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20.7, which was the highest rate among the country’s largest cities. That 58 per 100,000 is down from 2007’s rate of 71 per 100,000 (with 209 murders in a postHurricane Katrina population of less than 300,000), but up from last year’s 51. So far, New Orleans doesn’t seem to be doing much better in 2012. As of this writing, the city has seen 16 murders in this still-brand-new year. As the murder tally grew in 2011, so did the city’s list of initiatives aimed at curbing the bloodshed. In September, Mayor Mitch Landrieu officially launched “SOS NOLA: Saving Our Sons” with a crime summit at UNO Lakefront Arena. He pledged $250,000 to the CeaseFire program — a 15-yearold crime intervention model based on research by criminologist and author David Kennedy — in Central City. (The program, still being set up, will be rolled out in earnest next month, Landrieu said recently.) NOPD also ramped up efforts to create and strengthen Neighborhood Watch Groups. This
Whatever conclusions are drawn about crime in New Orleans after the model is applied here will be — and will be perceived by the public as — objective, he says. “What I like about the Milwaukee model is that it involves an analysis of murders in the community that’s done in a neutral way,” Serpas says. “When I talk about murder, there’s always going to be an audience that hears, ‘well that’s the police department’s view.’ If the district attorney talks about murder, people will think, that’s the DA’s point of view.” Last fall, Carter and Kirk Bouyelas, NOPD deputy superintendent of investigations, went to Milwaukee to review the MHRC in action. Beyond data-gathering, Carter says it was the interagency collaboration he saw in Milwaukee that really impressed him. “One of the great things I saw was federal, state and local law enforcement actually seated in the same room, sharing information, cross-information, to come to conclusions,” Carter says.
Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > january 24 > 2012
New Orleans’ murder rate not only outpaces the rest of the country — it does so by a wide margin. It’s more than four times that of similarly sized cities & more than 10 times the national average.
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Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke disagrees with the city’s police officials, saying the crimefighting method doesn’t work and is a “waste of money.” COURTESY MILWAUKEE COUNTY SHERIFF DEPT.
month, the city started a midnight basketball program aimed at keeping young men off the street. The initiative, announced in late November, appears to be both the broadest in scope and most specifically targeted at the singular issue of murder and is now being implemented, city officials say. It’s called the Strategic Command to Reduce Murders, which the mayor first called for in his April 2011 State of the City speech. The program is based on a similar one begun in Milwaukee in 2005. That city, which has some demographic similarities to New Orleans, also has had high murder numbers per capita, though its murder rate has never been as high as New Orleans’. The U.S. Department of Justice brought the model to Landrieu and Criminal Justice Commissioner James Carter through Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2), a local-federal partnership program launched by the Obama administration last summer in New Orleans and five other cities. “It’s considered a national best practice,” Carter says. The Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission (MHRC) is a data-based approach to the problem. The MHRC collects comprehensive data on every murder that occurs in the city, combines it with personal intelligence from investigators and criminal justice officials from local, state and federal agencies, then turns its findings into policy recommendations. “We have, over time, made over 350 recommendations that range from a case-specific recommendation … to state legislation,” says MHRC director Dr. Mallory O’Brien, an epidemiologist who founded the initiative. The model appeals to the Landrieu administration, which frequently affirms its commitment to adopting “best practices” based on “data-driven models.” Serpas says the attraction of MHRC is that it’s an academic approach, based on concrete fact rather than the biases of criminal justice professionals.
Dr. Steven Brandl, a Milwaukee crime expert and MHRC researcher, says information sharing is the program’s greatest asset. “I think that is the intent and the purpose,” he says. “It’s to increase communication among these people from different agencies. And that’s probably, in my opinion, what the homicide review commission does best.” Carter and Bouyelas’ Milwaukee trip was followed by a two-day training session in New Orleans, led by O’Brien and attended by officials here, including U.S. Attorney Jim Letten. “We had folks from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Corrections, U.S. Marshals, the [Milwaukee] Police Department,” O’Brien says. “So the right group of people was in the room. And everybody was committed to participating in the reviews and making it work.” Letten says he was impressed with the presentation: “Having seen the success of this project in Milwaukee, let’s just say I’m very hopeful and very excited that we can get some mileage out of it here.” There is some difference of opinion as to whether the Milwaukee model does, in fact, reduce murders. Carter and O’Brien say it does. But Milwaukee’s murder rate, which went down steadily in the first three years after MHRC’s launch, spiked again in 2010 and 2011. Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a frequent and blunt critic of the city’s police department, says those numbers vindicate his longheld position that the MHRC is a “waste of money” — political window-dressing for a nonpolitical problem. City officials, however, remain confident the initiative — combined with its other efforts — has worked in Milwaukee and will work to help solve what many say is the city’s most troublingly persistent issue. “The problem is the person crimes,” specifically murder, Goodly says. “That’s something we’ve got to, got to, got to, get right.” page 22