Crime adds to New Orleans gloom

By James Coomarasamy
BBC News, New Orleans

After Hurricane Katrina, the people of New Orleans had to pick themselves up, dust themselves down and try to accentuate the positive.

Now they are having to do it all over again, after the fairy-tale run of their football team, the New Orleans Saints, ended at the weekend - just one match short of the Super Bowl.

The Saints' defeat saddened the already-suffering city

The Saints' run - the best in their 40-year history - brought a real sense of focus to the city.

It dominated the local headlines and provided a welcome distraction from a crime wave which has seen nearly a murder a day in the city, since the New Year.

Time and again, I heard people say before the game: "If it wasn't for the Saints, I might have left."

So what now?

One sporting defeat won't create an exodus, but it is not hard to find people in New Orleans who are considering leaving the city.

'No point in staying'

Take guest house owner Bryan Block.

When the whole basement floor of his upmarket Block-Keller House bed and breakfast on Canal Street was flooded during the hurricane, half the rooms were destroyed.

There's always been a dark, decadent side of New Orleans - and that's been part of its charm Bryan Block, New Orleans resident

But the upstairs part - with its deep red walls and art deco lamps - looks untouched and welcoming.

So he decided to make a go of it, reopening for business four months after Katrina.

Now, though, he is disillusioned.

He feels the city authorities have concentrated their recovery effort on encouraging people to return, at the expense of helping those, like him, who already have.

For Bryan, the rash of murders is the last straw.

"There's always been a dark, decadent side of New Orleans - and that's been part of its charm," he told me.

"But you've always had the joyous one to balance it. If the dark is all there is, there's no point staying."

Crime in context

But Louisiana's Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu disagrees.

At his office in the Department of Culture and Tourism, the man who narrowly failed to become mayor of New Orleans last year says the city's crime wave should be put in context.

City officials say the anti-crime march was a positive sign

"Not only has the city always had a crime problem," he says, "but you have to remember that London had a terrorist attack, and that hasn't stopped people from going there."

And he points to the march on city hall earlier this month - which saw thousands of New Orleanians protest against the authorities' response to the killings - as a positive development, a sign of how much they care about their city.

Commander Jim Arey, of the New Orleans police force, also warns against exaggerating the problem.

On a recent night patrol, he drove through some of the deserted areas of the city, where now-empty buildings have been the scene of several of this year's murders.

Commander Arey - an easy-going, popular figure, whose background as a psychologist has earned him the nickname "Doc" - sees several Katrina-related reasons behind the murder statistics.

He says that a shrunken city, with fewer inhabitable areas, has meant that rival drug gangs, which existed long before the hurricane, are now living in closer, more dangerous proximity.

Pressure on police

At the same time, he admits that the city's police force, the NOPD, is experiencing new pressures.

For a start, a group of his fellow officers are facing murder charges relating to the deaths of two men around the time of Katrina.

In addition, he says, the post-hurricane growth in mental problems has coincided with a decrease in hospital spaces for people suffering from them.

According to the commander, the NOPD spends a fair amount of its time these days picking up the slack.

None of this is particularly reassuring for local residents, whose fears about the murder rate are not yet being quelled by the overnight police checkpoints which have been set up across the city.

Whatever the factual basis for these fears, they are making an already-tough recovery even harder.