Over the weekend, seven people were shot on the streets of New Orleans in one 24-hour period between Saturday and Sunday.
This almost unprecedented burst of violent crime is another example that while overall crime numbers are subsiding, violent crime is in fact headed in the other direction.
“Overall crime is down, violent crime is up, it spiked last year and this year’s violent crime rate is exceeding last year’s rate,” says Metropolitan Crime Commission President Rafael Goyeneche.
“We set a record last year, a ten year record. And this year, violent crime, shootings, robberies, carjacking, they were high last year, they’re even higher year-to-date than last year.”
Goyeneche says the year lost to COVID-19 is to blame for putting the New Orleans Police Department in the shape it’s in.
“The Police Department has been understaffed and part of the violent crime problem is every violent crime offender that you don’t arrest allows those offenders to go out and commit violent crime,” Goyeneche explains.
He says the Police Department had to compensate for the lack of manpower allowed for overtime, but: “Overtime was eliminated in June of last year. And then to compound a bad situation, the furloughs, starting in October, hit the department.”
With the Police Department understaffed more violent criminals are allowed to stay on the streets.
Exacerbating the problem is the new regime at the District Attorney’s Office.
“You have a new social justice policy in the prosecutor’s office. Where they’re not going to prosecute certain offenses, you’ve seen over fifteen hundred cases dismissed, not to mention the cases refused,” Goyeneche says. “And that puts the Police Department between a rock and a hard place.”
“When the public reports criminal wrongdoing to the police and the police make an arrest and they see the offender released right back on the streets again. It becomes a cycle, so those are some of the issues we’re experiencing right now.”
