re: How would you solve the crime problem in New Orleans?

Changes need to be made with NOPD, the courts, and the DA’s office.

For NOPD:
It starts with repealing the consent decree which requires NOPD officers to be residents of Orleans Parish as well as places all manner if ridiculous paper work and pursuit requirements on officers that makes actual arrests and criminal pursuits extremely difficult. This would also enable a return to stop & frisk.

The next issue would be a thorough investigation into OT and pension fraud. In BR as well as with state police, there is rampant over-billing for OT hours that could not physically have been worked by the officers. This is used as a means of giving pay raises without actual raising official pay. In addition, OT pay is used to calculate retirement pensions, so fraud doesn’t just rob the taxpayers for the pay period when the fraud occurred, but for many decades after. I would launch a wholesale investigation to root out OT fraud in the NOPD as well as in all of Orleans Parish government.

Once we have identified the OT fraud, put a stop to it, and punished those who have retired by either eliminating or severely reducing their pensions, I would use those freed up funds to raise base pay and training requirements significantly.

This pay raise, combined with a larger area from which the department could recruit officers, should result in more and higher quality new hires into the department. I would put these new hires to work on 3 projects:
1. Driving homeless encampments and panhandlers (not to be confused with street performers) out of the warehouse district, CBD, marigny, and french quarter
2. Cracking down on “minor” offenses like vandalism, shoplifting, petty theft, atvs on public streets, etc
3. Improving response times for 911 calls

These changes, combined with eliminating speed and redlight cameras, are designed to be ones that are highly visible to the average citizen as a way to pitch a dedicated millage increase or rededication to fund NOPD. This effort would be part of a larger initiative to remove enforcement based revenues (civil asset forfeiture, brake tag tickets, mip’s, dui’s, speed cameras, etc) from going to fund policing activities and replacing those revenues with dedicated millages. The idea is to discourage police from focusing on activities that raise revenues for the department rather than protect the public.

Now, flush with more officers, a more stable source of revenue, less paper work, fewer criminals on the streets because they were picked up for lesser offenses sooner, and less incentive for focusing on victimless crimes (speeding and brake tags), they can start investigating violent crime more aggressively.

I’ll post later on changes that would be needed to the courts and DA’s offices.

Re elect Latoya

Set up youth programs all over the city, operating 7 days a week

Well, a non-idiot mayor, a DA that actually wants to do his job beyond gaining political power, and a non-shrinking police force would help.

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Eventually the tourist will quit coming if they feel unsafe because of the crime.

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Tourists will never stop coming. Ever.

As soon as an area of town is safe, gentrification will take place and locals will be displaced. Community organizers and the City Council don’t want that to happen.

So you have locals who deny there is a real problem but are forced to drive on streets that look like the cratered moon surface to drop their kids off at an expensive private school, a government that is hostile to the tax base, other locals who pursue crime as an accepted way to make a living, and others who think that living off government checks is as good as they’ll get.

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Start stop and frisk again. Will get illegal guns off the street.

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I agree with this. However, if right wingers pass constitutional carry, those thug guns are legal and protected. Unregulated concealed carry only benefits the criminals. For law abiding citizens, the safety class and permit system is not an impediment.

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How would you solve the crime problem in New Orleans?

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Elect people with common sense and not liberals.

10-15% of the population commits most of the crime (and this isn't some racial analysis). Get rid of that group and crime goes way down.

There is only one realistic solution as of now: leave.