Ethan Brown

In mid- April, NOPD Superintendent Warren Riley proclaimed that New Orleans Police are winning the battle against violent crime. To prove his point, Riley cited a slight decrease in murders in the first quarter of ‘08 (54 murders in the first quarter of ‘08 vs. 59 in ‘07). I was skeptical of Riley’s statements because the first quarter is traditionally quieter than most crime-wise in New Orleans and a single quarter is too small a snapshot to buttress any big declaration about the murder rate here which has seen spectacular rises in ‘06 and ‘07. Back in April, I also warned that shootings and armed robberies had increased so dramatically in ‘08 that Riley’s comments would quickly disproved by events on the ground. Sure, enough, Riley recently admitted that the slight drop in murders he trumpeted back in April was erased quickly by a spike in killings. So, as of May 4 there have been 70 slayings in New Orleans as compared with 63 murders at the time last year. Worse–much worse–armed robberies are up 50% in the first three months of ‘08 compared to the same period last year. And yet another violent weekend in New Orleans has propelled the murder rate even higher. It’s long past time for media to take Riley’s prouncements for what they are–happy talk. Finally, it’s worth remembering that an NOPD that makes few arrests for violent offenses–a mere 2% of all arrests in 2007 were for state violent offenses, according to the Metropolitan Crime Commission–isn’t likely to “win the battle against violent crime” much less make a dent in it.

This Sunday at 7PM, Dateline NBC is running an investigative piece about the murder of federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna. I was interviewed for the piece–and it’s a case that deserves a lot more attention than its received so far–so if you find yourself at home that night please tune in.

UPDATE: Transcript of the Dateline segment on Luna is here; some video footage of me talking about the case is here.

WWLTV: “New Orleans police are winning the battle against violent crime, Police Superintendent Warren Riley said Friday.” Really? Well, no. Riley’s claim of victory over violent crime is staked on first quarter murder stats (54 murders in the first quarter of ‘08 vs. 59 in ‘07). That’s a decline that could safely be described as “statistically insignificant.” And sure enough, a violent weekend in New Orleans has already rendered Riley’s claims ridiculous.

Because I’ve been completely absorbed in working on my new book, I only recently realized that I haven’t done any writing here since the end of March. And I’m off on a work trip this week so there won’t be any updates here until the week of 4/21. But before I go, I wanted to make a quick point about Frank Rich’s recent column in the Times, “Tuning Out Iraq.” I’ve written here about the lack of interest in the costs of the Iraq war but I think that Rich is wrong to argue that “most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the war or oppose it. They want to look away, period, and have been doing so for some time.” As Eric Boehlert persuasively argues here, “news consumers’ interest in Iraq remains relatively high, while news coverage has basically vanished. How’s that for a disconnect?” Boehlert is correct, unfortunately, when he writes that the public-doesn’t-care-about-Iraq meme pushed by the media simply serves to “justify the media’s wholesale retreat from Iraq.” Indeed, the real problem here is not, as Rich suggests, that the public isn’t interested in the war or that movie audiences aren’t flocking to Iraq movies, but instead it’s that media coverage of the war has declined so significantly. This is the uncomfortable truth about Iraq’s disappearance from our public discourse and it’s no surprise that it eludes big media types like Rich.

I’ve got a piece in the new (April) issue of Radar Magazine on the murder rate in New Orleans which can be found here. My original draft was much, much longer than what ended up getting published in the magazine so I want to add a few points here:

1) My estimate of the murder rate in New Orleans (approx. 63 murders per 100,000 population) was probably too low. Tulane University demographer Mark VanLandingham recently published a study (”Murder Rates in New Orleans 2007″) in which he claimed that the murder rate is about 76.8 per 100,000 population. VanLandingham rightly described murder trends in New Orleans this way: “We went from really, really bad in 2006 to unbelievably bad in 2007.” And, as I noted in the Radar piece, cities with high murder rates (ie, Baltimore and Philly) don’t even come close to approaching the murder rate in New Orleans.

2) The interim Orleans Parish D.A.–Keva Landrum-Johnson–has repeatedly pointed to her success in bringing down the number of Article 701 releases as symbol of progress made at the DA’s office during her tenure . A decline in the number of 701 releases is significant, obviously, but obtaining convictions in murder cases is a lot more important. How’s the DA’s office doing there? In 2006, under D.A. Eddie Jordan, there were three convictions in 162 murders. The stats for 2007 conviction rates are not in yet (and Landrum-Johnson took over in the early fall of 2007, so it’s not fair to hold her responsible for the entire year) but it’s conviction rates–not 701s–that is the key metric in judging the performance of the DA’s office.

3) Low quality policing by the NOPD continues to be a huge problem. According to the Metropolitan Crime Commission (MCC), in 2007 just 2% of arrests were for state violent convictions. Similarly, according to the MCC “most arrests were for state, misdemeanor, traffic and municipal offenses.”

4) New Orleans law enforcement (from the NOPD to the DA) often juke statistics and routinely withhold public information.

5) There have been about 40 murders in New Orleans so far this year (that comes out to about 13 slayings per month). That’s a slight decrease from 2006-2007 (when we saw about 15-19 murders per month) but we’ve still got the traditionally violent summer months ahead and, already, we’ve had several days where more than a half dozen people are shot in a single day.

Finally, judging by some of the phone calls and e-mails I’ve received lately I seem to have pissed off a lot of New Orleanians with my writing about the murder rate here. They’re understandably protective of the city’s image post-Katrina but I’d hope they’d consider a couple of points:

1) Even after a massive anti-crime march on City Hall in early January of 2007, the city has done little on crime other than incessantly spin the numbers (the Mayor, the NOPD and the DA all, to borrow David Simon’s oft-used phrase, “shine shit and call it gold”); so, they all need to be constantly confronted with reality in order for change of/reform of law enforcement practices to occur.

2) New Orleans is a very, very small town (population estimates range from about 250,000 to just over 300,000) undergoing a very, very shaky recovery. So a sky high murder rate presents profound risks to the already tenuous recovery. Yes, New Orleans has long been a dangerous place and, yes, New Orleans reigned as the murder capital of the United States in 1994. But the city simply can’t afford its murder rate now–and I’d remind anyone here who is sanguine about the homicide rates of the past that crime was undoubtedly one of several major factors (a lack of economic diversity being another) that led to the steady decline in the city’s population since the early 1960s. Is this the sort of city that New Orleanians want? A city that experiences a long, steady decline in its population–and grows more dangerous every year?

Apologies for the long break; got swept up in a wave of work on the new book as well as a family visit. A couple of updates:

1) Late last week, Allhiphop.com ran a story about a Bureau of Prisons official declaring that Snitch is “not suited for introduction into a correctional facility.” Check it out here; also check out my response to the BOP’s decision over at Prohiphop, here (thanks to Clyde for giving me the opportunity to respond).

2) I have a new piece in the Guardian about the demolitions of thousands of public housing units in New Orleans (and the larger housing crisis in the city), here.

I know I’m real late on this, but I’ll add a few thoughts on Barack Obama’s big speech on race last week. Like just about everyone else, I thought it was a beautiful speech and I was particularly impressed by Barack’s ability to capture black and white resentments. I also thought that Barack was quite right to point out that these resentments have “distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.” Similarly, I thought Barack brilliantly framed the whole Jeremiah Wright issue as distraction, the very sort of distraction that has dominated our elections for the past twenty years or so, from Willie Horton in ‘88 to the Swift Boats in ‘04. Indeed, Glenn Greenwald smartly observes that “the entire Obama campaign is predicated on the belief that it is no longer 1988.” Anyway, here’s Barack again:

“We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

All that said, I agree with Bob Somerby that the issues Barack addressed should have been raised by liberals years ago. It’s ridiculous–and politically perilous–to have a presidential candidate go out on a limb like on such radioactive issues. Here’s Somerby:

“We think Obama’s speech was superb—and that it’s very dangerous. Ideally, such work should be done by liberal intellectuals, by liberal pundits, by liberal think tanks, in liberal journals. It’s dangerous when we put our White House candidate out in front on such issues, making him lead a risky parade…But let’s state the obvious: Our ‘liberal intellectual leaders’ don’t lead in any way on race…”

Encouragingly, in the wake of Barack’s speech, some refreshingly blunt, reality based discussions of race do seem to be happening. Check out this post on the criminal justice system from Harvard Law professor Bill Stuntz:

“According to the best available data, blacks are 20% more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. But blacks are an incredible thirteen times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crime. (Data source here). In effect, Americans live under two sets of drug laws: the forgiving set of rules that mostly white suburbanites know, and the unfathomably severe rules that govern urban blacks.”

On that note, I’ll re-iterate an important, frightening statistic, via the Justice Policy Institute’s December 2007 report The Vortex: “despite the fact that white drug users outnumber black users by a factor of five, there were more than twice as many African-Americans (62,087) as whites (26,314) admitted to prison for drug offenses from large population counties in 2002. The rate of admission to prison for drug offenses is more than ten times larger for African-Americans (262.16 per 100,000 than it is for whites (24.85 per 100,000).”

Barack performed a huge service for our country by opening the door for these sorts of discussions on race to take place; I hope he doesn’t pay the price for that bravery in the general election.

Very, very busy right now so this will be a link-rich post.

* Fourth rate Mary J. Blige brings down the governor of New York (does she know Margaret P. Jones?);

*The always great Bob Somerby on Orlando Patterson’s ludicrous NYT op-ed on Hillary Clinton: “This is one of the dumbest—and most negative—columns ever placed on an op-ed page. But almost surely, its most troubling words appear in its saddening tag-line: ‘Orlando Patterson is a professor…at Harvard.’ Those words should fill your soul with dread—with concern about the future of our anti-rational political culture.”

*More from Katy Reckdahl on the Lafitte projects in New Orleans; Huge respect to Katy for being one of the few (only?) smart, rational voices at the T-P on the public housing issue.

*Jay Electronica. Horrible name but wow he really is interesting. “When The Levees Broke” is relevant, weirdly psychedelic and scary all once. This is the first time in quite a while that I’ve been surprised (in a good way) by hip-hop.

*Speaking of scary, this renders me speechless.

So, the United States Sentencing Commission’s decision last December to make new, shorter sentences for crack cocaine related offenses retroactive to the approximately 19,000 prisoners incarcerated under the old guidelines is now in effect (for background, see here). Interestingly, there’s been much less fear-mongering around this development than I would have imagined excluding Attorney General Michael Mukasey and, unfortunately, a U.S. Attorney in New Orleans whose opinions I usually respect (and when I disagree with him it’s a respectful disagreement–but not this time). Instead, what seems to be occurring is a new, fresh debate about the sentencing guidelines (and, more specifically, the mandatory minimums passed during the mid-late 1980s) that avoids the extraordinarily stale “tough on crime/soft on crime” framing. Here’s Bill Clinton:

“We sentenced with a shotgun instead of a rifle.”

And Hillary Clinton:

“…we need to divert more people from the prison system. We have too many people in prison for non-violent drug offenses, which disproportionately impacts on the African-American community. That’s why I’ve been a strong advocate of eliminating the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine [sentencing].There may have been a reason for it 25 years ago but there isn’t any justification for it now.”

Though some sentencing experts have characterized the Clintons sentencing stances as hypocritical and even meaningless (Bill Clinton rightly acknowledged he did not act on the crack cocaine/powder cocaine sentencing disparity when he was president) I still think that the shift in the debate is important and, better, comes at a critical time: our prison population is at an historic high and several big states (California, Ohio and Texas among them) are struggling with prison overcrowding. So I think that while changing sentencing law is obviously crucial (see the Biden bill) it’s not insignificant that we seem to be approaching a moment where an honest debate about the cost and effectiveness of our highly punitive criminal justice policy can occur.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz: Iraq war will cost up to $3 trillion. Pulitzer prize winning Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks (while hosting an online disucssion about the war): “Welcome back. I see far fewer questions than ever before waiting for me. Our little group of people who still care about the Iraq war appears to be dwindling.”

isn’t airing on HBO on Demand this week. But apparently you can watch it in Southeast Queens!

“if u want the final episode of the wire season 5 and u live n [sic] nyc go to jamaica ave 165st to the hat store…all the dvd dudes on the ave have episode 10. real talk.”