After ending 2019 with the lowest number of homicides in New Orleans in more than 50 years, last month ended with a spike of 16 murders. New Orleans crime statistics show last year ended with a total of 119 murders, down from 2018.
“The murders went down from 2018 to 2019, from 146 to 119. The mystery in the room is the shootings actually went up one or two percent,” says Dr. Peter Scharf criminologist and professor at LSU Health New Orleans School of Public Health. “Now, all of this is cautious because of the break down, the ransomware attack on the NOPD computers. So the statistics are not completely up-to-date.”
Dr. Scharf says this trend highlights a broader issue with crime in New Orleans. “We got to fix alternatives to incarceration. Unless we think it through strategically we are going to have these dips but we really aren’t going to solve it until we clear that out.”
Seven people were killed in six separate shootings from Jan. 1 to Jan. 6. The most homicides happened in the last week of January, where police reported one murder per day.
