CRIME: LAW AND ORDER

CRIME RATES ARE DOWN ACROSS THE U.S.--SOME DRAMATICALLY. IS THIS A BLIP OR A TREND? WITH SO MANY FACTORS IN PLAY, IT MAY BE A BIT OF BOTH

WANT TO SEE A CIVIC MONUMENT THAT NO CITY would ever want? Go to New Orleans and proceed to the intersection of Congress and Law streets, just a few blocks from the tourists' Latin Quarter. Walk anywhere in that neighborhood of trashed storefronts and blunt-shouldered housing projects. It won't take long to find walls that are spattered with grimy little craters. Those are bullet holes. Every one of them is an unofficial memorial to the mayhem that was daily life around there until not so long ago.

Starting in the late 1980s, drug dealers had claimed the place as their own,...

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