What happens on election day this fall may determine whether New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu will be on the ballot in 2015, and must in part motivate a decision that easily could backfire to keep him from running for governor next year.
Last week, Landrieu put
in a request to the state to supply New Orleans with 100 state troopers to
police the city, in response to a horrific seemingly random shooting in the
open in the French Quarter that left one dead and several injured. Legally,
state policeman have jurisdiction anywhere in the state and Landrieu was taking
advantage of a power often invoked by past governors at local officials’
requests. However, given manpower constraints, the state will provide only 50
through Labor Day. This past holiday weekend 30 already were there.
Word that at a major worldwide tourist
mecca without warning one could catch a bullet will travel fast, and it doesn’t
exactly thrill the residents and workers there that random bullets fly about
the area (I used to live just down the block from where it happened), so
undoubtedly Landrieu’s action was designed to allay fears of a major industry which
contributes mightily to the city’s coffers as well as to constituents. But the
event and subsequent request also may have a more political motive, to build
support for a tax increase on Orleanians, its path to reality beginning with a
statewide referendum this November.
The incident may allow Landrieu
to justify this substantial increase, which could be as many as 10 mils,
dedicated to fund police protection with a federal consent decree in the
background forcing the city to spend much more than anticipated. Landrieu will
argue that failure to pass this, which even if approved statewide then would
require a local election to approve scheduled with City Council approval, would
cause a financial crisis – even though his administration hasn’t exactly made
strides in squeezing out inefficiency in one of the state’s
highest per capita spending local
governments. Yet he won’t let this crisis go to waste in spinning it so
that it serves as evidence of the drastic need for that money.
The problem for him in all this
is that the public may not buy the narrative. Landrieu has had the chance to
deploy a counterargument that, during his terms, he has made the crime
situation better in the city as the murder rate has fallen after his first
couple of years in office. He insists this operates as the prime indicator of
the public safety scene in New Orleans, due to other violent crimes being
relatively low. These factors validate his stewardship, so goes the argument,
justifying entrusting his administration with tens of millions more dollars a
year.
But upon more thorough investigation,
that tale begins to fall apart. For one thing, the city
trend merely mirrors the national trend. For another, while both the raw
numbers (about a third of where they were 20 years ago) and murders per hundred
thousand figures have declined, that per
capita figure still stays very stubbornly high, after having been the
highest in the country now in third place, at a rate almost 10 times the national
average for cities and almost three times higher than similar-sized cities. And
that’s taking into account that around 100,000 fewer people live in the city
than did two decades ago.
Some crime statistic experts also
have doubts
about the validity of statistics that purport to show that in number of all
major violent crimes New Orleans is unexceptional. They suspect the figures are
too low for those other than murder, for a variety of reasons involving
administrative actions or the city’s culture, cancelling the assertion that New
Orleans is a “safe city with a murder problem.” In their view, it’s much more dangerous
than statistics lead on, so a decline in the murder rate has much less of an
impact on violent crime generally than otherwise believed.
Finally, doubts
also have emerged about how well the city uses resources intended for policing.
The city now has fewer sworn officers than it has for over four decades and the
lowest overall staffing levels in three dozen years, and Landrieu’s years in
office have followed that continual downward pattern. Very embarrassingly, the
city’s own inspector general in May released a report
questioning resource allocation, arguing that with current funding the police
department could do a much better job of having officers available for patrol
and response, which occasioned an entirely negative appraisal from the NOPD and
Landrieu even as the document contained some compelling comparative national
evidence.
In other words, Landrieu’s story
that progress is being made but cannot continue without lots more money, as
demonstrated by needing to beg the state for troopers, can be parried by
pointing out that any fall in the murder rate may be due to national sociological/demographic
trends, that the underlying pathologies that continue to allow an absurdly high
murder rate continue regardless, that the problem is even worse in being masked
by invalidly low rates of other major violent crimes, and that the means to
address these things already are available without reaching into the citizenry’s
wallets. Under this interpretation, the request for state backup sends another
signal confirming the basic failure of Landrieu’s policing policy and implying
that any additional monies extracted by the city from the public are not only
superfluous, but wastefully throws good money after bad policy.
That’s a narrative Landrieu
definitely does not want propagated into the wider public consciousness,
beginning with the vote coming up this fall. If a majority of the state’s
public voting in that election can become convinced that it’s a policy rather
than monetary issue, then even the argument that Landrieu will try to make that
non-Orleanians should cast an affirmative vote to allow Orleanians to decide
the matter to tax themselves among themselves won’t cut it with that segment.
And that could have catastrophic
consequences for any ambitions he might have to ascend to the office of
governor in 2016. Quite properly, statewide rejection of the amendment will
reflect statewide rejection of him and will dampen any enthusiasm for his
candidacy the next year as well as provide plenty of fodder for his opponents
to fire at him.
While practical considerations
may have forced the move, the political ramification of making the supplemental
request to the state might make or break Landrieu’s political future. If it’s
seen in the light of justification for increased taxation to keep the city on
the right path that Landrieu shepherds into reality, it provides a vindication
of his political strength. However, if seen as part of a blind continuation of
a failing worldview by a stubborn and ambitious politician that ultimately contributes
to the defeat of any tax increase, mayor of New Orleans could be the last
full-time political gig Landrieu gets for some time.
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