Series: Day Two - Article One

HOT ZONE

New Orleans' Early 2003 Murder Spike Revealed A Startling Statistic: In
Such A Sprawling City, Nearly Half Of The Killings Were Concentrated Within
A Seven-Square Mile Area.

A 15-year-old boy gunned down in his high school gymnasium in Mid-City; a
woman who was eight months pregnant shot to death in eastern New Orleans;
an assistant city attorney murdered in Algiers Point.

These were just three of the 30 murders in April, a month that, by year's
end, would prove to be the deadliest of 2003.

April also was the month that the New Orleans Police Department regrouped,
determined to reverse the tide in a battle it appeared to be losing as the
murder toll in the first four months of the year reached 99 -- a disturbing
58 percent jump over the same period the year before.

Police Superintendent Eddie Compass and his second in command, Deputy Chief
of Operations Warren Riley, decided that letting the city's eight police
districts address the murder problem on their own wasn't working.

"District by district, we weren't making the impact that we needed to
make," Riley said.

So a new task force was formed, and one of its early insights was that
almost half the city's homicides -- 42 percent -- took place in a zone of
death covering a scant seven of the city's 190 square miles.

"It was determined that we would throw everything we had into attacking
that area," Riley said.

Flooding the zone was only one strategic adjustment. District captains also
were asked to identify the most dangerous felons in their neighborhoods and
take them off the street. As early as January, the NOPD drew on improved
relationships with federal agencies and hooked up with the FBI to target
repeat offenders. Throughout the year, the Police Department joined forces
with other federal agencies as well, like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms and U.S. Marshals Service, which could doggedly track down a
suspect for days and months at no cost to the city.

Recruiting officers was another push. The city came up with $4.8 million
for testing and training programs designed to boost the size of the overall
police force by 75 officers in 2004, and enough to give every officer a
$2,000 raise in July.

Finding ways to stop the bleeding was no mere numbers game. For some on the
force, the murder crisis had gotten personal: Officers Sherman Defillo Sr.
and Spencer Smith Sr. lost sons to street violence in 2003.

"We are fighting for our families as well," Riley said.

Zeroing In On The 'Zone'

Capt. Timothy Bayard, now commander of the Major Narcotics Unit, Capt. Bob
Bardy and Lt. Jimmy Keen crunched the numbers that led to identification of
the seven-square-mile zone sprawling across portions of the 1st, 3rd and
5th police districts as the epicenter of the slaughter and the drug dealing
that spawned much of it.

Despite the brutal crime upsurge in that area, police say identifying the
murder zone was not as obvious as it might seem in retrospect because
several policing jurisdictions were involved.

"It wasn't glaring," Compass said. "It was subtle. It crossed several
districts. It was spread out through those specific districts."

Once the target was mapped, Compass and Riley's orders were succinct:

Round up guns and the bad guys who use them.

Bust the dealers.

Root out the killers.

That was going to take more than good ideas. The first step was to improve
staffing resources, and NOPD brass tapped 12 other police officers to
devise a plan for the coming assault on the zone.

The seven-square-mile area comprised a swath of older neighborhoods loosely
bounded by Canal Street, North Broad Street, Gentilly Road, Mirabeau
Avenue, Florida Avenue, Kentucky Street and St. Claude Avenue. It includes
the turbulent St. Bernard and Lafitte, Iberville and Florida public housing
developments, and portions of the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th wards.

If there was a common denominator to the criminal elements in control of
those neighborhoods, police said, it was the viciousness with which they
enforced their stranglehold.

"I don't think they care very much about their own lives," Keen said.

On the streets within the seven square miles, he said, life is cheap.

That meant the assault was going to be costly, both in dollars and in human
resources. On May 1, with the help of federal agencies, the department
shifted into high gear, unleashing 120 of its best officers from SWAT and
the district task forces into the murder zone. Personnel costs would soon
rise to $2.5 million, including $232,000 in overtime. The FBI, ATF, the
Drug Enforcement Administration and State Police also participated.

Cops' Full-Court Press

Sheer street strength was one tactic. Grabbing suspects and known offenders
before they committed their next crime was another. It was the
"broken-window theory" of policing, the idea being that minor crimes, even
vandalism, can lead to bigger ones and to a corresponding degradation of
community life. Officers stopped scores of people on the street, not
hesitating to book them for minor infractions such as disturbing the peace
or possession of marijuana. The roundups regularly yielded men and women
out on bond who had begun skipping court dates. The battle was on.

Operation Full Court Press, the department dubbed it, and in short order
the numbers began to attest to its effectiveness. From January to April
2003, there were 42 murders reported in the zone. But in the next four
months, from May to August 2003, the number dropped to 26, a decrease of
more than a third.

And statistics show that the city had 7 percent fewer killings in July,
August and September compared with the same three months in 2002.

By year's end, the department had made more than 13,000 arrests since April
and taken more than 200 guns off the streets.

"We feel as though the momentum has shifted," Riley said, referring to the
last six months of 2003. "We are taking control of the streets."

The campaign did not always go smoothly. In November, New Orleans police
shot four suspects in eight days; two were fatally wounded. Police said the
use of deadly force was justified because firearms had been drawn on
officers five times.

Compass saw the violence not as a revival of lawlessness but as the end of
an upsurge. The new initiatives were "making criminals desperate," he said.

And indeed, by year's end, the springtime uptick in murders that had
threatened to claim 400 lives by the end of 2003 had disintegrated. The
finally tally for the year was 275 people killed, still an increase, but
only 7 percent more than in 2002.

Buckling Down

The task force that set to work in April appears to have been pivotal in
turning the tide, but it was not the city's only strategy, nor was it the
first response. Before directing his troops to attack the city's murder
zone, Compass had already drawn a bead on the city's most violent offenders.

After noticing a 90 percent spike in murders in the final three months of
2002, a special city, state and federal task force hit the streets Jan. 12,
2003, with a most-wanted list 35 names long.

In February, Compass announced that the team had detained 3,700 people in
the previous four weeks. Eight were on the violent offender list, including
James Aldridge, 22, who had been previously arrested in a double murder and
an attempted murder, and Kendell Thornton, 27, who had arrests on charges
of cocaine distribution and murder.

Nearly 2,000 of those arrested were booked with violent crimes and weapons
violations, police said. Along with the arrests, police confiscated a small
arsenal of 231 weapons, ranging from 12-gauge shotguns to 9 mm handguns.

Removing the guns and violent offenders from the street was a first step
toward curbing the murder rate, police said.

While officers prowled the streets, the brass worked to beef up its
investigative staff.

In September 2002, 30 detectives were shifted to headquarters from the
district command posts, reversing a 1996 decision by Compass' predecessor,
former Superintendent Richard Pennington, to decentralize the detectives.
Compass acted because the number of solved homicide cases had begun to
dwindle even as the murder rate soared.

Part of the problem, the department said, was that many homicide
investigators were green. The idea was to have young detectives work side
by side with more seasoned colleagues who had stayed at headquarters during
the Pennington years to work major cases.

By late March, Compass was ready to return the detectives to their
districts to run their own investigations. The "training period" was over,
he said.

"It worked to give us more experience, but it didn't work in solving
crimes," Compass said. "In a certain sense, they were isolated. They were
losing a lot of history and a lot of relationships."

Mentoring From Marshals

Training of another kind was provided by the U.S. Marshals Service, thanks
to the cooperation of Marshal Theophile Duroncelet, who agreed to let
investigators from each police district work in the federal agency on
two-month rotations.

Police investigators reporting to the Marshals Service were told to bring
along homicide cases in which the suspects were still at large. The
marshals coached cops on new search techniques that the officers could take
back to their district stations, said Steve Hartman, U.S. Marshals spokesman.

Working together, for example, homicide Detective Daniel McMullen and
Marshal Bill Brown developed information that led to the arrest of Lester
Harris in the beating death of Seattle conventioneer Thomas Breiwick within
48 hours of the Dec. 2 killing.

In late April, the Marshals Service tracked Keana Barnes to a hideout in
Mexico and arrested her in the fatal shooting of Perry Jennings Jr. of
Algiers. Barnes had been arrested in April 2002 and booked with the
stabbing death of an Irish Bayou man, but she was freed under an order that
requires a suspect to be released from jail in 60 days if no charges have
been filed by the district attorney's office.

"A lot of what we do on the technological end costs money," Hartman said of
the U.S. Marshals Service's contribution. "We spent several thousand
dollars to use our resources to help find her. The cost to the NOPD was zero."

Tarik Smith, accused of killing Demetra Norse in June near Almonaster and
Law streets, was found three weeks later in Slidell. Marshals in July
tracked Ronnie Rollins to Youngstown, Ohio, and he was subsequently booked
with the April shooting death of Gerard R. Joseph Sr. In October, Kendall
Allen, wanted in the July murder of Edward Snyder, was found hiding in a
stairwell in Irvington, N.J. After Walter Foreman was shot to death in
October, it took U.S. marshals less than a month to find and arrest suspect
Sean Gipson in Detroit.

FBI Hits Zone Hard

While the U.S. Marshals Service was able to haul in suspects, the FBI used
its resources to build cases against scores of offenders from the "hot
zone," local FBI chief Louis Reigel III said.

The FBI brought in 41 agents and worked 75,000 hours to establish wiretaps
and gather evidence to build cases against several big-time drug dealers,
Reigel said.

"We weren't going after individuals just selling narcotics. . . . Not only
was there the narcotics trafficking affiliation, but multiple violent
crimes," Reigel said.

In the last half of the year, working with the NOPD, the FBI conducted
monthly "take-downs" and picked up nearly 100 people with records of
violence from the trouble spots. The bureau spent $250,000 in the effort.

In one case, after a yearlong investigation, the FBI and New Orleans police
officers arrested 17 people, who had 134 prior arrests and 26 convictions.
They were charged in federal court with conspiring to distribute cocaine
and crack in and around the Florida public housing complex.

"These are the types of individuals that we want off the streets," Reigel said.

In September, Reigel said he knew the task force was beginning to make an
impact in the seven-square-mile zone when drugs became harder and harder to
buy there.

"We began to see the narcotics dry up," Reigel said. He said he knew the
drug market might move to new turf, but that such disruptions might lead
dealers to make mistakes -- and cops to make more arrests. "At least we
were moving them out of an area where they were comfortable," Reigel said.

Tough On Gun Violations

For its part, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, in tandem with
the U.S. attorney's office, stepped up enforcement of gun violations.

For example, Atiba Green, a convicted felon, was sentenced to 10 years in
federal prison for carrying a firearm.

Green and another man had a friend fill out the required federal paperwork
to buy an assault rifle on April 23. A short time later, they were stopped
by New Orleans police and ATF agents, and a search turned up an assault
rifle, a loaded 9 mm Beretta pistol, a .380-caliber handgun, ammunition, a
bulletproof vest and a ski mask.

With an extensive record -- six felony convictions, from possession of
cocaine and heroin in 1994 to battery of a corrections officer in 1999 --
Green received the maximum sentence, a decade in prison.

"Federally, the sentences that are being handed down are very strong,"
local ATF chief Mark Chait said. "We're taking these people out, some of
them for a lifetime."

While using federal agencies to enhance their policing strength, the NOPD
also started more aggressively analyzing the criminal history of murder
victims and suspects. For example, among the city's 275 homicide victims
last year, the department found that 87 percent of them had criminal
records, most with felonies. And among the suspects arrested or identified
in connection with those slayings, 91 percent had previous felony arrests.
Almost 30 had been arrested before on murder charges.

So far, police have cleared or solved 42 percent of last year's homicide
cases. Of the 275 murders, suspects have been arrested in 105 cases,
warrants have been issued in three others, and eight cases were cleared by
"exception." That includes suspects who wind up dead.

Arrests Don't Stick

But police lament that the suspects they catch often are released from jail
before the ink has dried on their arrest warrants, Riley said.

One of the most troubling cases for the NOPD in 2003 was the death of
18-year-old Gladys Dyson in late May. An innocent bystander, Dyson was shot
in the chest during a rolling car-to-car gun battle in Central City near
Washington Avenue and LaSalle Street.

Elwood Pleasant, one of three suspects arrested in Dyson's murder, was
booked in January 2003 on a murder warrant in another case, but he spent no
more than two nights in jail before hitting the streets again. Criminal
Court Judge Charles Elloie had reduced Pleasant's bond, paving the way for
his release.

Police and prosecutors said Elloie had infuriated them for years by
repeatedly going easy on suspects in violent crimes. But after Dyson's
death, the judge said he would no longer adjust bonds for suspects charged
with violent crimes, citing the surge in violence and the growing problem
of witness intimidation.

Pleasant, 23, turned himself in. He was acquitted of Dyson's murder in
January; two co-defendants await trial.

Thornton, who was booked with illegally carrying a weapon and with cocaine
distribution in the same sweep that first snared Pleasant, was out in less
than two months after prosecutors dropped the case. So was James Linton,
23, who was booked with attempted murder in January 2003 but released a
month later when the district attorney's office refused the case. And
Steven Kennedy, 22, got out in July after prosecutors refused a murder
charge against him from April. He was arrested again on Jan. 26 and was one
of two men booked in the Dec. 11 murder of a police officer's son.

In another example, four of seven men who were arrested in July during the
largest drug bust of the year were back on the streets just days later
after three Orleans Parish criminal court judges stepped in to override the
magistrate bail-setting process.

Keeping suspects behind bars until trial remains a daunting challenge.

"Our biggest challenge is that we continue to have to put the same violent
criminals in jail over and over again," Riley said. "We honestly believe
that our murder rate would be cut by 60 percent if the violent offenders
stayed in jail and did their time.

"No matter what strategy we have in place, we will not have success unless
hard-core criminals are remanded to prison until trial," he said.

Going The Federal Route

Vexed by the revolving door, the NOPD is teaming up more often with
colleagues on the federal side of law enforcement. Bond guidelines are much
tighter, and evidence rules often favor the prosecution -- meaning suspects
don't often get second chances.

"What's great about them going federal is that we will not see them back on
the streets until they go to trial and until they are convicted or
cleared," Riley said. "And we feel certain that they will not be cleared
through the federal system."

When suspects booked with dealing drugs learn they will be guests of the
federal system, they know what that means, Reigel said.

"Their eyes get about three times the size that they normally are," Reigel
said. "Word is getting back . . . It's a wake-up call. That's for sure."

Rounding up repeat offenders has a direct impact on the murder rate, law
enforcement agencies have found.

"We are trying to take as many violent or potentially violent offenders off
the streets as possible," acting U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said. "These guys
don't like being in the federal court system. We are turning the heat up."

Keeping repeat offenders behind bars longer is where the U.S. Department of
Justice has lent a powerful hand through programs such as Project Exile and
Project Safe Neighborhoods, which are taking guns and violent offenders off
the streets at record rates, Letten said.

In December, Letten said his office had secured the convictions of 51
people on federal gun charges in the New Orleans area during a 12-month
period ending Sept. 30. His office has charged more than 200 defendants
during the same period with gun- and drug-related federal crimes, Letten said.

The number of federal cases pending in U.S. District Court in New Orleans
made by the joint local, state and federal task force, Project Safe
Neighborhoods, has risen by 19 percent since the previous fiscal year, he said.

"So much of it has to do with the men and women of the New Orleans Police
Department," Letten said. "You have no idea how much worse this city would
be if they were not out there every day."

Increasing Its Ranks

Compass said the amount of cooperation between NOPD and federal agencies is
at a 25-year high. Although the help is welcome, the Police Department
wants to help itself by upgrading its force. That means paying officers
more money to make working for the NOPD more attractive.

The New Orleans Police Foundation, the recruiting arm of the department,
promised $5,000 signing bonuses to cops who agree to leave police
departments outside New Orleans to work for the city. The Police Foundation
also increased its bonus for raw recruits from $400 to $500.

Late last year, New Orleans recruiters flew to Cleveland, which was
planning to lay off a batch of officers. Twenty-two prospective hires
applied on the spot; and 15 have since passed the written exam, Riley said.
One veteran officer has been hired. The NOPD is planning another trip to
Cleveland.

The city also came up with some extra money for the department. As a
recruiting initiative, Mayor Ray Nagin budgeted $1.8 million to increase
police pay by $2,000 a year beginning July 1. The change will boost the
starting salary for a newly commissioned officer to $34,450.

An additional $3 million will pay for recruiting, hiring and training new
officers, with a goal of expanding the force to 1,685 by the end of the
year. Nagin initially had aimed for 1,885.

Although officials say they don't have the money yet, the goal is a police
force of 2,000. Riley would settle for 1,800 by the end of this year.

"With 1,800, we will assure you that there will be a major reduction in
murders," he said. "If we get 2,000 officers, New Orleans will not have to
worry about 200 murders again in a year."