There is a lurking danger of being shot if you’re in Texas, and it isn’t just if you are hunting near Vice President Dick Cheney. With the diaspora of New Orleans-area evacuees to Texas, crime is up there – especially in Houston. Now we are left to wonder when it is coming back home.
Before the most recent hurricane season, New Orleans was ranked the fifth-most dangerous metropolitan area by Morgan Quitno Press. In fact, the Louisiana metropolitan areas of New Orleans, Shreveport-Bossier City and Lafayette all made the top 25. Houston was not the safest place in the country, mind you – it ranked ninth among the 32 cities with at least half a million people. Now, it must be much more dangerous.
As an afterthought to the mass redistribution of New Orleans residents to other areas, particularly Texas, people are now worrying about the sex offenders, felons and generally crime-minded denizens of New Orleans who roam the country almost completely free from justice. The Houston Chronicle reported in February the case of Ivory “B-Stupid” Harris, who was being held first on murder charges and then on other charges and was released from a Shreveport jail by a New Orleans judge. He is currently a suspect in the murder of another New Orleans evacuee in Houston and wanted on charges of kidnapping and robbery – both of the aggravated variety.
While it is a travesty that people like Harris were so foolishly let loose among the people of Houston, the question for us is what is the state of Louisiana going to do with the current clean slate Mother Nature has given it? There is currently a significant drop in crime in the New Orleans area. As New Orleans becomes repopulated, can it keep crime lower than before?
According to Kim Cobb of The Houston Chronicle, reporting on a crime commission’s report, “7 percent of those arrested were ever convicted and that 60 percent of all convictions were for misdemeanors.” It also said “violent offenses such as murder, rape, battery or assault made up only 5 percent of all convictions during 2003-04.” It isn’t surprising that criminals would play those odds in the fifth-most dangerous metropolitan area in the country; crime wasn’t a gamble in New Orleans. There was a low chance of repercussion, and the market was flooded. Pun intended.
Of course efforts have been underway for years to combat these staggering crime statistics. Operation Wrinkled Robe has led to the conviction of two judges on corruption charges specifically dealing with lowering and splitting bonds. A new police superintendent is reshuffling the NOPD office to fight crime more effectively.
But the Indigent Defender Program, which supplies public defenders to people too poor to supply their own legal representation, is about to crumble. One judge, Arthur Hunter, has suspended all cases in his section which require the services of the IDP because of its lack of cash and manpower, and he says, “For all practical purposes, the public-defender program no longer exists.” With all judges expected to follow his lead and the Indigent Defender Program supplying lawyers for 80 percent of criminal defendants, it does not look like New Orleans will be a beacon of justice or crime prevention in the near future, if it ever was in the first place. Money and lawyers, two of the most vilely considered commodities of our society, are needed just to have the courts running as usual. And on top of that, “as usual” isn’t too good for New Orleans.
Other cities have curbed crime in record time. New York City was once a crime haven and now ranks fifth safest in the largest cities category by Morgan Quitno. One thing is sure for New Orleans; if all the evacuees come back, someone needs to be taking note.
 
Lake is a history senior. Contact him at [email protected]