GUARD, STATE TROOPERS TO PATROL NEW ORLEANS

'We're Not Going to Take It Anymore,' Nagin Vows

In an extraordinary move usually reserved for the immediate crisis
after natural disasters, a detachment of at least 100 Louisiana
National Guard soldiers and 60 State Police troopers will be sent to
New Orleans today in an effort to quell the steadily rising tide of
bloodshed in the city, a wave of violence that culminated Saturday
with the shocking murder of five youths in Central City. The
deployment comes just months after the Guard pulled its last
post-Hurricane Katrina units out of the city and follows requests from
law enforcement officials, Mayor Ray Nagin and the City Council, who
are growing alarmed at statistics that indicate the murder rate in
recent weeks has shot above the city's pre-storm pace.

Nagin and council members said Monday they are also likely to
re-establish a juvenile curfew, a measure that was credited with
helping to curb the city's top-in-the-nation murder rate in the mid-1990s.

The mayor and council members announced their remarkable request for
state law enforcement help at an unusual joint news conference in
City Hall on Monday morning, at which the group decried the killings
and declared war on what Councilman Oliver Thomas christened the
equally dangerous offshoot of Hurricane Katrina: "Hurricane Crime."

Gov. Kathleen Blanco called Saturday's Central City killings
"shocking" as she approved the city's request, which had been in the
works for weeks, on Monday afternoon. The city initially asked for 300
Guard soldiers and 60 troopers, and the Blanco administration said
late Monday that the deployment will build up to that number in the
coming weeks. Leaders of the various agencies involved will meet today
to discuss patrolling strategies.

For now, the plan calls for stationing troops mainly in desolate areas
devastated by Katrina, Police Superintendent Warren Riley said in his
own news conference late Monday. Their presence in those areas should
curb looting, and will allow police to focus on "hot spots" in more
heavily populated sections of town where most of the violence is
occurring, he said.

Deadly Force If Necessary

That said, Riley noted that the added troops will have the power to
arrest and detain suspects and to use deadly force if necessary.

"They will be armed, locked and loaded and prepared," he
said.

Riley said the city first asked the state for law enforcement help in
March -- well before last weekend's bloodbath, but just as the murder
rate began a stubborn uptick after a post-Katrina lull. Officials said
the National Guard troops were to arrive July 1, but as the murder
count kept climbing, Blanco accelerated the deployment at the city's
request.

As of early Monday night, 53 people had been murdered this year in the
city, well below the more than 134 killed in the first six months last
year, according to NOPD figures. But accounting for New Orleans'
reduced population, this year's murders are occurring at or above the
same pace as before Katrina, depending on what population estimate is
used.

And the killings have accelerated since the beginning of April, with
36 of this year's 53 murders taking place in the past 12 weeks, police
figures show. Even if the current population is 220,000 residents, a
generous figure according to most experts, the 12-week total
represents 16 murders per 100,000 residents, more than the 15.1
killings per 100,000 residents in the same period last year.

Nagin and council members Monday made it clear that if violent crime
is not brought into check, it will suffocate New Orleans' nascent recovery.

"This is a great city," newly elected City Councilman Arnie Fielkow
said. "But if we don't make people feel safe in their homes and their
communities, nothing else is going to matter."

The power to fix the problem lies with residents, Thomas said,
challenging New Orleanians to take their city back from criminals.

'Rise Up'

"Are we going to rise up and protest against the thugs? Are we going
to march on them? Are we going to tell them it's unacceptable? Or are
we scared?" Thomas asked. "I can pick on the mayor, but I can't pick
on the drug kingpin. I can pick on the police chief, but I can't pick
on the hit man. 'Cause guess what? If you live in this community
scared, you're dead anyway!"

To address the problem, officials prescribed several solutions,
ranging from a juvenile curfew to increasing economic opportunities in
poor neighborhoods to the reinstitution of night recreation leagues.

In addition, the council, led by Fielkow, plans to hold a "crime
summit" within two weeks, involving representatives of the criminal
justice system as well as community leaders, Fielkow said. Among other
things, that meeting will focus on better coordinating the various
arms of the criminal justice system, which was woefully inefficient
before Katrina and was left in shambles after the storm.

Nagin said Monday that he believes some thugs are coming home from
places like Houston because the judicial system is in such disarray
here that they're in less danger of spending long stretches in prison.
He said he and other city leaders will try to focus attention on
abuses of the system, such as the lenient bond practices of certain
judges.

"We are going to as a community watch and monitor much closer what's
happening in the criminal justice system," Nagin said. "And if we see
some things that we don't like, you may see the mayor and the City
Council show up at a hearing and be personally involved in making sure
that people are not getting lower bonding so that they can get back
out on the street."

The council's crime summit likely also will include talk of how to
better integrate the operations of the various law enforcement
agencies in Orleans Parish, which include the Police Department, two
sheriff's offices, and harbor and levee police forces.

Recently elected Councilwoman Shelley Midura noted Monday that on a
per-capita basis, New Orleans has the sixth-highest ratio of law
enforcement officers to residents in the country, but that those high
numbers for whatever reason do not translate into low crime statistics.

Likely the most concrete of the ideas pitched Monday was the
re-establishment of the juvenile curfew, something former Mayor Marc
Morial championed shortly after he took office in the bloody days of
the mid-1990s. The curfew, along with police reform and falling crime
rates nationwide, was seen as a key to the halving of the murder rate
that occurred under the watch of Morial and then-Police Superintendent
Richard Pennington.

Housing the Violators

City officials were optimistic Monday that the juvenile curfew could
be quickly re-established. The main sticking point appears to be
figuring out where offenders would be housed for the night.

During the mid-1990s, curfew violators were taken to a building on
Tulane Avenue operated by then-Criminal Sheriff Charles Foti, the
city's jailer. The building was not part of the Orleans Parish Prison
jail complex.

Renee Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman,
said the sheriff has told juvenile justice groups that he will not
house curfew violators in his jail. The only juveniles taken to the
jail are those charged with adult offenses, she said.

However, Gusman is amenable to having his deputies supervise a
facility where such offenders are taken, provided it is not a jail,
Lapeyrolerie said. For instance, recently elected Councilwoman Stacy
Head had proposed the idea of housing curfew violators in a church
gym, a solution Lapeyrolerie said could work.

A member of Head's staff said the councilwoman and Gusman are working
to come up with a solution "posthaste."

Nagin said he envisions the curfew would last from 11 p.m. or midnight
until dawn and would remain in effect at least through the summer.

While city officials, residents and police have been sounding the
alarm about rising crime for several months, the killings that
occurred in the pre-dawn hours Saturday served as a rallying cry for
Monday's events. It was the first time five people were killed in the
city in a single violent episode since March 1, 1995, when a man
sprayed bullets on a North Roman Street house, a crime for which he
was sentenced to life in prison.

Several council members on Monday invoked familiar rhetoric, saying
the city's residents need to declare that "enough is enough." But the
passion and anger were palpable, recalling the outrage that overtook
the city in 1996 after the infamous triple slaying at the Louisiana
Pizza Kitchen restaurant in the French Quarter.

'Line in the Sand'

"The community people I've talked to have said they're not scared,"
Thomas said. "For some reason or another, this has drawn a line with
everybody. OK. Little M.C. Killer don't get a pass anymore. He can't
walk around the street. Maybe he might have to shoot all of us."

"This is our line in the sand," Nagin said. "And we're saying we're
not going to take it anymore." The mayor said he was contributing
$1,000 of his own money to the reward offered by Crimestoppers for
information leading to the capture of the killers in Saturday's crime.

Nagin's donation was followed by several others announced at the
meeting.

While much of the focus Monday was on catching criminals and keeping
them behind bars, there was also some soul-searching about the state
of the city's youth, and discussion about spending money on measures
that might reduce crime forever.

Thomas bemoaned the diminishing worth of human life, as measured by
young hoodlums, and wondered aloud: "What have we produced, that human
life is so unvaluable?" Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge Morrell declared
that the city was "reaping the benefits" of having "abandoned" the
city school system 30 years ago.

To turn things around, Fielkow appealed to the New Orleans Saints, his
former employer, and the Hornets for help in financing night
recreation programs.

Newly elected Councilman James Carter spoke of the "economic
deprivation" that permeates high-crime neighborhoods, and prevailed on
business leaders to offer job opportunities to residents of those
areas as the city rebuilds.

Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis called for the state to open more
schools and to extend their operating hours from 6 a.m. until midnight
to allow adults and others to get education and "enrichment."

And Hedge Morrell called on companies that have "made millions" from
emergency federal contracts -- firms like the Shaw Group, Fluor Corp.
and Phillips and Jordan Inc. -- to contribute some of their earnings
to programs to help New Orleanians.

"Step up and put your money into this community," she said. "Because
this community is making you rich."