New Orleans tries to prevent mass shootouts and gang killings
24th September 2019 · 0 Comments
By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer
Partly because of its public gatherings, New Orleans has had mass shootings and gang killings that hurt bystanders. Louisiana — a mostly open-carry gun state — bans firearms at schools, youth centers, court houses, bars, law enforcement buildings and polling places. The Crescent City has its own stricter rules, especially for parade routes. Last month, Mayor LaToya Cantrell launched a 50-year, gun-violence reduction strategy.
Just how protected are residents? Louisiana’s gun laws are among the nation’s most permissive. Early this year, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, based in San Francisco, gave F’s to the Pelican state, Texas, Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South for the safety of their gun laws. In contrast, California and New Jersey earned A’s, while A minuses went to New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland and Hawaii. States with strong gun-safety laws have fewer gun deaths per capita, according to Giffords Law.
Here, we’ll look at controls in some of the places frequented by New Orleans residents.
Last week, NOLA Public Schools spokeswoman Tania Dall said the state prohibits people from carrying firearms, openly or concealed, on school property and at school-sponsored functions. Guns are not permitted in “firearm-free zones,” including school campuses, areas within 1,000 feet of a campus or inside a school bus.
“Under Louisiana law, school officials can recommend that a student found with a firearm at school be expelled,” Dall said. Of the 44,000 students in the school district last academic year, 0.68 percent underwent expulsion hearings for any type of offense. Only 0.02 percent of those hearings, however, were for gun possession, she said.
“Campuses and classrooms should always be environments where students feel safe,” Dall said. To that end, NOLA Public Schools works closely with the New Orleans Police Department.
Incidents involving guns at the city’s public schools, while fairly low, are alarming when they do occur. In one, an 11-year-old last Feb. 26 brought an unloaded handgun to Benjamin Franklin Mathematics and Science Elementary on Chatham Drive. NOPD took him to the Orleans Parish Juvenile Detention Center.
Guns are prohibited by law on all of the area’s Catholic school properties, Sarah McDonald, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans said last week.
As for places of worship, under a Louisiana law effective in August 2018, churches, synagogues and mosques can decide whether members with concealed carry permits can bring guns to services. Before that law, anyone bringing a concealed firearm into a worship service needed to have had eight extra hours of tactical firearms training each year.
Under the state’s 2018 law, a place of worship that decides to allow concealed-carry guns is required to tell its congregation. Churches and synagogues can have security teams of paid or volunteer workers.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans asks its church leaders to abide by the state’s firearms possession laws and has encouraged its parishes to have safety plans for mass, other liturgical celebrations and events, McDonald said. The Archdiocese is the metropolitan see for the province of New Orleans and includes the dioceses of Houma-Thibodaux, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Alexandria and Shreveport.
“We continue to cooperate with local law enforcement on training and information to be proactive in preventing gun violence,” McDonald said.
At St. Joseph Church on Tulane Avenue, Father Tom Stehlik last week said he doesn’t recommend bringing a gun to church, much less using one there. But he said members of local law enforcement belong to St. Joseph and sometimes do informal monitoring at services. If an incident does occur on its property, St. Joseph has an emergency plan to follow, he said.
Greater New Orleans is home to over a dozen hospitals. But hospitals aren’t federal gun-free zones. A Louisiana law effective in August 2018 prohibits people from carrying guns in hospitals only if they’re prevented from possessing guns under state or federal law. In Louisiana, for example, most convicted felons can’t carry guns anywhere for at least ten years after completing their last sentence.
Ochsner Medical Center on Jefferson Highway last week declined to comment on its gun policies.
The New Orleans Recreation Department serves thousands of youth at its camps and programs at centers and playgrounds. NORD services adults and senior citizens too. But last week, Mayor Cantrell’s communications office was unable to comment on gun restrictions at NORD facilities.
Seventeen people were wounded in a gangland shootout on Nov. 22, 2015 at Bunny Friend Park in the Upper Ninth Ward. The playground there is a NORD facility with ball courts and fields and exercise equipment.
The NOPD watches for guns on parade routes. In the two busiest weeks of this year’s Mardi Gras, from late February into March, 323 arrests of all kinds were made, versus 411 a year earlier, NOPD said. Of this year’s arrests, 81 were for illegal possession of firearms, and they included 63 by NOPD officers and 18 by the Louisiana State Police. Eighty-four guns were seized. Last year, 54 gun arrests were made during Carnival.
After this year’s Mardi Gras, NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said his officers and the Louisiana State Police were aggressive in their mission to keep illegal guns off the streets. “We asked our citizens to say something if they saw something, and they did,” he said. “The community’s partnership with police is vital to keeping everyone safe.”
Gunfire can erupt at anytime in New Orleans. In what’s believed to have been a gang event, three people were killed and seven injured at South Claiborne and Louisiana Avenues on the night of July 28 last year. The shooters haven’t been found.
The city is seen as having less than 50 to over 100 gangs, most of which are small, neighborhood-based groups, selling drugs and guns. In 2012, then Mayor Mitch Landrieu formed the Multi-Agency Gang Unit or MAG with NOPD, the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, the Louisiana State Police and other agencies.
The following year, twenty parade goers were injured on May 12, 2013 at a Mother’s Day second-line in the Seventh Ward at Frenchmen and North Villere Streets, where over 300 people congregated. Culture writer Deborah Cotton died four years later from injuries she sustained that afternoon.
Mayor Cantrell this past August released her “Generational Gun Violence Reduction Plan,” based on a year of effort by the administration’s gun task force. The plan aims to lower murders over 50 years by offering preventative services to those likely to have illegal guns; by calming situations where violence is likely to occur; and by solving more homicide cases to remove assailants from the streets.
New Orleans has the nation’s fourth-highest murder rate, following St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation last year.
But the city’s killings are on the decline. Last year, 146 murders occurred, the least since 1971, for an almost 50-year low. The local population was larger back then, however. Federally mandated police reforms, community oriented policing, seizing illegal guns and the use of new technologies have helped.
The downdraft in New Orleans murders has continued this year, with 57 killings in the first half, down a third from first-half 2018. Violent crime in the French Quarter, where the presence of police and security cameras is high, has risen, however.
In this year’s first half, NOPD seized 1,089 illegal guns, up from 958 in the same 2018 span.
The city’s shoppers and fast-food customers are changing their gun habits. Walmart, Kroger and Walgreens this month asked that guns not be openly carried in their stores. Kroger operates in Louisiana, but not New Orleans. CVS this month asked that guns not be brought inside at all, joining Target and Costco with the same policy. Starbucks, Sonic and Panera Bread are among the vendors asking that guns be left outside.
This article originally published in the September 23, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
