Someone posted a CNN article on a livejournal community I frequent, the gist of which is that New Orleans, Louisiana is the third most murderous city in the entire world, right behind Caracas and Cape Town. I found it hard to believe that you’re more likely to be murdered in New Orleans than in any random war torn city in the Third World. This is my response:
Here is a response I got:
I confess I’m still :dubious: on this issue. I live and work in New Orleans at the moment, and have been to the city many, many times in my life. I’ve never had so much as someone sniff at me, and I’ve been to the Lower 9th and Central City. I just can’t understand how the murder rate per capita is higher in New Orleans than in some shitty favela in Brazil. Does anyone have some good statistics that can shed some light on this? Is it really my ‘sense of American exceptionalism’ that blinds me to the truth?
And that’s just the cops!
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I doubt New Orleans is the third most deadly city in the world. IIRC it used to be the murder capital of the United States. I would not be surprised if NO is the #3 murder town in the U.S.
I live in the suburbs, and work in New Orleans as well. Not going to give stats here, just anecdotes:
A strong majority of the city’s footprint is super-duper safe. Very generally, the murderers don’t roam (it’s easy to cite counter-examples, of course, as it would be for any major American city).
Those who do happen to live in the pockets of the worst violence are especially vicious to one another, and are very generally indifferent to outsiders. This indifference is situationally influenced, however – the meter reader working during daylight in the hardest neighborhoods is pretty much OK. That same meter reader hanging out in the same area at night is at much greater risk.
The upshot is that it’s not like you walk out of the airport and have to immediately duck because of all the drive-bys. It’s not like gunmen are slaughtering Bourbon-Street partiers en masse every weekend. It’s not like when you walk out of a downtown hotel at night that there’s a real risk of taking a bullet as you hit the street.
All that said: there are parts of the city where tourist areas and hard neighborhoods are in very close proximity. Visitors really need to be anal about checking with locals about where it’s safe to be on foot, and at what times.
When you look at these stats, you need to be careful. First of all it is number of murders per total population. This makes comparisons sort of “Iffy.”
For instance, I live in Chicago, which has murders, like any other major city. But most of these murders are taking place in bad areas. If you never go into them, you have little chance of being murdered.
In this case the number of people in “nice” areas are duluting the stats.
You also have to look at the type of killings. In Chicago most, murders are gang related. Of course every single time a teen ager gets killed and it’s on the news “My son was not in a gang.” They never are, of course. But are they? Who knows? If the cops track such informatin they don’t release the follow up to it.
So if there are 500 murders in a city per year and 400 of them involved gangs and drugs, your chances of getting murdered go way down if you’re not a gang member or into drugs.
Percentages mean nothing unless they are properly compared. NYC because it’s twice as large as Los Angeles, the next biggest city, always has more crime, simply 'cause it’s so huge.
You also have to define murder. There was a huge argument whether to count the people killed in 9-11 as murders when NYC was defining its murder statistics, for example
It’s next to impossible obtaining reliable and comparative murder rates from different cities as highlighted above, but it’s safe to say that New Orleans is near the top of the table. In the admittedly exceptional circumstances following the aftermath of Katrina, the 2006 statistics probably fell somewhere between a rate of 63.5 to 72.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, and in one FBI demographic estimate potentially as much as 96 (up on 53.1 from 2002, F.B.I. “Crime in the United States 2002”). This places it in a comparable standing to the estimated murder rate for Caracas in 2003 of 61.5, though this figure is likely to involve a relatively high degree of inaccuracy, and unofficial estimates I have found online speculatively reach as much as 160/100,000. Cape Town has a rate of 62/100,000 and the official 2004 rate of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea is 54/100,000. Still at least you can console yourself with figures for post-invasion Baghdad, estimates of which are incredibly fuzzy but have in the years following the invasion potentially reached as high 140-198/100,000, and approximately 56.49/100,000 for the entire country in 2006.
All of us who know and love New Orleans realize that there are some areas of the city that are absolutely not safe, and that we have no business in these areas. Most major American cities also have such areas, including right here in Salt Lake City, which is not known as a violent crime hotspot…
That being said, to put New Orleans in the same company as Baghdad, Mogadishu, or Sowetto is assinine.
Mississippienne, you sound like an amazing young lady, and may God Bless your work, and please, God Bless New Orleans!!!
The quality of the assertion is approximately equal to the quality of the reply. The reply does not even attempt to answer the question-instead challenging the questioner in not-so-subtle terms. Ignore both the original assertion and the response. New Orleans is like every other city in the US, with distorted demographics due to Katrina.
Having found some more recent statistics, the 2007 FBI data indicates a murder rate of 94.7/100,000 for the City of New Orleans (209 murders and non-negligent manslaughter, pop. 220,614) compared to the following 2007 province data (and comparative change from 2006) from the Iraq Body Count,
Diyala, at 255 violent civilian deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (up 29% from 197/100k in 2006)
Baghdad, at 164/100k (down 39% from 267/100k)
Anbar, at 122/100k (up 61% from 76/100k) 4
Salah al-Din, at 120/100k (up 26% from 95/100k)
Ninewa, at 100/100k (up 143% from 41/100k)
So don’t worry you’re not in the top 3, though you might make it into the top 10.
One of the problems is that the population of New Orleans decreased drastically after Katrina.
The criminals stayed (or came back) and so did the people who are likely to get killed. They’re all concentrated into several bad areas.
So the murder rate isn’t any higher than it was before Katrina. It’s just that the population has decreased. So when you figure the murder rate per capita, it appears to have increased.
I also wonder if they mean “City of New Orleans” or if they mean the entire metro area. If they’re referring to the city limits, that’s an even more drastic population decrease, because a lot of the population of the city has moved to the suburbs.
That only thing that’s really gotten worse is the murder rate in the suburbs. Kenner, Louisiana (where New Orleans Int’l Airport is) is sweating their high murder rate compared to previous years and they’re currently at 7 (which is roughly their average over the past 10 years).
Yes. Random “drive bys” are (thank bob) relatively rare. Most of the violence in “bad parts” is caused by people like gang members, drug dealers etc. The not too savory demographic as a matter of fact.
I went to Tulane and lived in New Orleans until 1995. It was the murder capital of the U.S. back then and it was truly dangerous. You really had to know how to handle yourself and be prepared to break off in a dead sprint away from some situations. It happened to me a few times including an attempted car-jacking at a red light.
That said, the tourist parts of the French Quarter and Garden District are well protected. I have seen many incidents on Bourbon Street where the police seem to swarm out of nowhere when there is a sign of true danger. The city depends on tourism and they have to strike a balance between appearing lawless and protecting people. During the Mardi Gras season, New Orleans supposedly has the best crowd control police in the world which I can easily believe because they crack down fast and furiously on people that interfere with the parades or other people.
There is no way it is the third most murderous city in the world. The real contenders don’t have the means to compile such statistics. However, New Orleans is not a place where you want to wander around loaded off the beaten path. If you stick to the unwritten rules, you will generally be safe. The residents love their city and want to show it off. There is no other place like it.
Yeah, I’m a bit surprised at that myself. Jo’burg seemd much more dangereous than Cape Town when I was there, but perhaps the much higher population or under-reporting has to do with it. I could only find the 1999 numbers so far, but Jo’burg had 136 murders per 100 000 that year. Cape Town registered 73 per 100 000.
But exactly the same applies to all those other cities, foreign to you. You can’t make those exceptions for US cities only. Baghdad is not so dangerous because most murders there are due to terrorists? Please.
And actually, the percentages are ALL that matters. What doesn’t matter when quoted out of context are the absolute numbers. The murder rate expressed as a percentage, or per 100,000 inhabitants, IS what the OP is talking about. How those murders occur is hardly relevant.
Sure it is. An extraordinary event such as terrorists flying planes into skyscrapers is not the type of occcurence I would want my local police actively seeking to prevent. Their resources are better spent on crimes they can actually prevent.
If terrorist activities are so common in Baghdad that they become a legitimate regular risk, then I might want the local police there to have different priorities.
The rankings are based on murders, manslaughter, robberies, forcible rape, robberies, and aggravated assault for cities with populations over 500,000. Detroit came in at No. 1, closely followed by Memphis and then Miami. Those were the only ones on the list with more than 950 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
New Orleans was beaten by such surprises as Stockton, California, the ever charming Charleston, South Carolina, and my own Nashville, Tennessee. I feel safe in Nashville almost anywhere I go. I did, however, have an armed robbery committed against me at the local fabric store. Maybe I’m too trusting.
Like most South Africans I also assumed that Joburg would be worse than Cape Town but looking at the murder stats, per province only unfortunatly, the ratio per 100 000 is highest in the Western Cape. While the highest number of murders is in Kwazulu-Natal its population is larger than the Cape’s so that the ratio is lower. Cape town is the only city in the Western Cape and holds most of the population so the stats for the province should be close to the stats for the city by itself.