Much of the space of this blog is spent talking about trends that are changing for the negative, so it’s nice to write a post that solely highlights trends heading in a positive direction. Each of these three could probably get a fuller treatment, but I’m going to lump them together since I’ve had less time for blogging over the last few months. Continue reading “Three Positive NOLA Crime/Policing Trends”
The New Orleans mayoral election season is off and running and the early returns suggest that NOPD recruitment is likely to be a topic of interest. A recent NOLA.com editorial cited Forward New Orleans, a coalition of civic groups, calling for the next mayor to commit to growing NOPD by 50 officers.
Increasing NOPD’s size by 50 officers per year for several years is a worthy goal in my opinion, but our discussion should focus on new ways of growing the department because the current method simply is not solving the problem.
Continue reading “Why New Orleans Needs a “Cheat Code” for Police Recruiting”
Louisiana freshman Senator John Kennedy made waves on Friday telling WVUE that “(Stop and Frisk) worked in New York. It’s the only way I know left to get the guns and thugs and dopes off the street. We got young people killing young people and now other citizens, and the reason is they got these guns, and until you get the guns you’re not going to stop it. The criticism of it is it’s racial profiling. No, not when it’s done correctly. When it’s done correctly, race has nothing to do with it.”
But Kennedy is wrong. New Orleans should want nothing to do with stop and frisk, and here’s why.
Continue reading “Why Stop and Frisk Won’t Work in New Orleans”
There have been 718 people shot in 568 shooting incidents and 205 people murdered in New Orleans over the last 365 days. If this were the end of the calendar year those figures would be by far the worst of the Landrieu administration.
As May comes to a close it is worthwhile to examine where New Orleans stands with UCR Part I crime. Previous posts have covered how I estimate UCR Part I crime counts and it’s worth noting that the city hasn’t published the first quarter crime official stats yet as of May 31. Continue reading “NOLA Crime YTD Update”
Absent a significant reduction in gun violence it appears likely that New Orleans will see another jump in murder in 2017.
Thus concluded my 2017 murder forecast published late in December 2016. As we approach nearly five full months into the year it is apparent that both the conclusions and the underlying analysis were spot on. Continue reading “The Pessimist’s Murder Forecast for the Rest of 2017 in NOLA”
A few weeks ago I began playing around with the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. These datasets contain information on individual murder victims and offenders that are aggregated and published under the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report program. It takes some canoodling, but the data on murder exists all the way from 1968 to 2015. Add in some data from NOPD and the final product is a record of nearly every homicide victim in New Orleans from 1968 to present available here for anyone to view.
Continue reading “Data on New Orleans Homicides from 1968 to Present Available Online”
The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data has raw data freely available (you’ll need a login) to hundreds — thousands? — of studies and publications related to criminal justice. One of the studies that has caught my eye is the “Evaluation of the Phoenix, Arizona, Homicide Clearance Initiative, 2003-2005”.
Continue reading “Lessons from Phoenix: How Manpower Impacts Murder Clearances”
NOPD Chief Michael Harrison went before the New Orleans City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee on Thursday to talk crime in the first few months of 2017. Per Harrison NOPD’s murder clearance rate is 31 percent so far in 2017 after clearing 41 percent of cases in 2016.
