Crime Map

In much of the city, the effects of the storm remain apparent and inconvenient, but are no longer the dominant negative factor in quality of life that they once were. That's not true everywhere; obviously some parts of the city are still nearly uninhabited. For the rest of the city, the major problems are incompetent government (Eddie Jordan), corrupt government (William Jefferson), idiotic government (Charles Foti), bad physical infrastructure (particularly the roads), and crime (Jordan and Foti again).

We live a relatively low-crime neighborhood. The major quality of life problem we face is that the roads suck. More on that later.

The crime situation is interesting. New Orleans is on track to be the highest per capita homidice rate in the country. Murders is what really gets all the attention, but I'm sure other crimers are also very high. The New Orleans Citizen Crime Watch has assembled crime data from several sources in the city, and compiled it all into a map using Google Maps. It's really a good demonstration of what all the technologies involved are capable of.

One specific note. The corner of Dante and Spruce (within what the map calls the Leonidas neighborhood) has seen at least four or five homicides since the beginning of the year. That corner is about a quarter of a mile from us. A friend who lives there (!) says that those appear to be drug- and gang-related. Now I'm looking at it again, there are a a couple of drug arrests at that corner too, so that seems to be what's going on.