Someone Murdered a New Orleanian and Was Caught, Convicted, and Sentenced

In Houston:

Christopher Devon Jackson heard his death sentence Thursday, and wept.

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Jackson, 22, was convicted of capital murder two weeks ago for carjacking Eric James Smith and killing him with a sawed-off shotgun as Smith talked on the phone with a 911 operator.

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Smith, 34, had come to Houston after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in late August 2005. He was refueling his rented sport utility vehicle at a gas station in the 6700 block of West Airport when Jackson took it at gunpoint before dawn on Dec. 5.

The death sentence is abhorrent. But that’s not why I point this out.

How many convictions have we had in New Orleans for murders that happened after Katrina? We’ve had at least 230 murders in New Orleans since the storm. How many convictions?

How many convictions for *any* murders have we had?

I know it takes a while to get a conviction. The Houston case happened in December 2005, and a conviction came just two weeks ago. We are behind because the courts shut down after Katrina, evidence was lost in the federal flood, and we don’t have the resources to fully investigate murders after the storm.

But it would be nice to have some examples that the criminal justice system is working after the storm when it comes to violent crime. That is, if it is working…

Think Like a Houstonian

Cute.

Hurricane Katrina evacuees take note: You’re not in New Orleans anymore.

It’s time to “think like a Houstonian.”

That is the message from two displaced New Orleanians in a lighthearted new video prepared by Houston social agencies to help survivors of the 2005 hurricane find work and establish new roots here in the nation’s fourth largest city.

I watched the video. It has good advice for job seekers and useful information about the city of Houston.

I hope, though, that those New Orleanians who decide to stay in Houston don’t have to disavow their New Orleans-ness to assimilate:

“Now that you’re in Houston looking for work,” Mr. Johnson says, “you should think of yourself as a Houstonian, not a homesick New Orleanian.”

I suspect many New Orleanians that evacuated or were bused to Houston will choose to stay in Houston. That is, the choice, in many cases, will be made for them by the slow pace of the leaderless recovery. There is no community for many of the evacuees to return to. Nor is there adequate or affordable housing.

There will be many homesick New Orleanians looking for jobs in Houston with one foot in the Bayou City and the other in the Bayou State. But do they have to sell their New Orleans soul for a job?

A Houstonian does not keep a cellphone with a 504 New Orleans area code. “You want to make sure that the employer knows that you are planning on staying in Houston,” Mr. Johnson says.

Make sure, Ms. Jackson agrees, “to put a 713 or 832 or another local number on that application.”

Thinking “like a Houstonian” in this sense is really thinking like a good job seeker. I am confident that one can both “think like a New Orleanian” and get a job in Houston.

Now, if Houston businesses are refusing to hire people who are “obviously” New Orleanian (hmm, I wonder what that means?), then the problem lies not in the job seekers’ state of mind, but in the Houston business world. Being from New Orleans should not be an obstacle blocking one from getting a job. I have met many a Texan working here in New Orleans and, believe me, they are still thinking like a Texan.

I realize that a couple of New Orleans evacuees put the video together. I see that as an admirable response to a problem in their community and it should accomplish its intended result and help New Orleanians get jobs.

But it also is a response to negative myths that have evolved in Houston concerning New Orleans evacuees. The evacuees have already been characterized as an undesirable group. Asking the evacuees to cover up their New Orleans-ness supports this unfavorable stereotype, even though it may get a few of them jobs.

I guess, as a New Orleanian, my problem is with the choice of words. I don’t ever want someone to tell me not to think like a New Orleanian. Plus, I want the evacuees to get jobs here in New Orleans – their home – and help spur on the recovery.

Oops, there I go exhibiting my New Orleans-ness again. You know, the eternal optimism New Orleanians have that our leaders will do the right thing to get people home and speed up the recovery, or speed up the recovery to get people home.

Eternal optimism from a life long Saints fan. Imagine that.

Five oh fo’ eva.

UPDATE: New Orleanians in Houston get a video to help them find jobs. Iraqis get a billion dollars.

President Bush’s new Iraq strategy calls for a rapid influx of forces that could add as many as 20,000 American combat troops to Baghdad, supplemented with a jobs program costing as much as $1 billion intended to employ Iraqis in projects including painting schools and cleaning streets, according to American officials who are piecing together the last parts of the initiative.

Via dangerblond, who observes:

And the president is really smart to do this, because with all the training and jobs, they will not only be able to rebuild their destroyed homes and communities, but they’ll have less of an incentive to turn to violence. What? Why are you looking at me like that?

I wonder if the new plan will teach the Iraqis to "think like an American."

The Definition of Rate

From Wikipedia:

A rate is a special kind of ratio, indicating a relationship between two measurements with different units, such as miles to gallons or cents to pounds. For example, suppose one spends 9 dollars on 2 pounds of candy. The rate $9 / 2 pounds compares the money spent to the number of pounds of candy.(or money)

So the “murder rate” of a city would be the ratio of the total number of murders to another number, like the total population. The murder rate is usually presented as the number of murders per 100,000 residents.

There is a difference between the murder rate and the total number of murders in a city.

The *total number of murders* in Houston was up 13.5 percent in 2006 when compared to 2005:

In 2006, the Houston Police Department recorded 379 homicides as of Dec. 31, a 13.5 percent increase from the 334 homicides recorded in 2005. The 2006 total is the highest since 1994, when 419 homicides were reported in the city.

But the *murder rate* was up 5.57 percent:

Despite another annual increase, residents here are not necessarily at greater risk of becoming a homicide victim. That's because Houston's homicide rate per 100,000 residents rose only incrementally in 2006 — since the city's population is estimated to have surged by more than 148,000 people, due largely to an influx of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

***

Despite the upward trend, Houston's homicide rate per 100,000 residents hardly changed at all. That number increased from 16.33 in 2005 to 17.24 in 2006.

The FBI says that in 2006, cities with more than 1,000,000 people (that includes Houston) had an average increase in their murder rates of 6.7 percent.

Given the national trends, I just don’t understand how the Katrina evacuees that went to Houston can be blamed entirely for Houston’s higher murder rate:

"We did have a surge in population from a city where the homicide rate is eight times the national average," said Houston Mayor Bill White, referring to New Orleans, hometown of many of the evacuees. "The last 2 1/2 months, we have seen a return to homicide rates typical of the 2000-to-2004 period prior to Katrina."

Yes, more people were murdered in Houston last year. But there were more people in Houston to be murdered. If nearly 200,000 people had come to Houston in a matter of months from anywhere in the world, the total number of murders would have gone up, even if the murder rate had stayed the same.

I am still not sold on the Katrina Criminals Myth.

Katrina Crime in San Antonio

A good article from San Antonio’s Express-News investigating the relationship between Katrina evacuees and that city’s post-Katrina crime.

Their city officials have been less apt to blame higher crime numbers on Katrina evacuees and offer up a reason why Houston officials are playing up the Myth of the Katrina Criminal:

Houston's attempt to peg a statistical correlation of higher crime rates to the arrival of evacuees has brought in millions of dollars to help pay its police and fire bills. But that city's correlation — and the Express-News' attempt to replicate Houston's analysis — is open to debate.

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In Houston, which also received five times as many evacuees as San Antonio, the statistical impact is not much greater because its population is three times the Alamo City's size.

After tracing murders and noting leaps in other violent crime near resettlement areas, the administration of Houston Mayor Bill White has aggressively pursued more than $30 million in federal money for public safety costs. The money has gone to pay police and fire overtime and for five new police academy training classes.

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Houston has claimed the evacuee link wholeheartedly, with some success. Houston won an $18 million Department of Justice grant after White lobbied Houston's congressional delegation.

"My opinion is it never hurts to ask," said Gary E. Gray, assistant director for Houston's finance department. "If you don't ask what's possible, nothing's going to happen."

The Myth of the Katrina Criminal is worth millions of dollars to Houston.

The San Antonio article seems to imply that there *is* a link – officials simply haven’t looked hard enough or in the right places. But the best evidence the authors can uncover from the experts, officials, or community members they interviewed is that the rise in crime at the same time Katrina evacuees arrived is an unlikely “coincidence.” That’s not much proof.

One Texas criminologist offers up the most likely explanation for the rise in crime that can be supported by the facts:

"I think saying that [Katrina evacuees are causing more crime in the cities they go to] comes pretty close to demonizing people who were evacuated. All you can say is that's interesting, that went up," said Dr. Michael J. Gilbert, associate professor in the University of Texas at San Antonio criminal justice department and Mayor Phil Hardberger's appointee to a local crime commission.

"While that's perfectly rational thinking, it may be misleading in terms of what this data may actually mean. I think they're (city of Houston) trying to make the best case they can to get money when it's not defensible."

He and other experts say the coincidence that a sudden spike in major crime occurred with the arrival of evacuees might easily be explained by population increases, shifts in police tactics or changing drug trade dynamics.

In other words, the criminals already in the cities where evacuees went suddenly had more people to commit crimes on, sell drugs to, rob, kill, or whatever. With more criminal activity, police targeted those areas with special task forces, rooting out more criminals, making more arrests, which resulted in even higher crime numbers – all the things that good myths are made of.