Heroin use adds to city’s growing crime problem
25th January 2016 · 0 Comments
For two decades, the playground in the Holy Cross section of the Ninth Ward has been a gathering place for families seeking outdoor fun and recreation. But while the park, rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, has helped to build a close-knit community where families interact and enjoy spending time outdoors, Holy Cross resident Jason Emery and others say that drug activity and other crimes in the area have taken a toll on the neighborhood in recent years.
“There are people who drive in, they will park around the back,” Emery told WWL News last week. “There is general prostitution certainly in the back, there is a lot of drug use, needles, condoms, sexual paraphernalia you’ve got to pick up.”
Emery told WWL that the park was a major reason his family moved into the Holy Cross neighborhood, so that his five-year-old son could enjoy playing outdoors in a safe, fun environment. But he says that before his son can play in the park, he has to dispose of the needles and other harmful debris left behind by heroin users.
“You’ve got to go in and inspect the area for needles, got to inspect the area for drug paraphernalia,” explained Emery. “Inspect it for all kinds of other things, and then you can let him go play. So it’s a challenge.”
Emery added that sometimes neighbors even have to clean up the bodies of users passed out in the park. WWL cited a report from University Medical Center that said over a two-day period, Jan. 14-15, 15 people were brought into its emergency room suffering from heroin overdoses, a trend that continued through the weekend.
Tamara Jackson, from the advocacy group Silence is Violence, told WWL that the increase in heroin use around the city isn’t just leading to the ER, it’s also increasingly playing a role in crime.
“It definitely raises a red flag of concern that well maybe their lifestyle choices is a precipitating factor of why homicides happen.” said Jackson. “It’s definitely one to consider because it’s all too frequent.”
Jackson knows that all too well. She lost her father to a heroin addiction.
“He began to support his habit by committing crime such as robberies and theft, which is on the rise too in the city,” she explained.
A story like her father’s and so many others in the city; personal addiction that now impacts the entire community.
A number of medical journals and general media organizations reported last year that heroin use has grown exponentially in recent years in suburban and rural areas and that its users of late have become increasingly white. Those reports also noted that heroin has replaced oxycontin as the drug of choice among substance abusers because it is less expensive and more accessible.
A number of grassroots organizations have reported that individuals from surrounding parishes have begun flocking to New Orleans in recent years to buy heroin, fueling bloodshed as drug dealers compete for these lucrative drug transactions.
“Isn’t it ironic that sheriffs in places like St. Bernard, Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes talk about keeping the ‘criminal element’ from New Orleans out of their towns when it looks like their criminal element is contributing to the drug wars and escalating violent crime in New Orleans?” Ramessu Merriamen, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly Thursday. “With so many trigger-happy cops on the NOPD living in other parishes and residents from these towns coming to the city to buy drugs, who’s going to keep the ‘criminal element’ out of New Orleans so that we can finally get a handle on rising violent crime, armed robberies and burglaries?”
Aha noted that once more whites began using heroin, local law enforcement officials and health officials began to classify drug use as a health issue and not a crime issue.
“All of a sudden people want to talk about treating heroin use as a health issue,” he told The Louisiana Weekly. “When it was mostly Black people using heroin, it was viewed as a crime issue and anyone who used heroin was viewed as a menace and a threat to society. There was no room for compassion or efforts to help heroin users to overcome addiction.”
In other crime-related news, city leaders and law enforcement officials gathered Tuesday morning to discuss Carnival preparations, particularly security and safety.
WWL reported that city officials emphasized that they are not taking this Mardi Gras season lightly, especially after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif. recently.
FBI Special Agent In Charge Jeffrey Sallet said the city has brought in an unprecedented amount of resources to keep revelers safe. He stopped short of revealing all of the weapons that will be used, but warned that everyone should assume that he or she is being videotaped at all times.
“We have brought in more technology, more people, and more intelligence than has ever been brought to Mardi Gras before,” said Sallet. “With the changing dynamics of the world, vigilance is the price of freedom.”
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu also talked about the safety measures while not compromising fun. “We intend to make this a wonderful Mardi Gras, and we intend to do everything to make sure that it is absolutely safe and absolutely secure.”
The message conveyed repeatedly from each speaker was “If you see something suspicious, then say something.”
Last year, the City of New Orleans used retired NOPD officers, state troopers, sheriff’s deputies from Orleans and St. John the Baptist parishes and campus police from Tulane University and UNO to keep Mardi Gras revelers and visitors safe as the city’s police department continues to grapple with a severe manpower shortage.
The NOPD, which continues to lose officers to retirement and defections faster than it can replace them, recently said it would reassign 94 officers currently performing desk duties to street patrols but that won’t happen until after Mardi Gras Day, Feb. 9.
The NOPD has lost more than 400 officers since New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu was elected in 2010 and is currently under a federally mandated, 492-point consent decree aimed at implementing major reforms. Implementation of the consent decree began in August 2013. The consent decree came on the heels of a scathing U.S. Department of Justice report that found the NOPD was rife with corruption and abuse.
This article originally published in the January 25, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
