The Glass Is Half Full & Half Empty In New Orleans
Definite signs of progress in a number of crime and policing arenas.
It has been a rough few years for crime and policing trends in New Orleans. The city’s murder rate has soared to a level not seen in decades, NOPD has shrunk by over 20 percent since 2019, and — as a result — response times have tripled over that span.
The optimistic take is that the last few weeks and months have produced positive trends in all three areas.
The pessimistic take is that gun violence remains tragically high, NOPD’s recruitment efforts may not be able to reverse the losses of the last few years, and response times are still too long.
Gun Violence
There were 265 murders in New Orleans in 2022 as the city tallied the most murders since Katrina and the highest murder rate since the mid-1990s.
But gun violence in New Orleans is falling in 2023 any way you measure it. Murder is down 20 percent this year relative to YTD 2022 and shootings are down over 10 percent.
Even better, Calls for Service for firearm discharge and shots fired is falling rapidly for the first time since shootings surged in mid-2020. These are a preferred metric for evaluating whether a change in murder or shootings is because of luck or because of a genuine decline, and it’s hard not to conclude from the below graph that gun violence in New Orleans is legitimately declining right now.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that gun violence remains endemic in New Orleans and it’s not clear how far it will fall. While shootings and murders are down relative to last year, they’re up 40 percent relative to YTD 2020 and have nearly equaled 2019’s full year total (343 this year, 373 in all of 2019).
New Orleans is on pace for 241 murders in 2023 which, if realized, would be a 9 percent decline from 2022 but the second-most murders in a year here since Katrina. Yes gun violence is falling, but it is still higher now than it has been than pretty much any time post-Katrina.
NOPD Recruitment
There were 1,154 NOPD officers and 61 recruits in November 2019. There are 901 officers and 37 recruits today.
That’s bad news, and it gets worse.
Most of the current recruits will graduate by the end of 2023 but the recruit class set to begin at the end of July will not. That means that NOPD will add roughly 35 new officers this year. Assuming attrition remains roughly the same for the rest of the year as it did for the first half then that means about 40 or 50 officers will leave between now and the end of the year. Bottom line: NOPD will likely end 2023 with fewer than 900 officers for the first time since the 1940s.
There is good news with recruitment though. NOPD has launched two decent sized classes so far in 2023, has announced a large-ish class in July, and could conceivably launch one or even two more classes after that this year. That will mean a solid pipeline that should at least match attrition in 2024 if not produce growth. Applications are up and more applicants are taking the civil service exam, and attrition has slowed to near historic norms.
There is also (allegedly) a lateral hire class — officers from other agencies — set to begin sometime this Fall which may add officers by the end of the year. The details of how many lateral hires there are and how quickly they’ll become commissioned NOPD officers remains to be seen though.
There is reason to believe that the worst of these problems are behind us, but the department will not grow quickly. This isn’t 1995 anymore, and expectations should acknowledge that the police department is this size.
Response Times
NOPD response times have not been great the last few years. Average response times increased from around 50 minutes in 2019 to over 150 minutes on average in 2022 and 2023. Median response times have increased from 11 minutes in 2019 to over 40 minutes in 2023.
Emergency response times have increased though not quite as much. Still, the share of emergencies with a response time of 20 or more minutes has increased from 15 percent in 2019 to 32 percent in 2023, and the share of emergencies with a response time of 60 or more minutes has increased from 3 percent in 2019 to 13 percent this year.
But I promised good news!
NOPD’s average response time in April 2023 was over 180 minutes — that’s not the good news — but it has fallen substantially over the last 2+ months. The average response time fell to 144 minutes in May, 115 minutes in June, and is just over 100 minutes so far in July.
It’s hard to say what the cause of this decline is with 100 percent certainty, but it appears to be directly related to increased civilianization within NOPD. The share of incidents being handled by NOPD’s Alternative Police Response (APR) unit has doubled since late 2022 with APR handling over half of all property crimes over the last few months (up from about 30% last year).
Additionally, the share of traffic accidents being handled by On Scene Services — a contractor hired to take on mostly non-injury fender benders — has increased from 1.5 percent last year to over 20 percent in June 2023. The results from these efforts seem to speak for themselves with rapidly declining response times.
Adding civilians to handle non-emergency incidents over the phone and hiring a contractor to deal with many traffic accidents has lessened the load on NOPD patrol officers by roughly 30 calls per day. This has almost certainly helped reduce response times though it remains to be seen how low they will go.
A 100 minute response time on average is still too long, growing by a handful up to a few dozen officers after shrinking by several hundred is still too little growth, and 20 murders a month is still appallingly high. These improving trends could slow or even reverse at any point. That said, it is nice to see a few things trending in the right direction after several years of heading in such a terrible way.