Cracking down on violent offenders works, gun buyback programs don’t.
Despite a bloody Christmas holiday, New Orleans in 2018 registered its lowest number of murders in nearly half a century, and other key gun violence statistics also saw important drops, a sign of modest progress in the city’s most intractable crisis.
When the clock struck midnight early Tuesday to usher in the new year, there had been 146 people murdered in New Orleans in 2018, with three additional killings having been deemed justifiable, according to unofficial statistics provided by police.
It marked the lowest annual murder toll since 1971, when there were 116 slayings. And it was the second year in a row the number of murders had fallen in New Orleans, which recorded 157 in 2017, down from 174 in 2016.
In past years, skeptics of New Orleans’ violence-reduction efforts have downplayed the importance of such trends by pointing out that other violent crimes had not seen similar decreases.
A prime example of that was in 2014, when officials were restrained in touting a dip to 150 homicides because the number of nonfatal shootings that same year spiked by 24 percent.
In 2018, though, the 47-year low in murders was accompanied by a drop of about 28 percent in the number of non-deadly shooting incidents from 2017.
Moreover, armed robberies fell for the third year in a row, and the number of carjackings came down as well in 2018, according to statistics kept by the New Orleans City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee.
New Orleans Police Superintendent Michael Harrison has said none of that is by accident. He said he tasked a specialized team of tactical officers and detectives with removing repeat violent offenders from the streets over the past two years, no matter how long the cases took to build, and they’ve delivered results.