Bad guys doing silly things

Martian Law is back!


If you've flipped open your local news dispenser lately, you're no doubt aware that that the number of persons shot in New Orleans in 2012 is currently keeping pace with the number of days so far in that year. Perhaps our city is emulating its football team's propensity for shattering records this season. Although I doubt any of us would have the nerve to accuse any of the shooters of "classlessly" running up the score.

In response to the deteriorating situation, Mayor Landrieu and Chief Serpas have treated us to a series of PR events where they have appeared in front of microphones in shirt sleeves hyping individual convicts up to the level of comic supervillainy, disrupted courtroom proceedings by impractically serving on a jury, and slandered murder victims by prominently highlighting their arrest records.

This morning they presented us with yet another press conference, this time ramping up their already alarming bellicose rhetoric which likens local crime suspects (often themselves children) to enemy combatants. Serpas promised us that he was "taking the fight to the street. We are going after the criminals with an intensity that has not been seen in the last 18 months," which was a funny thing to say at a presser where the Mayor complained that "too many people are afraid of the police." Serpas also told us about his plan to "flood the streets" which seemed a wildly inappropriate choice of imagery for New Orleans.

The Chief also unintentionally drove home the point about his over the top street-crime-as-terrorism rhetoric when he mentioned in passing that last night's "bomb scare" where officers supposedly found grenades in a suspect's car wasn't quite what we'd been led to believe. Serpas didn't go into details but basically admitted the "grenades" weren't actually grenades.


Speculative image of what NOPD officers actually found last night

The Mayor, meanwhile, engaged in an angry bullying back and forth with Times-Picayune reporter Brendan McCarthy over NOPD's manpower which, despite its reduced overall size, Landrieu insisted was the most fully staffed of any force in the country "per capiter". The Mayor weakened his own argument, though, by extolling the value of a "smaller but faster" workforce even as he insisted that reporters asking about the smaller police force were being "factually inaccurate." We know that the Mayor has a Romneyesque fetish for wanting to fire people but this line of discussion bordered on the absurd. Landrieu went on to talk about the city's unfortunate "culture of violence" which he summed up at one point as "bad guys who do silly things"

Everyone has his or her own idea about what will or won't actually make a difference regarding the city's murder rate. I read a lot of stories and opinions about police methods, community input, technology, and other ideas and schemes which may or may not be of some marginal use. But none of it gets to the heart of the problem we're facing.

Neither, by the way, does this silly op-ed the Times-Picayune published yesterday by Brett Will Taylor which postulates the following.

Why don't New Orleanians seem to care? Think about it. We don't hesitate to take to the street here for a second line or a parade. Forget the tourists; look at the masses of us who will be out in force this Carnival season.

Where are those same masses when our city's -- our city's -- murder rate spikes 14 percent? We can take the time to make a throw, but we can't take the time to say "no more"?

By the way, I'm not pointing fingers here. I'm including myself in this question. Before I started this column, I could tell you all about my Mardi Gras costume, but couldn't tell you what the 2011 murder rate was or how many of my fellow citizens had died already this year. We're numb here. I get it. But it has got to stop.

To begin with, it's astonishing that Mr. Taylor has difficulty recalling the last time the city's masses gathered to yell at City Hall about the out of control murder rate. I mean, I know it happened in the far ancient time of the year 2007 but that's hardly an excuse seeing as how it was recently immortalized on HBO's Treme.

None of this is to say that gathering in mass to demand a more tightly policed citizenry is a particularly useful tool in these matters. I may have had a few words to say about the efficacy of that before the last time it happened. Others will no doubt continue to disagree. But the point I think we all can agree on is that the problem is most assuredly not the fact that we do enjoy living our lives in this city at the same time that we grapple with the problems that come with doing that.

But the truth is we're never going to get this "culture of violence" under control until we fundamentally change the way our society limits opportunities for an increasingly large forgotten percentage of the population. And that's a problem not even the strongest "per capiter" police force who "takes it to the street" every day to kick down doors with all the "intensity" humans can summon will ever get a handle on for us.