IN NEW ORLEANS, DYSFUNCTION FUELS CYCLE OF KILLING

NEW ORLEANS -- When the body was brought out, the two little boys did
not stop chewing their sticky blue candy or swigging from their pop
bottles. The 18-year-old mother wheeling her baby came to watch, and
the teenager with the spiky hair and the bulky duffle coat was
laughing up on the worn stoop.

Only the cries of Linda Holmes -- "Oh, Lord, have mercy on me, Jesus,
oh my baby!" she said, over and over -- were a tip-off that this was
her teenage son Ronald the man in the lab coat was laboring to pull
out of the empty apartment in the Iberville housing project.

It was another death in New Orleans -- violent, casual, probably drug
related and, by the time the sobbing and the laughter had faded,
covered over in the silence that is the only resolution of many such
killings here. The gurney holding Ronald was pushed into the
coroner's van, the gawkers stepped back from their balconies and the
police furled their yellow tape. "It's messed up around here," said
the mother with the stroller, Ariane Ellis.

There has been no arrest.

There were 161 homicides in this city last year, and there have been
18 so far this year, making New Orleans by most measures the nation's
per capita murder capital, given its sharply reduced population. Many
of the victims and the suspects are teenagers. About two-thirds of
the deaths have gone unsolved: the killers, in many cases, continue
to walk the streets and are likely to kill again, the police say.

Other cities have plenty of murders. But only in New Orleans has
there been the uniquely poisoned set of circumstances that has led to
this city's position at the top of the homicide charts. Every phase
of the killing cycle here unfolds under the dark star of dysfunction:
the murderers' brutalized childhoods, the often ineffectual police
intervention, a dulled community response, and a tense relationship
between the police and prosecutors that lets many cases slip through
the cracks.

Hurricane Katrina's devastation loosened the fragile social
restraints even further, making the city perhaps more dangerous than ever.

The storm also pushed a teetering criminal justice system over the
edge. The evidence in hundreds of criminal cases was lost, and the
flood destroyed the police crime lab, which has not been rebuilt.
Often, drugs cannot be tested at other locations before the deadline
for bringing charges. Yet the police are trying to stop the violence
by arresting more drug users and street dealers, many of whom are
quickly released, spinning the jail door faster than ever and fueling
the carnage.

In the Central City neighborhood last June, five teenagers in a sport
utility vehicle were killed in a drug feud. The police said the
19-year-old suspect had been arrested 11 times in the previous 30
months. But he had been acquitted on an attempted murder charge, the
district attorney's office had dropped some of the other charges for
lack of evidence, and he was out on bail on drug and gun charges at
the time of the killings.

Last year, about 3,100 people who were arrested, mostly for drug
offenses, were released from jail or their bail obligation when the
deadlines passed for charges to be filed, records show. That was
nearly three times the rate before the storm. More than 500 others
were released in January alone, including one in a murder case and
two arrested for attempted murder.

In some neighborhoods, people refer to "misdemeanor murders," or
"60-day murders," the length of time suspects can be held without
charges. The police superintendent, Warren J. Riley, often blames
prosecutors for refusing other cases and the courts for letting
violent suspects out on bail. Though Mr. Riley declined to be
interviewed for this article, he recently told Gambit Weekly, a local
newspaper, that he was tired of having to re-arrest the same people
who had been let out of jail.

"We can't be as successful fighting crime as we would like to be
until the rest of the criminal justice system works like it's
supposed to work," Mr. Riley told the newspaper. "We have to keep
hard-core felons in jail."

But the district attorney, Eddie Jordan, and several judges say that
shoddy police work, and a general mistrust of officers by witnesses
and jurors, doom many cases. Witnesses also fear retaliation on the street.

"It's an insurmountable problem," Mr. Jordan said. "By the time the
investigative report is presented to our office, a good number of
witnesses are no longer available or have gotten afraid to testify.
That's the biggest problem in murder cases."

And even as city and federal officials announce new anticrime
measures, doubts persist.

Terry Q. Alarcon, a longtime criminal court judge, said, "The
criminal justice system has always had two major problems: a lack of
funding and a lack of cooperation."

A Legacy of Mistrust

The Police Department's history of brutality and its emphasis on
minor arrests have fed the mistrust and alienated many people who
might be witnesses. Prosecutors and judges have criticized police
officers as failing to investigate cases sufficiently, taking too
long to write arrest reports and ducking subpoenas to appear in court.

As a result, the district attorney's office has typically been able
to go forward with only half to two-thirds of the cases the police
have brought. With most assistant district attorneys earning only
$38,000 a year, the turnover in Mr. Jordan's office is high, and the
experience level is low. Several studies by the Metropolitan Crime
Commission, a local nonprofit group, show that as few as 12 percent
of homicide arrests end in jail sentences.

Mr. Jordan said he had not been to the Police Department's weekly
crime statistic meetings for three years, ever since an argument had
broken out at one of them over whether he was prosecuting enough cases.

More recently, he and Superintendent Riley have pledged to work more
closely together. But tensions shot up again after a grand jury, at
Mr. Jordan's direction, indicted several police officers on
first-degree murder charges stemming from the shooting of a retarded
man in the chaos after Hurricane Katrina.

City officials recently announced a host of actions, including the
mounting of more cameras in crime-ridden areas and the increasing of
foot patrols to rebuild community trust. The city is raising pay
levels to attract more police officers and better prosecutors,
including several who will focus on convicting the most violent
repeat offenders. (In a few months, most prosecutors will be earning $50,000.)

Federal authorities have put up $5 million for a new crime lab, and
they are sending more prosecutors and undercover drug agents to help.

But even in criminal justice circles, there is a recognition that
arrests and convictions alone will not break the killing cycle.

"You can put a cop on every corner, and you will not stop the
murders," said Eric E. Malveau, who has worked as a prosecutor and a
public defender. "As long as you have a large population that is
uneducated and has no job and no hope, what else is there to do but
sell drugs? Until you fix that, it's hard to see the problems getting
much better."

'Killing Is In'

The killing is integrated deep into the community. Residents say the
routine nature of the violence stifles a sense of outrage, for
reasons of physical and mental self-preservation.

"Last week I buried one on Tuesday, and the one who killed him was
buried on Wednesday," said the Rev. John C. Raphael Jr., a burly
former policeman turned minister who has campaigned against the
violence here. "And I buried another one on Friday. And the one I
buried Friday, somebody shot part of the family later that night."

Mr. Raphael posts signs on telephone poles that say "Enough!" at
murder scenes; often, neighbors are reluctant to let him do so.

The police blame drugs -- drug debts, or drug deals gone bad, or
grabs for drugs, mostly crack. Many of the drug gangs dispersed after
the hurricane and have since regrouped, ending the brief lull with a
greater intensity of infighting now concentrated in fewer neighborhoods.

On the street, a 10- or 12-year old can get up to $30 for being a
bicycle lookout, and teenagers can get up to $1,000 for helping to
move drug stashes.

But apart from the drug trade, those living with the culture of
violence say that often all that is needed to set off a deadly
shooting is a misdirected look, an epithet or a turn down the wrong
block into an alien neighborhood.

"They killing each other on, whatever," said Terrol Wilson, 40, a
lifelong Central City resident and a former convict who is now a
truck driver and a member of the New Hope Baptist Church. "People
right now, they're not scared to kill now. That's how they rockin'
right now. Killing is in."

Mr. Wilson served 15 years in prison for burglary and drug-possession
convictions, beginning at age 15. He says he has seen people shot in
the street in New Orleans since he was a child, and he has known
people who have pulled the trigger. But now, he says, the killings
are coming faster, and residents have little interest in helping investigators.

Miming an aggressive look, Mr. Wilson suggested that that posture
alone might be considered a pretext for killing on the rough blocks
of Central City. He described how successive killings became easier,
once the first was accomplished, for some of the teenagers with guns.

"I'm not worrying about my shooting my second person, because I'm
bucked up right now," Mr. Wilson said. "It's like, that's what's up.
For some of them, it doesn't matter -- my second killing, my third killing."

The killings have spilled into the city's suburbs, which last year
recorded 78 homicides, the highest tally in more than two decades.
The police said evacuees from Hurricane Katrina had been involved in
many of them.

"They get their first hit, it's like, they can do anything," Mr.
Wilson said. "It's like shooting marbles for them."

There was Ivory Harris, for instance, known as B-Stupid in Central
City, twice arrested for murder before the hurricane and twice let
go. "A quiet little boy," said Mr. Wilson, who had grown up with the
boy's mother.

B-Stupid logged his first arrest on murder charges at 16, for a
killing in the C. J. Peete housing project.

"He was trying to gain respect on the street," another Central City
acquaintance, Lyle Mouton, said. The police re-arrested Mr. Harris,
now 20, in March on new murder charges.

A Wall of Reserve

Arrest hardly means conviction, however. And in this city, with its
codes of neighborhood silence, both are the exception.

At the murder scene in the derelict Iberville housing project, where
Ronald Holmes was pulled out of the apartment, several people told a
reporter they had seen a young man run across the courtyard, then
heard a shot. But as the police were doing their work, going in and
out of the abandoned apartment -- officers said they had found drugs
inside -- the residents, several dozen at least, hung back.

A wall of reserve separated them from the police: nobody could be
seen offering up evidence. The Iberville tenants were as oblivious to
the men in uniform as they were to the exhortations of a preacher
droning steadily through a microphone at the back of the courtyard.

"Without witness testimony, we've got nothing," Deputy Chief Anthony
Cannatella, a senior police official on the scene, observed pointedly.

Three teenage girls sat on a stoop, watching the detectives. "They
kill people every day back here," said one of them, a half-smile
playing on her face. She ran off when asked her name. In an apartment
adjacent to where Mr. Holmes had been shot, another young woman
ducked inside rather than give her name.

Most of the violence involves black men killing other black men. Out
of the 161 homicide victims last year, 131 were black men. Most of
the suspects were also black men.

When the pattern of black-on-black violence is occasionally broken,
white fear and outrage are redoubled. This happened earlier this
month after the killing of a white filmmaker, when thousands of
people marched on City Hall to demand change, a majority of them whites.

The small showing of black marchers saddened Mr. Raphael, the
minister. In the 2006 murders, he said, "99 percent of them were
black-on-black, and we did not march. As a community, we could not
bring ourselves to respond to that."

In New Orleans, Mr. Wilson said, "the motto is, beef or barbecue." If
you "beef" -- go to the police -- then do not expect to be enjoying
barbecue anytime soon.

Distrust of the police and fear of the gunmen make the motto nearly
beside the point. Few people beef.

Annie Randolph's daughter and nephew have both been lost to the
violence. Nobody was arrested, said Ms. Randolph, a resident of
Central City. She called the police once, but warily. "I said, 'Don't
come to my door.' Because if they come to my door, whoever did the
killing is going to see it."

Bessie Minor's son and grandson have both been killed; the police and
the prosecutors showed minimal concern, she said.

"In that time, they didn't really worry about who did the killing,"
said Ms. Minor, who is also a resident of Central City.

In this view, the police are part of the problem, not the solution --
"an occupying force," Mr. Raphael said. Meanwhile, people in his
neighborhood and elsewhere in the city are "living in tremendous
fear," he said.

"I mean, most of these murders are in front of people," Mr. Raphael
said. "When some of these murders happen, it's really a disrespectful
thing to the entire community. You have children out there, older
people, and this person will come into the community and shoot an AK-47.

"That's saying to the community, 'I don't care nothing about y'all,
you better not say nothing about it,' " he said. "In broad daylight.
To me, it's demeaning to black men."