Are we ignoring New Orleans?

[Bubba Fett]

I check out nola.com just about every day and what's happening in New Orleans, in terms of the daily murders, is simply frightening.

The national media stopped by for the one-year anniversary of Katrina, but I haven't heard anything since.

Here's a graphic of the recent killings from the Times-Picayune's site:

 

[Buck]

It's good to see the people of New Orleans are getting back to their normal lives.

 

[Matt Foley]

I bet these guys could help clean up that town

 

[SoSueMe]

Funny you mentioned this. Last night at work we were talking about life in Iraq and how everyone there must wonder if today might be their last.

But then a guy at work does some research. Apparently there are 57 civilian deaths per 100,000 people in Iraq in a month (I think). And there were five or six American cities, including New Orleans, with a higher rate using the same numbers.

How right he was, I don't know. Where he got the info, I don't know.

He just pashed me the list. I was busy working.

But if the numbers were right, it's strange the media wouldn't make more of the deaths in America.

 

[Buck]

Funny you mentioned this. Last night at work we were talking about life in Iraq and how everyone there must wonder if today might be their last.

But then a guy at work does some research. Apparently there are 57 civilian deaths per 100,000 people in Iraq in a month (I think). And there were five or six American cities, including New Orleans, with a higher rate using the same numbers.

How right he was, I don't know. Where he got the info, I don't know.

He just pashed me the list. I was busy working.

But if the numbers were right, it's strange the media wouldn't make more of the deaths in America.

New Orleans has had a high murder rate for a long time, but a murder rate that high would definitely be news. I'm not sure how he was doing his figuring, but there are not 57 homicides per 1,000 people per month in New Orleans.

 

[Football_Bat]

The main places in Iraq that have a high civilian death rate are those places (such as around Baghdad) where there is a volatile mix of Shia and Sunni populations. Thus if you discard the population of Iraq as a whole and just account for the population of Baghdad and other flash points, the death rate per 100,000 is much, much greater.

In more homogenous places like Anbar, the only ones dying seem to be our boys.

 

[SoSueMe]

Buck.

I thought the same thing. Which partly why I didn't listen too intently to the other guy at work. I just pashed it off as a guy who was making something out of nothing.

 

[Evil Bastard (aka Chris_L)]

The death rate for US soldiers serving in Iraq is lower than the death rate for black males under 30 who live in Philadelphia.

The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.

 

[DyePack]

Maybe some of those bodies are the hundreds of thousands who were killed in the flooding during Katrina's aftermath.

Oh wait, that was simply the media forking up the facts and the tally. My bad.

I'm sure the corrections for those articles will be moving any day now.

 

[SoSueMe]

This (I think) is what the guy work was taking numbers from:

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/5/29/132706.shtml

It's just simply civilian deaths per 100,000 people. Period.

 

[The Big Ragu]

According to FBI figures, there were 56 murders for every 100,000 people in New Orleans in 2004. That's an extremely high murder rate--about eight times the murder rate in NYC. The numbers you are seeing in New Orleans today are not starkly out of whack with how bad things were prior to Katrina, which is why this is sort of a non-story outside of La. In absolute terms, the number of murders will actually be significantly lower than in the past, but that is because there are far fewer people living there.

 

[novelist_wannabe]

And then there's the ancillary violence that followed the transplants to other cities ...