There were undoubtedly wild, uncofirmed, and false rumors circulating during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Such rumors are a natural part of chaos. So now we have seen the stories about how crime and violence and other problems were exagerrated. But these stores about rumors are likely taking things too far in correcting these rumors as part of the perrenial liberal re-writing of history ; we all saw an event with our own eyes, where looting took place on a grand scale, in some cases with police officers joining in. We heard the shell-shocked survivors of the Superdome, describing gang fights, intimidation, rape, and worse. Anyone who has been to New Orleans should not have been to surprised; it’s always been a violent and disorderly town, with an extremely high rate of criminal behavior, which exceeded 50% in one group of refugees. (Why the re-write? The reality of New Orleans undermines a number of liberal shibolleths about the poor, racism, democratic governance, and black crime.)
Today the New York Times joins in, writing:
It is still impossible to say if the city experienced a wave of murder because autopsies have been performed on slightly more than 10 percent of the 885 dead.
[On Wednesday, however, Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state's medical incident commander for Hurricane Katrina victims, said that only six or seven deaths appear to have been the result of homicides. He also said that people returning to homes in the damaged region have begun finding the bodies of relatives.
[Superintendent Compass, one of the few seemingly authoritative sources during the days after the storm, resigned Tuesday for reasons that remain unclear. His departure came just as he was coming under criticism from The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which had questioned many of his public accounts of extreme violence.]
But let’s do the math, then. 850 or so people died. Ten percent of them have been autopsied. Of these perhaps six or seven were clear homicides. Multiplied by 10, that’s 60-70 killed. And this number likely undercounts individuals that were victims of blunt trauma, vehicular homicide, and other less apparent forms of homicide. The 60-70 number would be more deaths than took place in the L.A. Riots (52) or the Detroit Riots of 1967 (43).
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But you’re assuming that all 850 bodies are being autopsied in random order. If coroners first examine the most suspicious looking corpses, then almost all the homicides will turn up early in the process.
Gunshot wounds are not too easy to see if they’re from handguns. I admit there must be some selection bias, but even a “once over” on 850 bodies takes a while. Even if this is off by 50%, let’s say it’s 30 murders or 25 or 40. This is a city with 1/5 or so the population of Detroit or LA and has the highest murder rate by county in the country, if I’m not mistaken.
Last I heard, LA was about 4 million in population and Detroit came in around 900,000. N.O. is a hair under 500,000 people (in the city limits – Greater N.O. is about 1.2 mil).