Is it safer to go to New Orleans? Violent crime plummets in Big Easy after a gruesome 2022

This time last year, New Orleans was staring down the barrel of its bloodiest year in recent history, on the way to reclaiming its place as the nation’s murder capital, and among the world’s top 10 cities for killing.

At the time, officials and advocates likened the crisis to a hurricane as they called for a similar, all-hands approach to the city’s survival. John Casbon, a board member for the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation (NOPJF), hearkened to the response after Hurricane Katrina.

“People rose to the occasion,” Casbon said in October 2022. “There was an excitement in the air, because we were going to rebuild the city — and we did that ... We’ve got do that again — and we are.”

It seemed to many like a tall order, delivered as police ranks dwindled to levels unseen since the 1940s, and while Mayor LaToya Cantrell weathered a bruising recall campaign. But by almost any measure, New Orleans has delivered over the past year, with violent crime down across the board.

Murder and other violent crime have slid nationally this year, but in New Orleans they’ve fallen faster than in almost any other major U.S. city, according to crime analyst Jeff Asher’s analysis of public data from 165 U.S. cities.

While criminologists say the ebbs and flows of violent crime are difficult to predict, Cantrell and others view the dip as anything but random in a city battered by violent crime. Police, school officials, emergency medical technicians and citizen advocates cite concrete steps taken since the surge of bloodshed began in 2020 to address the crisis of gun violence on city streets, hoping the recent pullback means the start of lasting dividends.

“Really good police work”

Casbon, a policing booster since the days of former NOPD Superintendent Richard Pennington in the bloody 1990’s, chalks up many of the gains to “really good police work.” He described an unparalleled coordination among local, state and federal agencies of late.

Cantrell echoed that sentiment in a statement on Tuesday, saying NOPD’s officers, “who show up every day are directly responsible for the measurable drop in violent crime our city is experiencing.”

At a luncheon Wednesday put on by the police booster group, NOPJF board member Elizabeth Boh credited strategies rolled out last September by policing consultant John Linder, an author of the “Pennington plan” that was widely credited with blunting epic murder highs in the 1990s; and Fausto Pichardo, a privately funded former NYPD patrol chief enlisted to help.

Pichardo, whose contract is up, mocked the idea of random declines in violent crimes as he credited a “precise, methodical approach” he invoked to build a “systematic foundation” for fighting crime in the Crescent City.

Interim NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick, who goes before the City Council on Wednesday for confirmation, said she intends to pull from their playbook, as well as that of Michelle Woodfork, her predecessor as interim chief.

Woodfork’s early moves involved an NOPD leadership shakeup and data-driven deployment of the officers, she said in April, as violent crime rates began to wane. Council member Oliver Thomas credited Woodfork for restoring “proactive” policing in the city, after a pullback that included disbanding of NOPD district task forces.

“New Orleans historically doesn’t have people who shoot one or two people. We have a small group with several notches on their guns that shoot a lot of people,” Thomas said. “Chief Woodfork was targeting that group of multiple repeat offenders with proactive enforcement.”

Pichardo also spoke of the NOPD focusing on the city’s 100 most violent offenders. Boh said the NOPD’s digital forensics unit has stepped up in helping detectives build swift cases against those suspects, in a world where beefs can quickly spread from social media to retaliatory killing.

Pichardo pointed to the removal of more than 2,000 illegal guns from the streets so far this year, a figure that has climbed. He noted that the haul has come with just one shooting of a suspect this year, in what they said was an accident.

Council member Eugene Green pointed cited improving trust between NOPD and other state and federal agencies.

“The federal government has stepped up with the cooperation of the district attorney and prosecuted some very important crimes involving illegal guns and other activities involving controlled substances,” Green said.

Young people heavily impacted

Educators, though, have yet to experience relief from the steady toll of gun violence. Jamar McKneely, CEO of the InspireNOLA network, said there remain far too many guns on the street within easy reach of kids. A year ago, as gun violence mounted, McKneely created the NOLALOVE program, which equips students with mentorship, counseling, rallies, and strategies to de-escalate potentially violent encounters.

Even then, “my youth don’t feel safe in New Orleans,” McKneely said.

The numbers bear it out. The number of juveniles murdered in the city rose from 11 in 2020, to 13 in 2021, to 22 last year -- a 14-year high. This year could be worse; so far, 19 children have been murdered in the city in 2023.

The grim toll has helped Louisiana lead the nation in firearm deaths in children, according to a study published last month in the journal Pediatrics.

“We have already lost, I believe, 20 students under age 18 to gun violence since Jan. 1 of this year. That is a Uvalde,” said Olin Parker, Orleans Parish School Board president. “It just happens over time instead.”

Pre-hospital blood transfusions saving lives

Young people comprise the bulk of patients affected by gun violence in New Orleans, according to Dr. Juan C. Duchesne, trauma surgeon and TICU Medical Director at University Medical Center’s Level I Trauma Center.

“We are in one of the most violent cities in the U.S., with an increase in gun violence, especially among young patients, usually less than 35 years old,” he said. “Utilization of pre-hospital blood has been a great advantage to this group of patients.”

Dufresne was instrumental in pioneering a first-of-its kind pre-hospital blood transfusion program that launched in New Orleans in 2021 as shootings notched upwards.

Though health care workers can’t stop shootings from happening, they can in some instances prevent shootings from turning into homicides. Duchesne said that’s happened time and time again: patients with poor vital signs in the field regain signs of life when they receive blood.

Emergency Medical Services administered blood to 15 patients in 2021, 104 patients in 2022 and 83 patients so far in 2023, according to EMS spokesman Capt. Janick S. Lewis.

Since the program began, Dufresne said, “our mortality has dropped 11%.” That drop represents the first significant change in mortality in the EMS world in 20 years, and a watershed moment in trauma care, he said.

Economic opportunities and blight reduction

City officials also are claiming a role for Code Enforcement in this year’s declines in violent crime, for prioritizing anti-blight operations in high-crime areas.

City Councilman Eugene Green said blight reduction initiatives in his district include “removing scores of abandoned cars and tearing down some blighted houses that have long served to make people, including children, feel disaffected with their surroundings.”

The city demolished 105 blighted buildings in 2022 and has demoed 116 building so far this year. It has also matched the number of overgrown lots cut in 2022—4,033 lots—and projects cutting about 1,200 more before the year ends.

Bulked up programs to address socioeconomic drivers of crime could be making a difference. But the collective impact of job programs, youth mentorship, and case management for victims of gun violence, is difficult to evaluate, said Katherine P. Theall, Ph.D., a social epidemiologist and senior director of the Violence Prevention Institute at Tulane University.

On Tuesday afternoon, Parker, the high school superintendent, visited the New Orleans Career Center’s Seventh Ward campus, where high school and adult students get help preparing for careers in health care, hospitality and engineering.

“One high school student studying to be a medical assistant took my pulse,” he said. “Another had just finished a croque madam. I watched another building a tiny house.”

The significant declines in violent crime last year have Parker and other educators expressing a fresh hope in altering some of the generational, systemic forces that have fueled the city’s violent history.

“We’re making progress, but we have a very long way to go,” McKneely said. “The question should never be about what schools or communities are doing. The question should be, ‘How can we all work together to bring about real change and reform?’”