Troops to Return to New Orleans

Nearly 10 months after Hurricane Katrina, National Guard troops are returning to New Orleans to keep the peace in a city growing increasingly uneasy over its rising tide of crime.

After six deaths over the weekend -- including those of five teenagers in one shooting incident -- Mayor C. Ray Nagin asked Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco at a news conference Monday to send a contingent of National Guard troops and state troopers.

Blanco agreed to send the reinforcements, with the first 100 of 300 promised troops arriving in the city today. Sixty state troopers also will be deployed.

“The senseless slaying of five teenagers this weekend is shocking,” Blanco said in a prepared statement. “I will not tolerate criminal behavior. We must protect our citizens.”

The five young men were shot Saturday in an SUV in the historically tough Central City area. Police have speculated that the killings may have been drug-related. No suspects have been arrested.

The next night, a man was stabbed to death during an argument over beer. Nagin called the bloody weekend “our line in the sand.”

Federal troops were a common sight in New Orleans after Katrina. At one point, as many as 15,000 patrolled the city to curb its descent into chaos and looting. The last of the troops left in February as the city -- and the New Orleans Police Department -- got back on its feet.

For some locals, there was a hope that this strange, post-Katrina stub of a city -- less populous but also less poor -- would be reborn with less of the crime and violence that have marred New Orleans’ reputation.

That hope emerged despite the performance of the New Orleans Police Department during Katrina, when some officers were accused of desertion and looting. The department was also criticized for failing to maintain order after the storm.

More recently, police have been struggling with some complicated new problems -- and a few that are all too familiar. A criminal element has returned, bringing back turf wars, drugs and deaths. Police have recorded 53 homicides since January. That is half as many as during the same time last year -- but the city’s population is less than half its pre-Katrina level of 450,000.

The Police Department is down from a pre-Katrina strength of 1,700 officers to an effective force of about 1,370, said Lt. Michael Glasser, the police union president. They are working within a severely compromised justice system saddled with thousands of backlogged criminal trials, a dearth of jurors, and flood-damaged jails.

In addition, officers must deal with issues like house break-ins and squatting in vast and largely depopulated swaths of the city.

City officials said the Guard troops and state police will patrol the depopulated areas until September, freeing up local police to fight crime in more populous areas. The Guard troops will be armed and given police powers, said Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher, who noted that Louisiana remains under a state of emergency.

Majeeda Snead, a clinical professor at Loyola Law School who defends indigent clients in criminal cases, said she thought that residents would welcome the Guard presence even though it might give the impression that the city was under martial law.

“I think that people are really afraid,” said Snead, who moved near Loyola University after her home in the New Orleans East neighborhood was flooded.

“They are arming themselves. They feel threatened in their homes. They feel threatened in their cars,” said Snead. “Based on that fear, they would not be opposed to a show of force, whether federal, state or local.”

New Orleans City Councilwoman Shelley Midura, one of four new City Council members sworn in this month, said that all seven council members supported the call for Guard troops. Police Chief Warren Riley had been proposing a similar plan to state officials long before the weekend’s slayings, according to a spokeswoman.

“We have unified leadership at all levels, and we’re saying enough is enough,” Midura said. The functioning parts of the city, she added, would not feel the military presence.

“I just would not be supporting this if we had the military on the streets of the French Quarter,” she said.

It remains to be seen how the plan will play in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, where some residents are trying to rebuild.

Dent Hunter, 27, president of the Oak Island Neighborhood Assn. in devastated New Orleans East, suspected that the Guard would not provide the same level of service as the police.

He said residents were not being treated equally. “We want to be equal,” he said. Hunter also said the troops’ presence could dissuade other residents from returning.

Glasser, of the police union, said the move was a temporary fix at best, and many city officials agreed. City Council President Oliver M. Thomas Jr. said the city needed to tackle issues like its blighted public housing complexes, the public school system and police efficacy. Councilwoman Stacy S. Head said officials agreed a curfew for juveniles should be reinstated.