A Rough Second Quarter for Crime in New Orleans
I saw that on Jeff Asher’s NOLA Crime News blog, and I thought, well, police are kicking ass in New Orleans, aren’t they? Alas:
NOPD released their unofficially official Uniform Crime Report statistics recently for the second quarter of 2017 and the numbers aren’t particularly pretty. Overall crime is up 11.9 percent relative to the first half of 2016 with a 9.2 percent increase in person crime (murder, rape, robbery and assault) and a 12.6 percent increase in property crime (burglary, theft and auto theft).
I did appreciate Jeff’s thoroughness:
It’s important to remember that New Orleans has grown considerably since Katrina. The Census does not provide quarterly population counts, but the New Orleans Data Center provides a monthly population indicator for every month starting in mid-2006 (I guesstimated the population of the first two quarters of 2006 using that data).
Applying the population data enables the calculation of a crime rate per 100,000 households for both person and property crime. This is provided in the below chart which shows the rate of crimes per quarter in the second quarter of 2017 was the worst since the third quarter of 2007 for person crimes and the third quarter of 2008 for property crimes.
