New Orleans has seen a recent spike in homicides, with the NOPD working at least 15 homicides over the last two weeks.
Is this a sign that violent crime is on the rise in New Orleans? One analyst says the jury is still out.
"Yes, we've seen a slight increase over the last few weeks, but that comes on the heels of a lower number of shootings," Jeff Asher of JH Datalytics said. "We have seen, I think much more publicly, this horrific increase in murder over the last few weeks, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're seeing some sort of reversal of the decline that we've seen over the last two years. At least, it doesn't mean that yet."
However, Asher notes that two weeks of crime stats don't make a trend. While the recent spate of deadly shootings has caused the city's homicide numbers to level off after falling for most of the year, Asher says it's much too early to declare a crime wave. That's because, Asher says, the total number of shootings year-to-date is at its lowest level in years.
"For the most part, shootings remain low, and it suggests, at least to me, that we're not seeing necessarily a surge in gun violence," Asher said. "We're just seeing a change in randomness, essentially, over the last couple of weeks."
According to Asher, the city of New Orleans is averaging one shooting per day this year, a significant drop from just a couple of years ago.
"You compare that to, say, the end of 2022 and 2023, when we were averaging three shootings per day consistently," Asher said.
Asher says two weeks' worth of crime stats paint an incomplete picture of the true crime story in New Orleans.
"This drives home the need for a longer horizon than the last two weeks or the last month," Asher said. "You really have to be able to contextualize over several months to see these things change. They go up, and they go down over short time frames. What is a major change, and what is randomness?"