The Times-Picayune (6/6/16) — The day Richard Pennington was sworn in as New Orleans’ police chief in 1994, an FBI agent pulled him aside and told the former Washington, D.C. deputy chief that the department was riddled with corrupt and rogue officers. Many, the FBI told him, were involved in a widespread drug-trafficking ring and the targets of a federal investigation.
The agent ended the conversation by saying, “Welcome to New Orleans,” according to news reports at the time.
“I thought, my Lord, what am I getting myself into?” Pennington said years later.
The same day as Pennington’s inauguration, officer Len Davis ordered the murder of 32-year-old Kim Groves. She had filed a brutality complaint against him the day before, after seeing Davis pistol-whip a teenager.
Groves’ body was found a block from her home in the Lower 9th Ward with a single bullet wound to the head.
Groves was one of 424 people murdered in New Orleans in 1994, the highest recorded number in the city’s modern history.
In trying to put the current homicide rate in perspective, city officials often point to 1994, as if to say: Sure, things seem bad now. But look how much worse they were. Look how far we’ve come.
Critics reject the comparison. They characterize New Orleans’ murder rate, which consistently ranks as one of the worst in the country, as unacceptable no matter what transpired two decades ago.
But 1994 remains a powerful point of reference for every New Orleanian who lived through it, which begs the question: What if anything does that violent year have to teach us about what is happening now?
In hopes of understanding how best to combat New Orleans’ seemingly perpetual crisis of deadly violence, criminal justice experts have tried to answer that question, by looking back at the city’s homicidal trends over the last two-and-a-half decades.
Their research suggests a complex combination of influences affecting the lethal ebb and flow of violence that plagues New Orleans: police corruption, the crack cocaine epidemic, the effects of Hurricane Katrina, implementation of new tactical strategies and the prosecution of organized gangs.
NOPD corruption, murders at times rise and fall in chorus
There is no definitive evidence linking an increased murder rate with abuse inside the NOPD, and some deny there is any connection, but in New Orleans they seem to rise and fall in chorus.
After Pennington came into office in 1994, he instituted a series of sweeping reforms within the department and the number of homicides fell to 158 just five years later.
Twenty-two years later, New Orleans once again finds itself experiencing a downturn in murders. As of June 14, there were 58 homicides. If that pace continues through the end of the December, it will result in around 120 murders, which would be the lowest total since 1971.
Once again, the decrease coincides with changes in the NOPD spurred by several incidents of abuse by police officers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, including the murder of two unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge. In response, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a scathing report of the NOPD in 2011 describing it as a broken and lawless agency, which led to a 2013 federal consent decree and the mandated changes.
Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, said there are many factors that play into the number of murders. But there is a direct correlation between a community’s trust in a police department and its ability to convict killers, which ultimately deters crime. Police corruption erodes that trust, he said.
Former New Orleans Police Chief Ronal Serpas, who led the department from 2010 to 2014, dismisses any cause-and-effect relationship between rooting out corruption and murder reduction, as there are typically only a handful of officers involved in the criminal activity. Just as the overall size of a police force doesn’t directly impact the homicide rate, he said.
What does directly impact the number of murders, Serpas argues, is the enhancement of investigative techniques and the removal of any internal dysfunction that could block those efforts. That’s what Pennington did in the wake of the previous scandals.
But in the end it’s all just guesswork, Serpas said. “If police knew how to stop murders, would there be any?” he said. “If the government could stop all murders, there wouldn’t be a single one, right?
“We’re all struggling to figure out how to reduce that number.”
‘An explosion of violence’
In the early 1990s, New Orleans’ police department was widely described as an organization infested with criminal gangs that used violence to intimidate the people they were supposed to protect.
Five months after Davis had Groves killed, Officer Antoinette Frank robbed a Vietnamese restaurant in New Orleans East. During the robbery, Frank and accomplice Rogers LaCaze shot and killed Frank’s former patrol partner, Officer Ronald Williams, who was working a security detail. They also killed two members of the Vu family who owned the business.
The impact of such corruption can have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to cooperate with the police, making it difficult to solve and discourage violent crimes, Goyeneche said.
“Police have to have the trust of the community to be their eyes and ears as well as rely on them for witnesses needed to convert arrests into convictions,” he said. “If there are a rash of police corruption cases, they can have a rippling effect throughout the public, not just with respect to the officers arrested or convicted.”
At the same time police corruption was on the rise, New Orleans, like many cities across the country, was dealing with the spread of a deadly, addictive and profitable new drug.
“We saw an explosion of violence as crack hit the marketplace,” said Serpas, who experienced that period firsthand as a member of the NOPD. “It was cheap, easy to make and transport, and it was protected with violence. It went through the city in such a vicious way.
“At that time, the Glenn Metz gang was terrorizing New Orleans. They drove around in a black pick-up truck with ‘Murder’ written on it. And wherever that truck ended up, someone was murdered,” Serpas said.
The number of homicides nearly doubled, from 228 in 1988 to a high of 424 in 1994. But in the ensuing years, murders dropped dramatically, down to 158 in 1999.
It was during this period that new police chief Pennington instituted a number of reforms that focused on rooting out corruption and improving accountability. The measures included strengthening the Public Integrity Bureau, outlawing off-duty detail work at bars and strip clubs, and prohibiting the hiring of people with criminal records.
More importantly, Pennington implemented COMSTAT, a management system that uses statistics to uncover crime trends. It can be used for the rapid deployment of resources and relentless follow-up and investigations, Serpas said. This, more than the rooting out of corruption, played a significant role in the decrease in homicides, he said.
“It’s not whether you have a good hiring or disciplinary process but whether you can do better investigations into retaliatory shootings and gangs and domestic violence,” Serpas said. “If you’re more functional in those things you can reduce murders. Corruption usually only involves a handful of people and doesn’t transcend into an increase in crime.
“Of course, the very next year, when the New Orleans Police Department was thought to be the best reformed department in the country, the number of murders rose (from 158) to 204,” Serpas said, illustrating the unpredictable nature of such statistics.
The Katrina effect
One of the most violent periods in New Orleans’ recent history took place during the two years immediately following Hurricane Katrina.
In 2006, there were 162 murders at a time when the city’s population had dropped to around 230,000, resulting in a homicide rate of 70 killings per 100,000 residents. The following year, there were 209 murders accounting for a rate of nearly 78 per 100,000, the highest the city has seen since the mid-1990s.
This drastic post-Katrina increase was likely caused by the chaos the storm inflicted on the city’s illegal drug market, according to a 2015 report written by Loyola University criminologists Kelly Frailing, Dee Wood Harper and Serpas. Before the storm, the drug activity was spread out across the entire city, with many dealers staking their claims in the clearly defined boundaries of the low-income housing developments — Magnolia, Calliope, Iberville and Desire.
This relatively organized and entrenched structure was wiped out when nearly 80 percent of the city flooded after the storm, causing the closure of the housing developments and the destruction of many low-income neighborhoods such as the Lower 9th Ward and parts of New Orleans East.
The few remaining areas of viable turf in non-flooded neighborhoods, such as part of Central City, became the scenes of a bloody war between the old school drug dealers now forced to occupy the same territory and an influx of new competition sensing weakness and trying to stake a claim, according to the report. This caused the murder rate to jump from 57 per 100,000 in 2004 to nearly 78 per 100,000 three years later.
At the same time the storm hit, the NOPD had already begun unraveling from the days of Pennington’s reforms, according to the Justice Department’s 2011 report. The document detailed instances of officers using excessive force, ignoring federal law by conducting “pat-down” searches without legal justification, and discriminating against racial, ethnic and LGBT groups. The department also lacked sufficient oversight, training and accountability.
“As devastating as Hurricane Katrina was, our investigation has revealed that these serious deficiencies existed long before the storm,” Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez wrote at the time.
When Pennington left office to run for mayor in 2002, the number of murders was already on the rise, from a low of 158 in 1999 to 258 in 2002 and 274 the next year.
The dysfunction of the department was laid bare in the days after the storm with the Danziger Bridge murders and subsequent police cover-up. In a separate post-storm incident, an officer shot Henry Glover and another officer burned his corpse in a car to hide evidence of his death.
These incidents were not responsible for the post-storm surge in New Orleans’ murder rate but were emblematic of the dysfunction, lack of leadership and oversight within the NOPD, according to the Justice Department. That dysfunction had a direct impact on the city’s ability to prosecute murderers and deter additional killings, said Goyeneche, referring to the infamous “701 releases,” also known as misdemeanor murders.
In 2006, more than 3,000 suspects, including some suspected of murder, were released from then-Orleans Parish Prison because the officer of then-District Attorney Eddie Jordan failed to file charges within 60 days as required under Article 701 in state law. Many blamed the situation on the NOPD’s inability to get homicide and other reports to prosecutors within the allotted 60 days. People on the street began referring to misdemeanor murders, doing a two-month stretch for homicide, Goyeneche said.
“Whether it’s corruption or inefficiency, all of this has a corrosive impact on the criminal justice system,” Goyeneche said. “Witnesses who were cooperating with law enforcement see the offender being released and suddenly they can no longer remember anything.”
In 2007, the district attorney’s office refused to prosecute 48 percent of all homicide cases, according to the Metropolitan Crime Commission. Six years later, due to increased communication and cooperation between the NOPD and new District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, that number dropped to 20 percent, which helped to reduce the number of additional murders and prevent retaliatory killings, Goyeneche said.
‘They may have run out of victims’
Similar to what happened in the 1990s, the number of murders in the years after Katrina gradually began to drop, from 209 murders in 2007 to 179 in 2008 and down to 150 in 2014, though there was an uptick in 2015 to 164 killings.
The number of non-fatal shootings has also decreased, from 409 in 2010 to 342 last year. These numbers, provided by the NOPD, reflect incidents of non-fatal shootings, and not how many people were actually shot. For example, the Mother’s Day second line shooting in which 20 people were shot, counts as a single incident.
There were a number of factors at play for the reductions in murders and non-fatal shootings, one of which was the stabilization of the illegal drug market, said Harper, the Loyola criminologist. The number of dealers decreased due to lethal violence, sections of the city reopened expanding territory, and the customer base increased, populated with transient workers and former users who relapsed due to stress.
“Someone asked a criminologist to account for the decline in murders to 158 in 1999 and he said, ‘They may have run out of victims,'” Harper said. “You reach a point where you have a stabilized drug market. Everyone has zipped their mouths shut or they’re dead or no longer a player. So you can carry out drug transactions without the use of violence or intimidation. Then the homicide rate drops off. Some have argued that’s what happened in more recent years.”
Another possible reason for the drop in annual homicides was a 63 percent decrease between 2000 and 2015 in the number of people between the ages of 15 and 24. That population is the group most responsible for crime, Harper said.
“Most people, after they pass the age of 30 to 35, we call it criminal menopause. They’ve grown out of it. It’s a young person’s game,” he said.
At the same time, the percentage of students graduating from public high school rose from 54.4 percent in 2004 to 72.8 percent in 2013. Better education leads to more opportunity and eliminates the need to resort to crime, Harper said.
New Orleans’ most recent decrease in killings could also simply be part of a national trend, Serpas said. In 1991, the national homicide rate was 35.5 per 100,000. That dropped to 11.9 in 2008 and 4.5 in 2014, according to the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Experts can’t agree on a single cause for the national drop but have offered a number of possible explanations including a reduction of lead pollution which has been proven to cause aggressive behavioral problems, a decrease in drug and alcohol use, an aging population, improved law enforcement strategies, and even gentrification in many major U.S. cities.
Would more police help?
What has clearly worked in New Orleans’ ongoing efforts to reduce the number of murders was the 2012 introduction of the Multi-Agency Gang unit, Harper said. The Mag Unit, which is led by the New Orleans Police Department but also includes federal and state law enforcement agencies, is part of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy. It was formed at the time to target around 600 gang members thought to be responsible for a majority of the city’s violence.
So far, the Mag Unit has indicted 114 people from 12 violent gangs, with 94 convicted through state or federal prosecution, said the mayor’s spokesman C. Hayne Rainey. The rest are awaiting trial. “There were 55 percent fewer group- or gang-member involved murders in 2015 than 2011.”
“Putting people behind bars for long period of time is having an impact,” Harper said.
Landrieu’s push for more officers, however, likely won’t have the same impact, said John Penny, a criminologist at Southern University New Orleans. There are currently 1,170 officers in the NOPD. Landrieu wants that number to reach 1,600, which he has said would allow the department to increase police presence on the streets and respond to calls more rapidly, thereby reducing the number of fatal shootings.
“The murders in New Orleans are acquaintance murders. They happen between people who know one another, who have relationships with one another and have conflict with one another,” Penny said. “They’ve decided the best conflict resolution is to end the whole deal. And I don’t think more police would make a big difference.”
Harper agreed, saying that police will never be able to prevent all murders “unless you give each potential killer a policeman to stand around and watch them. By 2014 we had the lowest post-Katrina killings at 150 and we were at lowest in terms of police force. The number of police is an aspirational, political thing.”
Serpas, who supports an increase in officers, also said there is not much evidence directly linking the size of a police force to the number of murders. But a department forced to work with fewer officers is negatively affected in all areas, including its ability to conduct follow-up investigations in homicide cases, he said.
Murder rate still too high
After a bloody two-day stretch in March during which 12 people were shot, three fatally, NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison said he was confident in the department’s strategies to combat violent crime, which include a “smarter” deployment plan to increase police visibility. But there’s a limit to what officers can do when an argument suddenly erupts in gunfire.
“It’s extremely frustrating, because we were seeing a bit of relief from homicides, compared to the same time last year,” Harrison said at the time. “To see a spike of homicides and shootings is very frustrating, because we’re putting more officers and vehicles in the field to deter this.
“It seems some of these people are very brazen. But we’re not going to let that diminish our focus.”
That brazenness has been exacerbated by the proliferation of guns which has made a significant difference in the annual murder tally over the past several decades.
In 1951, there were 66 murders with 53 percent committed with firearms, Harper said, citing statistics form the Orleans Parish Coroner’s office. In 1973, out of the 252 homicides, 71 percent were committed with guns. Last year, 91 percent of the 164 murders were by gunfire.
Serpas agreed that guns make it easier to kill, but what is more concerning is that so many people are making the choice to kill. The bottom line, Serpas said, is that the drop in homicides from 1994 to 2016 is something to be thankful for, but nothing to celebrate.
“We should always be excited to see fewer people killed, but we should never think that New Orleans per capita murder rate is where it should be for a city our size,” Serpas said, referring to New Orleans’ rate of 42 murders per 100,000 people last year, which remained one of the worst in the nation.
“People are choosing at a much higher rate than in years past to use the ultimate violence to settle conflict,” Serpas said. “There was conflict in the ’60s, the ’70s and the ’80s, but there weren’t as many murders.
“There are more guns in play, for sure. But the willingness of young men to use guns is incredibly high and that’s the problem. We still have a lot of work left to do as a community.”