GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER

New Orleans has reclaimed an infamous title: Murder capital.

The city's 275 homicides worked out to 59 murders per 100,000 residents in
2003, which was the highest per capita rate in the nation.

This is not a title a city can afford to carry. Not only does a high murder
rate make New Orleans a less humane place to live, but it could also make
conventioneers and other tourists wary of visiting this lovely and
fascinating place. And visitors, of course, are the city's lifeblood.

Understanding homicide in New Orleans is not as simple as looking at a
year's tally, however. The reality, as revealed in The Times-Picayune's
seven-part series, "Cycle of Death," is that murder is rare in much of the
city.

While it may seem harsh to say so, if you aren't involved in buying or
selling drugs, you are unlikely to be killed. Police say that three out of
four murders are drug-related. Perhaps more enlightening is the fact that
42 percent of homicides in 2003 were committed in a seven-square-mile area
of the city.

In other words, most of the city is safe, which is a fact that the people
who market New Orleans to conventions and other tourists certainly should
emphasize.

Still, the fact that most murder victims somehow put themselves in harm's
way is not an excuse to view homicide as someone else's problem. For one
thing, thousands of innocent people live in neighborhoods that are
essentially under siege by thugs. The lives of those New Orleanians are
diminished in countless ways and, therefore, so is the city as a whole.

Luck can be fickle. While innocent bystanders are rarely killed in the gun
battles that rage in New Orleans' most violent neighborhoods, simply being
in the wrong place at the wrong time can be your undoing. Gladys Dyson, a
bubbly 18-year-old, was one such victim. She was walking with a friend on
Washington Avenue last May when she was hit by a stray bullet as two
carloads of men fired at each other.

Gladys Dyson is atypical, police say. Officers estimate that only 15
percent of murders in the city claim truly innocent victims. That is a
small slice of the whole, but if the percentage were applied to the 275
murders in 2003, it would total 41 people. That figure is hardly
insubstantial; the entire city of Boston had only 41 murders last year.

Besides, every death -- no matter what the circumstances -- brings pain to
mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors.

Beyond that, if the murder rate continues to rise, as it has in the past
four years, the killing could very well spread to parts of the city that
are now considered to be mostly immune. When violence was at its worst here
in the mid-1990s, when 350 or 400 people died each year, violence didn't
seem to conform to any border.

Already there have been moments when violence popped up in unexpected
places. In mid-January, an 18-year-old man was shot to death when two
hooded men leapt out of a vehicle on Earhart Boulevard during rush hour and
attacked his car. The road was packed with traffic, as people headed home
from work. "How these guys didn't kill anyone else is beyond me," 6th
District Capt. Tony Cannatella said.

It is remarkable that no one else was killed, and the Earhart attack is a
sober reminder of why it is in everyone's interest to reverse the murder trend.

That will not be easily done. The New Orleans Police Department had some
success in the so-called murder hot zone after zeroing in on it last
summer, and the resulting drop in homicides in that area is a hopeful sign.
Police also teamed up with federal law enforcement agencies to round up and
prosecute some key drug dealers. Those strategies are not cheap, but they
ought to continue and, if possible, expand.

In an attempt to lure new officers to the understaffed police force, the
Nagin administration and the City Council have come up with almost $5
million for testing and training programs and to provide $2,000 raises for
every officer. In addition, the New Orleans Police Foundation is offering
$5,000 signing bonuses to veteran officers from other police departments
and $500 bonuses for brand-new recruits.

Those efforts are almost certain to pay off, although it will take an
aggressive recruiting drive for the department to get its troop strength to
1,800 officers by year's end. A similar effort was highly successful in
1997, but attrition soon overwhelmed the hiring successes as the city
backed off on recruiting and new officers became disgruntled because they
weren't given step pay raises as promised.

Police and city officials ought to learn from those mistakes. Whatever they
promise new officers, they need to deliver. Recruiting should be a constant
effort, not something that is ramped up and then allowed to wane.

Arguably the biggest challenge, though, is to persuade witnesses to testify
in murder cases. Police have made arrests in 106 of the 275 murders in
2003, but 30 percent of those cases have fallen apart because witnesses
were uncooperative, recanted or were not considered credible. So far,
prosecutors have been able to get convictions in only seven cases.

District Attorney Eddie Jordan has beefed up his office's witness
protection program and is working to expand it further. And Police
Superintendent Eddie Compass has recruited churches to act as a support
network for witnesses. The efforts are too new to judge their
effectiveness, but such strategies are worth pursuing.

It is understandable that witnesses who are constantly confronted with
violence might be reluctant to risk the wrath of a killer. But the irony is
that if more witnesses would cooperate, police and prosecutors could get
more convictions, and the cycle of homicide might begin to break down.

At this point, the killers seem unconcerned about punishment. "It's almost
like word on the street is: The easiest case to get away with is murder,"
5th District detective Jimmie Turner said.

As ghastly as that sounds, it seems to be true. And that is something that
this community simply shouldn't tolerate.