Trying to Explain Plunging Crime in New Orleans

It's probably not what you think.

My deepest, darkest secret is that I tell people that I am a New Orleans native but in reality I was born in a hospital in Metairie, Louisiana. I’ve lived in New Orleans for 30 of my 41 years so far, so I call myself a native New Orleanian in spite of my secret.

As a native and current New Orleanian, therefore, I have a keen interest in understanding the city’s crime trends over the last few years. Whenever I’m asked if (insert trend here) is impacting New Orleans I always think of that line from the classic movie Casablanca where the young woman asks Rick what Captain Renault is like. Rick replies that “he’s just like any other man, only more so.”

That’s New Orleans when it comes to crime and policing.

Murder’s rising nationally? It’s probably rising more in New Orleans.

Surging auto thefts and carjackings? Yup.

Plunging commissioned officer strength and soaring response times? Few citied saw more of it.

At some point in the first half of 2023, however, things started to get better in New Orleans — although two recent horrific mass shootings serve as reminders that better is never good enough and surging violence can return quickly.

The rise and subsequent decline over the last few years is shocking though. New Orleans went from 120 murders in 2019, the fewest since 1972, to 266 in 2022, the most since before Katrina. Carjackings rose from 103 in 2019 to 281 in 2021, and auto thefts skyrocketed from 3,222 in 2021 to 6,831 after that video hit TikTok.

At the same time, NOPD fell from more than 1,200 officers and recruits in mid-2019 to under 950 today. Predictably, response times rose dramatically, from 50 minutes on average in 2019 to a peak of 180 minutes on average in April 2023.

But then a strange thing happened: things started getting dramatically better. NOPD is still struggling with hiring and there are fewer commissioned officers now (898) than there were last spring (925). But the average response time has fallen dramatically from that absurd April high to just 53 minutes in September 2024.

The city reports 109 murders through November 16th, a 38 percent decline from 2023 (there has been a spate of killings over the last week though), and fewer than half as many as murders as were reported as of mid-November 2022. Auto thefts are down 48 percent while carjackings are down 43 percent compared to YTD 2023.

The question, naturally, turns to why are these changes occurring?

The answer, quite simply, is that I don’t know and I’d wager that nobody else can really say why with confidence either. Really knowing why a crime trend has changed is quite challenging, and it’s rare to be able to clearly tie a specific strategy to a drop in crime like Robin Engel and Nicholas Caruso did when they studied the drop in New Orleans gun violence in 2013. It’s also rare when an outside event like the TikTok video showing how to steal certain cars is obviously an explanation for a sudden change in crime.

In the case of falling crime and gun violence in New Orleans we have neither rigorous academic study nor a clear outside event that might explain why gun violence suddenly began plunging.

The most logical explanation to me is that big national factors caused gun violence to explode in New Orleans from 2020 to 2022, and big national factors are causing it to go down now. New Orleans is like every other American city, only more so.

Murder rose 30 percent nationally in 2020 and stayed at that elevated level in 2021 and 2022, but murder in New Orleans more than doubled between 2019 and 2022. Murder fell 12 percent nationally in 2023 and is falling even faster in 2024, and murder is falling at a much faster clip in New Orleans.

Consider the shape of gun violence in Philadelphia and New Orleans over the last five years. These are very different cities with vast differences in the successes of their professional football franchises over the last few years, yet the shape of gun violence in both cities is nearly identical. This suggests to me that something(s) bigger, something national is the main driver here.

One of the explanations being bandied about has been that the drop is due to the intervention of the state government. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry made that claim a few weeks ago. According to the Times-Picayune, Landry “said this week that New Orleans has seen a relative “peace” when it comes to crime, crediting his launch this year of a new dedicated Louisiana State Police troop as a catalyst for extended declines in reported violence.”

A closer examination casts doubt on this theory. To begin with, crime began plunging in New Orleans towards the end of 2022 and early part of 2023, well before the expansion of the State Police role as seen on the graph below.

I’m also skeptical of the State Police as main driver explanation because of the scale of the contribution. A State Police spokesman said that “Troop Nola since Mardi Gras has conducted nearly 800 traffic stops and made 196 arrests, resulting in a mix of felony and misdemeanor charges.”

These figures, however, are a drop in the bucket relative to overall enforcement. There were over 20,000 traffic stops between Mardi Gras and early November and more than 7,000 arrests, so the State Police are just 3 to 4 percent of those overall totals.

It’s certainly plausible that State Police enforcement efforts are contributing to the overall decline, but one would be hard pressed to describe those efforts as one of the main causes behind it based on the timing of the decline. And I'm not sure there's a ton of evidence that a change in enforcement practices drove the downward trend in the first place.

The biggest change of note locally over the last two years has been the sharply declining response times, at least as I see it. I’m not sure what the mechanism would be for declining response times contributing to fewer murders, but shootings began plunging nearly in step with response times. Clearance rates are up — at least with respect to murder — but that may reflect simply having fewer cases to solve rather than serve as a measure of community trust.

These questions are heavily localized to New Orleans but they’re also national in scale. Tons of cities are going through exactly what New Orleans has over the last few years and it behooves us to understand why.

Is there a local reason that gun violence is still plunging in New Orleans and Philadelphia but the decline has started to level off in New York? Or is the main driver a set of national factors that are largely unknowable in the moment? Understanding trends is usually my lane, but it’s also critical to use those trends to evaluate what might (and might not) be causing those changes.

Ultimately, ‘I don't know’ isn't a satisfying answer, but in my opinion it’s the only one that fits right now in the case of plunging crime in New Orleans right now.