New Orleans to use $40M grant for safety
6th February 2017 · 0 Comments
By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer
With a total of 175 murders, 2016 in New Orleans ended with the highest body count since 2012. According to New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) data, there were about 520 shooting incidents in 2016, putting New Orleans’ per capita shooting rate (when someone is hit by a bullet) higher than Chicago.
For 2017, Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced a $40 million “safety plan,” which includes funding for 300 new police cars, security cameras, and NOPD overtime.
Landrieu is also continuing violence reduction efforts through the NOLA FOR LIFE program he launched in 2012.
Partnering with Chevron, Landrieu announced last week the recipients of grants through the NOLA FOR LIFE “Connecting Students to Supports” initiative.
Started in December 2016, the initiative is designed to work with schools and other organizations to identify students who show the highest risk for being involved with violence, and then make available support and interventions aimed at reducing the risk.
The “early warning system” is based on 31 risk factors for youth violence identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including involvement in the juvenile justice system, truancy and school disciplinary infractions.
While some critics say the recent spike in violence is evidence the NOLA FOR LIFE strategy isn’t working, Landrieu believes longer term data shows improvement, and is moving forward with the program, and expanding.
In the 2016 NOLA FOR LIFE progress report, Landrieu touts an 18 percent reduction in the city’s murder rate since the program began. The report also cites a 55 percent reduction in group or gang-member involved murders since 2011, a positive impact to close to 6,000 students in 11 partner schools, and 300 partnerships with other local organizations.
“Violence prevention and public safety have remained top priorities for this administration since we took office in 2010,” Landrieu said in a news release. “Connecting Students to Supports is a critical component of NOLA FOR LIFE’s work to protect our children. We’re grateful for the commitment of our teachers and school administrators who work every day to determine which children may be in need, and work to end the cycle of violence. We are also proud to partner with Chevron to support these non-profit organizations working to better our community.”
As part of a $270,000 donation from Chevron, a $136,500 grant was awarded to Communities in Schools of Greater New Orleans to provide case management services intended to help kids complete school and be successful.
A $25,000 grant was awarded to the Children’s Bureau of New Orleans to support better access to mental health and wellness services, and improve quality of life for children and families.
Another $70,000 will be used in partnership with the Louisiana Public Health Institute for data management and needs assessments, and $38,500 will go to additional needs within the Connecting Students to Supports program.
In 2013, Chevron donated $1 million to the NOLA FOR LIFE Fund.
“Chevron believes every child deserves to have the tools and support they need to overcome obstacles they may be facing, excel in school, and succeed in life,” Leah Brown, Public Affairs Manager for Chevron’s Gulf of Mexico Business Unit, said in the press release. “We’re proud to invest in NOLA FOR LIFE and these prevention, mental health and wellness services as part of our commitment to giving children an opportunity for a better future.”
Rachel Gassert, Policy Director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, notes that preventing the violence in New Orleans, especially that affecting young people, is a very complicated problem, and not one that will not be solved in just a few years.
A non-profit organization, LCCR acts the public defender for juveniles in the justice system.
“The needs remain,” Gassert said. “It’s a challenging problem that will not go away quickly.”
The numbers are stark: According to NOPD data, nearly 80 percent of murder victims in 2015 were Black men, the majority younger than 35.
There’s also the challenge of solving the crimes, and the deterrence that may provide: At the end of 2016, the NOPD had made arrests or identified a suspect in only about 14 percent of nonfatal shootings, and 22 percent of gun murders.
And there’s the hot-button issue of gun control, one area NOLA FOR LIFE does not step into: According to FBI data, nearly all New Orleans’s murders (92 percent in 2014) are committed with guns.
But Gassert also pointed to some encouraging trends: juvenile crime continues to decrease, she said, and has consistently for some time. In addition, the LCCR’s data for juvenile intakes saw a 15 percent decrease from 2015 to 2016.
She also emphasizes that the best place for kids to access resources is outside of the courts – so that the criminal justice system is not utilized as mechanism to get services to kids.
Gassert advocates against unnecessarily criminalizing kids, and points to a large amount of research showing the more involved in the juvenile system, the worse the outcome for the child, and the higher the rate of recidivism.
There’s also the over incarceration of young people, in Louisiana and nationwide. The United States is the world’s leader in youth incarceration with a rate of 94.6 in prison per 100,000.
Gassert also advocates for avoiding prosecuting children as adults wherever possible.
But that is not what is happening in New Orleans. According to a Southern Poverty Law Center report from February 2016, “The Orleans Parish district attorney is prosecuting children as adults in unprecedented numbers. Although nothing in the law requires Louisiana prosecutors to charge children as adults, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro chooses to transfer children to adult court in almost every possible instance. . . Prosecuting children as adults is, in fact, Cannizzaro’s default practice. Between 2011 and 2015, his office has transferred more than 80 percent of cases involving 15- and 16-year-olds charged with certain offenses where there was an option to prosecute in either juvenile or adult court.”
Another report from October 2016 called for the shutting down of juvenile detention centers, significantly reducing the population, and replacing them with facilities designed for treatment and rehabilitation.
“This ill-conceived and outmoded approach is a failure, with high costs and recidivism rates and institutional conditions that are often appalling,” write the report’s authors, the National Institute of Justice and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. “Instead of helping kids get back on track, these facilities exacerbate many of the factors that brought them to the attention of the courts in the first place.”
While Gassert works on the other end of youth violence than the NOLA FOR LIFE prevention efforts, she said LCCR supports efforts like NOLA FOR LIFE that treat violence among youth as a public health issue, rather than a “crackdown, get tough on crime” approach.
“We support any effort that creates a comprehensive community effort,” she said.
“Connecting Students to Supports drives home the NOLA FOR LIFE pillar of investing in prevention methods, said Criminal Justice Commissioner Calvin Johnson. “It gives New Orleans youth access to greater opportunities and decreases their chances of being trapped in the criminal justice system.”
This article originally published in the February 6, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
