New Orleans East experiencing downtick in homicides, armed robberies this year
9th October 2017 · 0 Comments
By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer
A blitz of murders and convenience-store robberies that has frightened New Orleans East residents for years has slowed. Crime is down in the Police Department’s Seventh District. At 133 square miles, bordered by the Industrial Canal on its west, the district is the biggest in the parish and faces its own challenges.
“Because of our geographic size, we get more calls for service than other districts, and it can take a little longer to respond to some of them,” Lieutenant Ryan Lubrano, Assistant Commander of the NOPD’s Seventh District, said last week. The district has more domestic violence incidents than most parts of town. “And we respond to accidents on Interstate 10, running across New Orleans East,” he said.
With targeted patrolling, community outreach and increased resources from City Hall, the East’s crime is down across the board. The Seventh District has 82 commissioned officers and two civilian employees. That’s a smaller staff than before Katrina, but the area’s mixed-income, mostly African-American population of just over 80,000 is below pre-storm levels.
“So far this year, we’ve had 24 homicides in the district, versus 29 at this time last year,” Lubrano said. “Our 88 armed robberies this year are down from 112 a year ago.” Sixty-one rapes have been reported in the district, compared with 65 a year ago.
Nonetheless, crime in the Seventh District is the city’s second-highest after the Fifth District, which covers the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards.
When asked about street gangs in the East, Lubrano said, “We had some back-and-forth gang violence earlier this year.” One early-year spate of gang activity involved victims from within and outside the area. On Feb. 2, a woman at the Chateu d’Orleans apartments on Chef Menteur Highway in the East was killed. Days before that, a man in the Seventh Ward and two brothers in St. Roch were murdered. After those related killings were investigated by the city’s Multi-Agency Gang Unit and Street Gang Unit, three gang members were indicted in March.
Gang members are typically in their late teens to mid-to-late 20s, Lubrano said. The city’s Multi-Agency Gang Unit is part of NOLA FOR LIFE, which Mayor Mitch Landrieu credits with having reduced murders across the city. Started in 2012, the program’s 35 initiatives include Group Violence Reduction, a Workforce Re-entry Strategy and Midnight Basketball. Funding for these efforts will continue in 2018.
Last week, Lubrano outlined some of the Seventh District’s accomplishments. “In the past few years, we’ve had an increase in successful investigations, putting guys in jail,” he said. “Our 189 drug arrests from this January through September are more than double 79 a year ago. And our gun arrests total 112 year to date, up 50 percent from 77 a year ago.”
The Seventh District’s Community Outreach and Public Information Plan, drafted late last year with input from residents, maximizes patrolling to make the NOPD more visible in the East’s 50 neighborhoods. Under the plan, the Seventh District has increased its engagement with youth, and strengthened its ties with community groups and city agencies.
After a tornado tore through the East in February, the Seventh District did round-the-clock patrolling in the affected area to prevent looting.
The Seventh District relies on schools and youth to help combat crime. “We have a youth dialogue program in schools, where we have open, candid conversation with kids,” Lubrano said. In their weekly patrols to protect kids, who stand in the dark at bus stops in the winter, officers talk with the students, particularly in Little Woods. They distribute donuts. “It keeps them safe, and they get to know us in a different way than an officer showing up at their house during an incident,” Lubrano said.
As for NOPD’s response times in the East, “they’re coming down,” he said. But like policing elsewhere, if officers have to attend to a serious crime, it may take them awhile to get to a routine traffic accident.
As Second in Command, Lubrano was appointed to the Seventh District in 2015. He manages patrol strategies and the district’s detective-unit deployment. Lubrano’s background includes a leadership role in the Multi-Agency Gang Unit and work in narcotics investigations.
Lawrence Dupree was appointed Commander of the Seventh District in 2014 after assignments in investigations, community policing and management. Dupree and Lubrano both hold a number of NOPD Medals of Commen-dation for Outstanding Achievement, and Dupree earned a Crimestoppers Award for excellence in community partnerships.
Progress in the Seventh District is in line with the NOPD’s strides. Citywide, murders peaked at 395 in 1993 and totaled 174 last year, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. The city’s robberies, burglaries and assaults peaked in 1990. But as of mid-2017, New Orleans still had the nation’s third-highest murder rate, with St. Louis first and Baltimore second.
A year before Katrina, the city’s police force in 2004 was the largest ever at 1,664. Because of budget constraints, the number of officers dropped below 1,100 in 2015 to the smallest in over 50 years, affecting response times and investigations. In the last few years, officers hired have barely surpassed those who retired or quit, and today the NOPD force stands at nearly 1,200.
The city is making headway, however. “Since 2010, funding for NOPD is up by over $30 million per year, which is about a 25-percent increase,” according to Mayor Landrieu’s 2018 operating budget in July. The entire department is better paid, trained and managed and far better equipped, the mayor said. “We’ve raised pay for officers by 15 percent and invested over $100 million for public safety facilities.” The Seventh District has a new police station. And Landrieu has proposed another set of pay hikes for officers, sergeants and lieutenants.
The NOPD is in the midst of court-ordered changes from a 2012 federal consent decree, based on the U.S. Department of Justice’s earlier findings of misconduct and civil rights abuses in the department. The decree will continue for three more years at least. The Seventh District is in compliance with the decree’s requirements for training to stop police misconduct.
In 2018, $6.5 million will be spent on the NOPD consent decree, according to the mayor’s budget. That money will go to a federal monitor, legal fees, cameras in police cars, body cameras for officers and an Early Warning System to detect wayward police behavior.
In New Orleans East, a Night Out Against Crime is scheduled for Oct. 17 to raise awareness about best practices for preventing and reporting crime. It will be held at Joe W. Brown Victory Field at 5601 Read Boulevard.
This article originally published in the October 9, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
