CURBING CRIME

If you are fortunate, an increase in crime doesn't touch your life directly.

You can go about your daily routine as usual. Maybe you start to think
twice about putting the garbage out late at night or jogging at twilight.
Maybe you get more vigilant about locking your doors.

If you are fortunate, that is enough. Not everyone is so fortunate, of course.

With crime on the rise in New Orleans, eruptions of violence are becoming
commonplace in some neighborhoods. June has been particularly violent.
Three homicides in a two-hour period Wednesday night brought the six-day
total to nine. Earlier in the month, there was an equally disturbing spate
of killings in a six-day period.

The shooting deaths overnight Wednesday put this year's homicide total at
110. That is only six more than the same period a year ago, a 5.7 percent
increase. But the 2001 homicide count was an increase over 2000. And in
truth, any increase is distressing.

Indeed, the latest killings coincide with the release of an FBI report
showing that New Orleans' crime rate rose much faster than the national
average in 2001. Major crimes -- including murders, robberies and assaults
- -- went up almost 7 percent in New Orleans and only 2 percent nationwide
between 2000 and 2001. The city had especially large increases in armed
robberies and assaults.

There is a bit of good news; armed robberies fell 11 percent in the first
three months of this year. But that is small solace after the violence of
the past week.

New Police Superintendent Eddie Compass attributes the upward crime trend
to an explosion in the heroin trade. Because of the potency of the heroin,
the youth of the users and the expense of maintaining a hard-to-break
habit, the drug is a worse scourge than crack cocaine, he says. Considering
that crack fueled rampant crime in the early 1990s, that is a frightening
assessment.

Superintendent Compass is reassuring, though. He says the problem is
sizable but not overwhelming -- "and it will be fixed." He is mapping out
an aggressive, multi-layered strategy for combating the increase and seems
to be on the right track.

First, he shifted some officers to the most violent areas in the city. Now,
he is working with the Housing Authority of New Orleans and the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development to try to substantially
increase the police presence in the city's housing developments.

He is meeting with the two agencies next week, hoping to get federal money
to pay for 12-hour shifts -- an extra four hours per officer per day -- for
the roughly 70 officers assigned to the housing developments. Beefing up
the police presence in those developments is a smart move because of the
recent flare-up of violence in some of them, in particular the St. Bernard
development.

It was in St. Bernard that Davia Atkins was killed by a stray bullet as she
sat on a porch at a post-funeral luncheon in May. Another innocent
bystander, a 17-year-old, was shot four times but survived. The gunmen were
believed to be firing at two men, supposedly in retaliation for some
unknown slight.

Besides the staffing moves, Superintendent Compass is urging his district
commanders to be in constant contact with community leaders. Those are the
people who can help build links between the Police Department and
residents, some of whom are leery of cooperating in crime investigations.
And the chief is right to view those relationships as an essential
ingredient to successful crime fighting.

In addition, he is backing an effort by All Congregations Together to get
the state to put more money into drug treatment -- particularly for heroin,
which is a complicated habit to break.

The superintendent also has a July 8 summit planned with church leaders
from across the city. He hopes to enlist them in an effort to find jobs for
young people. Arrests alone won't erase crime, he argues. As long as young
people have nothing meaningful to do, he says, they will be drawn into
crime -- and the cycle of violence will continue.

Crime trends back him up. In times of economic health, such as the late
1990s, crime tends to drop. When the economy sags, as it has recently,
crime goes up.

Getting young people into jobs is a long-term strategy, as is drug
treatment. These are perhaps unusual priorities for a police chief. But if
they can help drive down crime, and that seems possible, New Orleanians
will be glad that the chief made them his business.