On Aug. 29, 2005, New Orleans was on track to finish the year as the deadliest city in America, again. Crime had become atomized here--it was part of the culture, the air, the dark humor of the place. Under normal circumstances, criminologists believe, there are two ways to stop a cycle of gang violence: either dismantle the gangs or disrupt their business. In New Orleans, both happened overnight. Hurricane Katrina sundered what no man could, sending the criminals fleeing in all directions. So now there was a mystery: What would happen next? What would become of the criminal population when stripped of its neighborhood affiliations, its drug suppliers and a well-worn black-market infrastructure? This is a story about what happened to the gangs of New Orleans. But it is also a story about a culture of killing and what it takes to change it.
New Orleans was a disaster site before Katrina. So far that year, 202 people had been murdered. Computer models predicted that about 107 more were going to be killed before the year was out. "We were watching the lid come off," says Peter Scharf, a University of New Orleans criminologist. At that rate, not only would New Orleans have once again ranked as deadlier than New York City or Los Angeles, but it would also have been so much more violent that it really belonged in another country altogether. By the time Katrina hit, most law-enforcement types in the city had come to an unpleasant conclusion: no amount of arrests would stanch the murder rate. Somewhere along the way, despite the best efforts of techno-cop Chief Richard Pennington in the 1990s, despite tens of thousands of arrests for drug and quality-of-life crimes, violence had become normalized.
"It was chaos," remembers Jimmy Keen, a lieutenant with the New Orleans police department (N.O.P.D.) and the former commander of the homicide unit. Keen joined the department at age 19 and has stayed for 30 years. He has white hair swept back off his forehead, gimlet eyes and the bone-dry sense of humor adopted by police officers whose intentions have been knocking up against reality for a long time.
Over drinks and cigarettes at the Carousel Bar in the French Quarter recently, Keen explained New Orleans by telling the story of a 15-year-old named "Caveman." On April 14, 2003, at 10:30 in the morning, high school football player Jonathan (Caveman) Williams was sitting in his gym class. The gymnasium was packed with kids. Without warning, two men with an AK-47 and a handgun walked into the gym, strode up to Caveman and shot and killed him. They fired at least 18 times, blowing off half his face and pockmarking the floor tiles underneath his body. Three girls were injured by stray bullets. Then the men walked out. Police said the attack was probably payback for the murder of another high school student the week before.
Keen's officers went house to house, searching for the killers. They had 150 witnesses in the gym and a dead child on the floor. It was hard to imagine that the case would be a tough one to crack. And yet, Keen says, the officers' questions were met with shrugs and stares. "I asked my sergeant, 'How's it going?'" remembers Keen. "And he said, 'I feel like the Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq. The people in the neighborhoods don't want us here. They don't speak our language. They won't talk to us.'"