Orleans is a prime example of this.

“In the 1990s violence erupted when school officials combined the Pigeon Town neighborhood with the Freret Uptown Neighborhood at Fortier School,” he said. “It took years to solve the problem. So we already know what bad planning can do in a city of neighborhoods.”

And statistics make this city seem pretty poorly planned: Recently, the Department of Justice released several reports (including one on the prejudiced practices of the New Orleans Police Department), one of which showed the New Orleans murder rate to be 10 times the national average.

According to Brendan McCarthy of the daily newspaper, “the report found murders are highly concentrated in pockets of the city, that victims and perpetrators are largely young, Black males with criminal records, and disproportionately unemployed.”

And while the report claims some sort of settlement issues could be the problem, it points out these murders are not the ones seen on shows like “The Wire”: They are not organized crime syndicates fighting for territory. Instead, they are more scattered, arbitrary and broken than that.

“It is not large, organized gangs vying for turf that drives homicide levels. It is not the kinds of drug wars we have seen in other cities,” the report stated.

And while Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a press release following the report, “The first thing is to acknowledge that you have a problem. To get somebody who is objective to help you assess it. Then to make a commitment to fix it,” Hill thinks the crime dates back to the resettlement of the city following Hurricane Katrina, making a fix a harder task than in most cities.

“We had no resettlement plan, and the result was pushing people – especially low-income renters – into neighborhoods where old rivalries spilled over,” said Hill.

With the murder rate reaching 54 this year, nine more than this time last year and placing New Orleans on the path for its most murderous year since pre-Katrina, and several reports pointing out the failings of our government and police force, Hill believes a new way of thinking might be necessary.

“When New Orleans was resettled after Katrina, since we had no resettlement office, people from rival wards ended up mixed in together,” he said. “Neighborhood schools were abolished which increased contact between students from historically rival neighborhoods.  Could part of the violence that we are seeing today be a result of drug dealers having to compete for new markets on hostile turf?”

He continues to point out drug markets were no longer defined, which could have led to more violence.

“The old market territories of drug dealers were erased and when they returned they were forced to compete for new territory. Drug dealers settle market disputes with guns. I have never seen a police report that indicated … what the impact of the storm was on the arrestee’s life and … what neighborhood they lived in before Katrina.”

As this series has focused on, Hill thinks there is a direct connection between violence and the storm, both the resettlement thereafter and the trauma caused by the loss and death of the storm itself.

“Traumatized poor youth tried to numb themselves to their pain by turning  to self-medication with illegal drugs,” he said. “The middle-class kids had the advantages of health insurance and prescription anti-depressants- but even with that there was an outbreak of heroin use in some of the city’s predominantly white, elite schools. Low-income drug users pay for their drugs by selling drugs; and when they sell drugs, they end up trespassing on another dealer’s territory.  Once again, the disputes are settled by violence.”

He thinks New Orleans should follow the lead of nearby cities, such as Chicago.

“In Chicago, the CeaseFire project understood the role of market competition as a root of violence and actually negotiated truces between gangs and drug dealers,” he said. “The media tells us nothing about the victims of violence: Their Katrina experience, their employment experience, and even if they died in the neighborhood they lived in before Katrina. If we knew this information, perhaps we would understand that reviving all neighborhoods with affordable housing allows people to return to a supportive environment.”

Regardless of what is causing the violence, police superintendent Ronal Serpas said the department, now aware of many of its problems, is making steps to fix itself.

“The police department has not been sitting on its hands,” Serpas said. “We are making the changes.”

But Hill thinks this may be too little too late.

“Much of this could have been avoided with a culturally-sensitive resettlement plan, free and accessible mental health services and prescription drugs, and a jobs program for youth that provided legal income,” said Hill.