Police making progress against New Orleans gang crime

(2/18/06 - HOUSTON) - Houston police say they are making inroads in dealing with a rash of violent crimes attributed mostly to New Orleans gang members who evacuated to Houston along with other hurricane victims.
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They asked this week for help in finding five Katrina evacuees believed responsible for three murders and two thefts. Last month they announced the arrests of eight others for the deaths of 11 fellow refugees.
While the city had "a huge explosion of murders" in November and December, Houston Police Sgt. Brian Harris said Friday the homicide rate has stabilized and is only slightly up from this time last year.
He credited a growing confidence that hurricane evacuees have in Houston police and increased cooperation among law enforcement agencies in cities with large numbers of Katrina evacuees for the improvement.
But Harris said local refugees are still wary of helping police.
"Their (justice) system was broken long before Katrina," said Harris, of the homicide division. "If people did come forward, they would see that the people arrested would be released. There was also a lot of intimidation from criminals. It was a culture of silence."
Capt. Juan Quinton, a spokesman for New Orleans police, said problems with witnesses coming forward and other hindrances to criminal investigations aren't unique to his city.
"There was a time when this department was questioned. There is no question about our integrity," Quinton said. "We have worked hard to remove any elements that caused us any problems."
Houston evacuees seeing that individuals arrested for violent crimes will do serious jail time has caused "the lines of communication to start opening up," Harris said.
Dorothy Stukes, a New Orleans resident living in Houston, said that many evacuees are afraid to come forward because they are afraid of reprisals from criminals and they lack confidence in law enforcement. But she said that has to change.
"As long as we are here, we have to learn to work with authorities to keep crime down," Stukes said.
However, Stukes said she feels local authorities and officials have unfairly portrayed all Katrina refugees in Houston as criminals whenever they've announced the arrests of gang members.
"It seems to me that we are getting picked on just because we are from Louisiana," she said.
Frank Michel, a spokesman for Houston Mayor Bill White, said while the spike in murders the city experienced late last year was related in part to Katrina evacuees, it was also due to Houston gangs.
"The vast majority of (evacuees) who came here are law-abiding citizens," he said.
Police representatives from Dallas and Atlanta, cities that also have large numbers of Katrina evacuees, said Friday that while their agencies have dealt with crimes committed by refugees, they pale compared to Houston.
Harris said the FBI in New Orleans has created a Web site for law enforcement that lets authorities share information about what is going on in their particular cities with regard to crimes being committed by Katrina refugees. He said the Web site had been helpful in tracking trends.
Peter Scharf, executive director of the Center for Society, Law and Justice at the University of New Orleans, said he is hoping to get federal funding for a study that in part would look at why many of Louisiana-based gangs migrated to Houston instead of other cities.
Some possible answers include a thriving drug trade between Houston and Jacksonville, Fla., and similarities between neighborhoods in Houston and New Orleans, he said.
Scharf said he thinks crime rates in Houston will continue to drop as the gang members realize that Texas agencies are stricter in making arrests and getting convictions.
"They will realize there is a chance of doing serious time in Texas and that they'd better go back to New Orleans," he said.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)