Owen Courrèges
New Orleans is synonymous with many positive things: jazz, daiquiris, Victorian architecture, Mardi Gras. In the popular perception, unfortunately, it is also synonymous with crime. A recent spurt of rapes and armed robberies in Uptown continue to feed the perception that crime is uniquely prevalent in New Orleans, worse than most urban areas.
This perception is entirely false. New Orleans does have a crime problem, and our homicide rate in particular is disturbing. However, our overall crime victimization rate is actually decent given size and demographics.
On May 25th, the Wall Street Journal released a list of the “10 Most Dangerous Cities” based on 2010 FBI crime data. This list, which utilized the number of violent crimes per 1,000 in cities of 100,000 or more, did not include New Orleans at all.
The fact that New Orleans is not uniquely bad in terms of its violent crime rate has not been lost on city officials anxious to defend their records and manage expectations. Following the release of the new FBI statistics, Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas said on WVUE-TV that “[t]he city of New Orleans by comparison to cities our size in America is not awash in crime.”
Taking a pot-shot at the home of Walt Disney World, Serpas further noted that “New Orleans is a far safer city on violent crime than Orlando is.”
Serpas also notes, correctly, that New Orleans’ high rate of murders and aggravated assaults largely spawns from arguments and disputes between people who know each other. If you don’t associate with persons likely to pull out a gun during or following an argument, then you aren’t likely to be a murder statistic, either.
This is an important distinction. When citizens talk about their fear of crime, they are primarily talking about their fear of being confronted in by a complete stranger. They worry about being robbed in the streets, about having their home invaded – the types of random confrontations that the victim cannot control.
On this score, New Orleans is akin to most major urban areas. A person should be more afraid of “stranger crime” in New Haven (which ranked 4th on the Wall Street Journal’s List) than in New Orleans.
Of course, New Orleans hardly has bragging rights when it comes to crime. Regardless of the reason, our murder rate is ridiculously high. Our murder rate of 49 per 100,000 is far closer to the murder rate in Tijuana, Mexico (58 per 100,000), a city plagued by drug wars, that it is to the American average.
Likewise, residents of Uptown have good reason to be concerned about the recent outbreak of crime. Although an uptick of crime during the summer months is common, nobody wants to become a random victim. Stale statistics cannot be expected to overshadow prominent stories about rapes and robberies.
However, we shouldn’t allow our high murder rate to create the false impression that New Orleans is a basket case when it comes to crime. We may not be Pleasantville, but we aren’t Mogadishu either. For better or worse, I think most of us prefer it that way.
Owen Courrèges, a New Orleans attorney and resident of the Garden District, offers his opinions for UptownMessenger.com on Mondays. He has previously written for the Reason Public Policy Foundation.
