New Orleans Citybusiness reports about the latest "tipping point"-- Nagin's city infrastructure bonds are now barely investment grade, and are being sold. According to a radio interview with
CityBusiness editor Terry McConnell, the mayor's "courageous" decision to
fire 3,000 city employees after the flood was wise and necessary so that these bond ratings could get upgraded and then sold.
New Orleans sold $75 million in bonds for its hurricane recovery plan.
Standard & Poor’s rated the city bonds below investment-grade status. Moody’s and Fitch Ratings each gave the city investment grade ratings.
Merrill Lynch & Co. offered the lowest amount of interest payable on the borrowing. Peter Kessenich, a financial adviser to the Board of Liquidation, City Debt, expects the money to be available to the city by mid-December.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin hailed it as another step in the city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
“I truly believe we’re at a tipping point,” Nagin said.
The money is the first drawdown of $260 million in bonds approved by voters in November 2004 for infrastructure projects.
New Orleanian
Ethan Brown agrees that we are at a tipping point. But, as his
article in the Guardian indicates, we might be tipping backwards over crime rather than forwards over the Mayor's shiny optimism.
[W]hen Richard Pennington was sworn in as top cop in New Orleans in 1994, he made eradicating police corruption a top priority. Mr Pennington also emphasised community policing and insisted that the New Orleans police department (NOPD) focus on high crime areas (or "hotspots"). The so-called Pennington Plan was astonishingly effective in bringing down the murder rate in New Orleans. By the late 1990s, New Orleans not only finally began experiencing the significant crime declines that had been occurring in major metropolises like Los Angeles and New York City, it also had the largest decrease in crime among 50 major US cities.
But by the early 2000s, crime began rising in New Orleans again.
...
In recent years, the Orleans Parish district attorney's office has released hundreds of suspects under Article 701 of the Louisiana code of criminal procedure, which states that suspects cannot be held for longer than 60 days on felony arrest without an indictment. Reasons given for the lack of charges filed in 701 cases range from incomplete police reports to overburdened assistant district attorney's who were simply not able to file an indictment before the 60-day period expired. Unsurprisingly, the city's drug business began getting the message that felony crimes-even murder-would most likely end in a 701 release.
Pre-Katrina, there were a few hundred 701 releases per year. But after the storm, the trickle of 701 releases became a flood. In 2006 alone, there were nearly 3,000 such releases, a five- or six-fold increase over pre-flood levels.
...
701-related laxity has become so common that New Orleans street hustlers have dubbed doing 60 days in jail for a killing a "misdemeanour murder." This was no exaggeration: in addition to the thousands of suspects being released under Article 701, the Orleans Parish district attorney's office secured just one conviction in the 162 murders committed in 2006.
...
As the year comes to a bloody close, it seems that New Orleans is nearing the tipping point where it may become so violent that it is no longer livable at all. Certainly, the current murder rate is so high and the city's population so low (around 250,000, well below pre- Katrina population of about 500,000) that a significant chunk of the city is already simply being killed off.
Incredibly, the killing fields of New Orleans do not appear to rank high as a concern among state and local officials. The mayor, Ray Nagin, has been silent in the face of the sort of mass killing that occurred and often dismissive of it. This summer, he told a group of reporters that the murder rate "keeps the New Orleans brand out there."
...
So, New Orleans speeds along to the sort of wholesale destruction than even Katrina could not have wrought without anyone in major leadership positions stepping up to stop the bloodletting. "The trouble is," University of New Orleans criminologist Peter Scharf told me recently, "there is no willing to stand up and say 'This is fucking nuts.'"
Labels: crime, Markets, Nagin
9 Comments:
I can't understand why so many people who should know better think that the mayor showed wisdom and courage in borrowing money and laying off employees after Katrina. Both moves were necessary and obvious moves that any mayor would have made. I don't know any former employees who were surprised by or angry about the layoffs. Sending out impersonal pink slips certainly didn't take any courage on the mayor's. What pissed me off, and other coworkers I talked to, was just how top heavy city pay was after the layoffs. Not only did the very top people keep the pay raises they had received (much bigger raises than most city workers) they weren't told to consolidate the high level positions right below them. It would have take a very slight amount of courage for Nagin to call in all the heads of city departments and say that he was taking back part of their raises and they would have to offer the top officials in their departments a choice of taking a lower ranking position or being laid off (I'll post an email from NOPL that illustrates what I'm talking about), but Nagin didn't have that minimal amount of courage. Nagin claims he made tough cuts, so to people like Terry O'Connor he was courageous.
Folks are asking me, and I don't even live in New Orleans. Is anyone thinking recall?
Until there's a real purge of the voter's rolls, we can't do a recall.
About the Guardian article: it's not minimizing our murder rate to note that phrases like "a significant chunk of the city is simply being killed off," "killing fields," and "mass killing" are hyperbolic.
About hyperbole...
England has a population of over 50 million, and there are about 800 homicides a year , looking at 2006 data.
NOLA has 177 homicides in '07 with less than half a million people.
To a Brit, "killing field" is not such a far reach with such a relatively high murder rate
Let's assume for a moment that the NOPD's recent, highly optimistic optimistic numbers (that we have 55 murders per 100,000 population) are correct. By way of comparison, very dangerous cities like Philadelphia have about 28 murders per 100,000 population; relatively safe cities like NYC have about 8 murders per 100,000 population. So, New Orleans--again, even using optimistic NOPD projections--is in a class all its own when it comes to murder.
No disagreement that we're in a class all our own, and that our murder rate is appalling. And this article is particularly effective in reminding us that this state of affairs is not even a post-levee failure phenomenon, but part of life here since the 1990s.
But I don't see the point in hyperbole when the reality is already startling on its own. I think it backfires. Using language that describes a war zone, or which is simply inaccurate, is distracting. Unlike people caught in a war zone's killing fields--Badghad, or Sarajevo, or Cambodia, most of our population is not at all at risk. Nor is our population being cut down significantly -- 200 people can leave town at any time and not really cause any meaningful changes. This hyperbole detracts from the reality of who is killing and being killed, and creates a false sense of danger for people who aren't actually at risk. I don't think we need to fan the flames of fear among white uptowners, or tourists, for example. I worry that when we do this we diminish the concerns for young men shooting each other in neighborhoods most of us don't venture into. And that attitude allows the administration, the police, and the courts to continue to treat that population as an annoyance, rather than as people who need a reason to be invested in society.
Beth, I don't understand your last comment. We should acknowledge that the crime is mostly in bad neighborhoods, so that we'll care more? I'm not trying to be flip, but you seemed to be making two unrelated arguments.
I'm not so sure about the neighborhoods most of us don't venture into part anyway. Except for Lakeview, there's no part of Orleans Parish that's far from those neighborhoods. Anyway, I would bet that the crimes other than murder are greatly underreported. I was nearly killed at the corner of Moss and Orleans (right on Bayou St. John) last Tuesday, but, if it makes the crime maps at all, it will be as assault. Even if it's just a hairline fracture, I would say that anything that results in a fractured skull could be said to almost kill somebody. In this case, the weapon was a brick rather than a gun.
I agree with David. And I know that "good" neighborhoods like the Marigny aren't as safe as some might think. I know a lot of folks who live out in the Marigny toward the Bywater and they deal with violent crime issues constantly (brutal muggings and the like). The NOPD's own numbers back this up: armed robberies are up nearly 69% in the 3rd quarter of this year. So, again, yes, the murder epidemic may mostly be confined to specific neighborhoods but pretty much everywhere in Orleans Parish is suffering from significant crime increases. In a city where murder victims barely warrant a single line in the Times Pic, we should be more--not less--alarmed by crime, even it means scaring off uptowners or tourists.
I'm nitpicking, I suppose. My criticism is narrowed to three phrases that I believe detract from an otherwise credible, articulate article: "a significant chunk...being killed off," "killing fields," and "mass killing." I'd probably add "speeds along to the sort of wholesale destruction than even Katrina could not have wrought," on second thought.
