Web-powered grassroots activists take on the killing fields of New Orleans

June 27, 10:38 PMCommunity Journalism ExaminerJonathan Donley

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St. Louis Cathedral in the heart of the French Quarter.

For a time in post-Katrina New Orleans there was a lull in the killing. The few residents able to return lived in a small strip of the city they called the “Sliver by the River,” an area that was flooded only lightly, and was the first to have electricity turned on.

But 2006 saw New Orleans return to worse violence than ever, as gang members, finding their evacuation host cities inhospitable, moved back into the still-dark and storm-damaged areas worst-hit by Katrina. Murders began to crank up by the spring, and in June, five teens were gunned down in a drug assassination, the first in a long summer of bloodshed that earned Central City the nickname of the “Triangle of Death.” 

In the largely spared Uptown and Marigny-Bywater areas of New Orleans residents criticized police and the district attorney’s office for inaction in the face of the swelling violence. Accusations grew that the New Orleans Police Department was covering up the situation by under-reporting crime and the NOPD stonewalled the Pulitzer-winning Times-Picayune as it attempted to gain access to police reports.

A number of neighborhoods – particularly the hip, bohemian Marigny-Bywater area – began publishing their own weekly crime reports, based on resident reports that were never filed by police. These reports went out on mailing lists, and on community forums and blogs.

To a great extent, violence against normal residents was limited to armed robberies and muggings; the murders were largely contained within the never-ending drug turf wars. But a wave of slayings at the end of the year – beginning with the Dec. 28 murder of Hot 8 Brass Band drummer and music teacher Dinerral Shavers and ending with the Jan 4, 2007 home-invasion shooting of filmmaker and Katrina aid activist Helen Hill – was the last straw. Hill was the final victim in a spree of six murders within a single 24-hour period.

The following week saw a firestorm of community activism with every tool available, especially on the public forums and blogs of NOLA.com, the Times-Picayune web affiliate that had become the shared voice of the community during Katrina. Residents used this venue to organize “Silence is Violence,” a group that has become a permanent watchdog over crime-fighting efforts in New Orleans. Exactly one week after Hill’s death, thousands of marchers carried pictures of Shavers and Hill and other victims of the post-Katrina murders in one of the largest protests in the city within recent memory.

While Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Warren Riley took their share of the heat, it was District Attorney Eddie Jordan who was destined to fall. His office’s prosecutions of murder suspects was miniscule . . . criminals, in fact, joked about “misdemeanor murders,” and the NOPD, fed up with seeing suspects back on the streets, agreed with that assessment. Faced with the unrelenting protests of Silence is Violence and other residents, voiced mainly via the internet – and pressured by a growing number of politicians and other public figures facing collateral damage – Jordan resigned Oct. 30, 2007.

As New Orleans nears the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it is still suffering one of the highest homicide rates in the country.  Silence Is Violence is still on watch.