New Orleans’ violent tempest

The district attorney of this bloodstained city dropped murder charges this month against a man alleged to have massacred five teenagers, saying the sole witness was nowhere to be found.

A day later, an angry New Orleans police chief, who had not been warned that one of the city’s most sensational criminal cases was being abandoned, trotted out the supposedly elusive witness at a news conference. He said it took his investigators three hours to locate her by calling a phone number sitting in the case file.

The bungling of the quintuple-murder case -- which has outraged New Orleans and led some officials to call for the head of Dist. Atty. Eddie J. Jordan Jr. -- illuminates the city’s continuing inability to bring even high-profile suspects to justice.

Nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina, it has become clear that New Orleans’ failure to control violent crime presents an obstacle to the city’s repopulation every bit as big as the shortage of affordable rental housing and the slow disbursement of government aid to rebuild homes.

Yet the criminal justice system continues to be plagued by political backbiting, inexplicable communication breakdowns and, in some cases, outright incompetence.

“This is a city that’s very fragile. People are deciding every day their future. And the criminal situation is leading people out of this city,” City Council President Arnie Fielkow said at a heated meeting this month in which city officials lashed out at Jordan and in which two state legislators threatened Jordan with impeachment.

Despite abysmal poll numbers, Jordan firmly rejected calls for his resignation. He asserted that other politicians were trying to make him a scapegoat for systemic problems that reach back decades -- a contention that even some of Jordan’s biggest critics did not challenge.

“No matter who sits in this chair, there are going to be some cases that fall apart,” Jordan said in an interview. “They blame me, but if you have a one-witness case, with no fingerprint evidence, no ballistics, that is not a strong hand to play. And too many of these violent crime cases are coming down to a single eyewitness.”

New Orleans was the nation’s homicide capital once again last year, according to FBI statistics released last month, and it wasn’t a close call. The city had 63.5 slayings per 100,000 residents in 2006, significantly more than such perennial homicide hotspots as Gary, Ind., and Detroit.

That’s based on a generous estimate of New Orleans’ 2006 population: 255,000, which is roughly what it is today. Using a smaller population estimate, a Tulane University demographer found that the per capita murder rate last year was 96 killings per 100,000 residents. In 2004, before the storm, the city had 57 homicides per 100,000 residents.

The city logged 161 killings last year. Having already surpassed 100 slayings this year, it is on pace for nearly 200, even though its population is still just slightly more than half of what it was before the storm.

New Orleans has been through worse crime plagues, such as the extraordinary 421 homicides in 1994, when its population was about 490,000. But reforms that cut the homicide rate in the 1990s seemingly lost their effectiveness, and the toll was climbing again even before Katrina dealt the criminal justice system a knockout blow.

Determining who is to blame is difficult in a city where politicians are forever pointing the finger at someone else, said Peter Scharf, the executive director of the Center for Society, Law and Justice at Texas State University, who has studied New Orleans crime for more than a decade. The answer, he said, seems to be everyone in a position of authority.

“New Orleans is a city of smoke and mirrors. Nothing is as it seems,” he said. “When you have a political disaster like this, the temptation is to blame someone other than your organization. The dysfunctionality of the D.A.’s office certainly opens him up to blame.

“But what’s happened to Eddie Jordan is like what happened to the Italians at El Alamein: He’s been left out in the desert,” he said, referring to a famous battle in Egypt in World War II.

At the council meeting, it was evident that calls for Jordan to resign had divided the city along familiar racial lines: Nearly all of those who rose to defend Jordan were black; nearly all who criticized him were white. Jordan is the city’s first African American district attorney.

Just a few years ago, Jordan, a former U.S. attorney, was the toast of Louisiana after finally winning a conviction against former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards. Jordan had succeeded Harry Connick Sr., the father of the popular singer and pianist, who was district attorney for nearly three decades.

But Jordan quickly created a stir after his 2002 victory when he fired 43 white investigators and staff members and replaced them with black aides, many of whom had connections to his political mentor, Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.), who is currently the subject of a corruption probe. The fired workers filed a racial discrimination suit and won. Jordan has appealed.

Jordan also angered police when he filed murder charges against the so-called Danziger Seven, a group of police officers who killed two people and wounded four others in a chaotic skirmish after the hurricane.

“I see a witch hunt,” Keith Hudson, 47, a black New Orleans resident, told council members. Staring at Jordan, he added: “They ain’t forgot that you took his place. They ain’t forgot that you’re black.” (Connick was white.)

Jordan’s popularity has plummeted across all racial groups, and Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who, like the police chief, is also African American, has joined the chorus of critics, saying that Jordan has displayed a disturbing pattern of dropping cases without asking for help first.

Many anti-crime activists say that police also deserve blame but that the district attorney has emerged as the weakest link. Most New Orleans slayings continue to go unpunished, and many cases that initially result in arrests never reach a courtroom.

Prosecutors didn’t just fail to tell police they were dropping the case against Michael Anderson, who was indicted in the slayings of five teens last summer as they sat in an SUV. Prosecutors also failed to inform the victims’ relatives, including Monalisa Hunter, who lost sons Markee, 19, and Arsenio, 16.

“She heard it on the news at work, and she became so ill that she passed out,” said Barbara Lacen Keller, a family friend who was Arsenio’s godmother. “Mr. Jordan never had the courtesy and respect to call and say what was happening.

“This little boy was about 4-foot-9. They were still buying his clothes in the boys’ department, that’s how small he was,” she said. “When the perpetrator shot up this van, they told us, he tried to crawl under the seat.”

The Anderson case, which prosecutors want a grand jury to reinstate, was hardly the only highly publicized murder charge to disintegrate without a trial.

This month Jordan also dropped the case against a man accused of gunning down the drummer of the Hot 8 Brass Band, a New Orleans group that appears in the Spike Lee documentary “When the Levees Broke.” Jordan said his reason was that the only known witness refused to testify.

The drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was the third member of the Hot 8 to be shot dead in the last decade, a testament to how bloody New Orleans has been, even before Katrina.

His killing deeply touched many New Orleanians and helped spark a January protest march by thousands.

Shavers’ friends and relatives demanded that the case be reopened, and prosecutors have agreed to resume searching for ways to bring his killer to justice.

“We made it clear that we were not going to let this go,” said Baty Landis, a music history professor at Tulane University who helped launch an anti-violence group called SilenceIsViolence after Shavers’ death. “The problem is that so many cases are coming down to witnesses to begin with. It seems like once a witness comes forward, the rest of the investigation stops.”

Police Supt. Warren J. Riley did not respond to requests for comment, but police officials said they realized they too needed to change.

Hoping to quell criticism that the Police Department is distrusted by the people it serves, Riley announced recently that it would undergo an overhaul to focus more heavily on community policing. He named a new second in command and said further shake-ups were expected.

But the research that led to the plan -- which was prepared by Lee P. Brown, a former Houston mayor and police chief who has become a community policing guru -- was not immediately disclosed to the public, upsetting activists who said they had grown weary of hyped-up studies and fix-it men.

Jordan has also made changes, assigning homicide cases to a new unit of more experienced prosecutors and asking a national group of district attorneys to audit his office. But he cautioned that progress might come slowly, because the root causes of crime in New Orleans, including poverty, a near-absence of youth programs and a failing public school system, had festered for decades.

“This is a lot more complicated than a phone call,” he said. “Politics are being played with crime. And post-Katrina, that’s probably the easiest thing to do.”

miguel.bustillo@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Tough towns

The homicide rate in New Orleans last year was highest in the nation among cities of 100,000 or more, and nearly five times Los Angeles’ rate of 12.4 per 100,000 residents.

Homicides per 100,000 residents

New Orleans: 63.5*

Gary, Ind.: 48.3

Detroit: 47.1

Flint, Mich.: 46.5

Birmingham, Ala.: 44.5

Baltimore: 43.3

Richmond, Calif.: 40.7

Richmond, Va.: 39.0

Newark, N.J.: 37.4

Oakland: 36.4

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Source: FBI

* Based on 2006 population estimate of 255,000