It depends on which study you believe.
If you click on this link it will show you a map of the cities with the most crime in the country.
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008 ... rime.html#
New Orleans has highest crime rate in country, national study says
by Brendan McCarthy, The Times-Picayune
Monday November 24, 2008, 6:30 PM
Michael DeMocker, The Times-PicayuneNew Orleans police investigate the slaying of a 24-year-old man on Friday near Cambronne and Spruce streets. The city tops a new survey of the nation's most violent urban areas in a study released today.
Long known as an American murder capital, New Orleans also has the highest rate of overall crime in the country, according to a high-profile and controversial study released Monday.
A map showing the top 10 most crime-plagued cities in the United States.
The number of crimes reported in the city last year, analyzed alongside population estimates, puts New Orleans head and shoulders above its closest peer, Camden, N.J., and nearly 400 other cities, according to the study by CQ Press.
The dubious honor will surprise no one in New Orleans. Even New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley dismissed the murder capital title as nothing new -- though he also challenged the survey's methodology, especially its use of a population number city officials dispute.
In a rare news conference Monday afternoon, Riley seemed to suggest that the city's crime problem is endemic -- and thus perhaps impossible to correct.
"In the 1870s, New Orleans was considered, in the riverboat gambling days, one of the most violent cities in the country," he said. "Is it the water in the Mississippi? I don't know what it is. But we certainly have some problems. So does every urban city."
Riley laid blame with poverty and poor schooling, saying these societal ills have allowed crime to "fester for a long time."
"The problem won't change until we take care of the poor people in this city, until we take care of the impoverished in this city, until we gave them the same educational opportunities as everyone else, until we give them direction" he said.
Notably, Riley did not mention his department as an important force in reducing crime.
Police officials in other cities took a different tack with the new study. In Camden, which ranked second to New Orleans, the police chief said the spike in crime led to changes in the city's policing plan.
"The unacceptable level of crime has been the driving force behind our recent reorganization as well as the development of our crime-control plan," Camden Police Director Louis Vega said in a prepared statement.
In Ramapo, N.Y., the city with the lowest crime rate, the top cop lauded the department's community-outreach efforts.
"The community is our eyes and ears, and we work closely with community groups, schools, parent teacher associations and more," said Christopher St. Lawrence, chairman of the police commission in the affluent city of 120,000 people, located about 20 miles north of New York City.
The report's rankings are calculated using crime statistics from seven major categories: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft and car theft. Rates are calculated using population data.
The usefulness of such rankings is hotly debated among many in the criminal justice field. For example, the FBI and some criminal justice groups stopped using a similar methodology in 2004, arguing that it was not a true indicator of crime -- in part because it overvalued the importance of less-serious crimes that occur more often, such as theft, over relatively rare but serious crimes, such as murder.
The creators of the rankings did issue a special note about New Orleans, highlighting the city's dramatic changes in population over the past few years.
In determining the CQ report, the researchers used a 2007 population of 220,614, the estimate that was provided to the FBI when police agencies across the country reported their statistics, according to Ben Krasney, a CQ spokesman. That estimate is less than a later U.S. census estimate of 239,124.
The census number, meanwhile, has been attacked as far too low by city leaders, who have filed an official challenge to the figure. The challenge is still pending.
Krasney said CQ used the same population totals reported to the FBI for every city in order to "level the playing field." He also said that although some may quibble with their methodology, the comparisons among the cities are fair.
Riley disagrees.
"It's inaccurate information," the chief said Monday. "There's nothing factual about it. There's nothing scientific about it."
Krasney said New Orleans ranked well above Camden, and would have still taken the crime title with the higher population number provided by the U.S. census. It's not clear what population figure city officials think should have been used, and whether it would have affected the rankings.
Mayor Ray Nagin's communications staff did not return requests for comment.
. . . . . . .
Brendan McCarthy can be reached at
bmccarthy@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3301.
