In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  I am haunted by the lives we could not save. The river of federal funds that allowed me to rebuild this city provided no levee system against the tides of violence sprung from the porous gun laws of this country. I had no power to stop the flow of guns; the criminal justice system can only arrest and incarcerate the worst offenders. In the face of futile gun laws, I decided to raise awareness and set an alternative path. We have made a significant dent, but it is only that, a dent. We have so much more work to do. I firmly believe that this is a solvable problem if we treat gun violence as both a public safety issue and a public health crisis. We vaccinate people to thwart disease. Against gun violence, society is passive.

  A politician learns from youngsters trapped on the front lines of this carnage how desperately they want to avoid drug gangs and change their circumstances. Ricky Summers, sixteen, was surrounded by violence in his Central City neighborhood. Ricky was determined to get out and be different. He was one of the original “KIPPsters” enrolled in the first class at Knowledge Is Power Program in Central City, part of the charter school effort. With ambitions for college, Ricky was struggling to become a man without the guiding hand of a father. His eighth-grade English class had been studying Langston Hughes’s poem, “Harlem.” “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? . . . Or does it explode?”

  Ricky was in his school uniform when they found him behind a blighted house, shot in the back. Ricky’s dream was violently denied, his rich potential snuffed out like too many before him. What must we do to save young men like Ricky Summers?

  Not too far from Briana Allen’s photo are stacks of red binders in my office. They hold the stories of murder victims in my city—more than one thousand of them since I took office in 2010. Emotions overflow at funeral services. Another prayer vigil, a moment of silence, an endless cycle, primarily young African American men killing each other.

  In 2011, five John McDonogh High School students were killed before they had a chance to make their mark on the world. It is a sad, horrifying truth that in 2011, a John McDonogh High student was more likely to be killed on New Orleans streets than a soldier fighting in Afghanistan. Let that sink in.

  Statistics confirm that 80 percent of the victims know one another. Most of the “beefs” or disputes are so petty as to leave us numb over the waste of human life. Day after day young men kill someone they know, and not just in New Orleans. They are not faceless, nameless thugs who die out of sight and mind; they are flesh and blood. They matter. Their deaths are not God’s will. Often, as I have tried to focus attention on this issue, many people, not just whites, turn away. Not my problem . . . Just thugs killing thugs . . . They get what they deserve . . . It’s not my fault.

  One of the biggest sticks that was used against me in taking down monuments was that I should be focused on murder, not monuments. Not one of those people helped me in fighting murder or helping young, black men in my time at City Hall. And my record on murder reduction is unlike any other administration. But the opponents to taking down the monuments used any excuse they possibly could.

  The great civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis refused to stand aside, asking, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

  Our battlefield is on the street and in the heart. The mass shootings in churches, schools, movie theaters, and malls are the opposite face of the same coin: too many guns, too little preventive intervention. This is a mental health issue, a security issue, and the greatest moral issue in America today. Where are the voices of our religious leaders, calling down the failure of legislators and government to face this blight? If this is not a pro-life issue, what on God’s earth is it?

  Since at least the early 1970s, major urban centers have experienced gunfire like warfare. Every year, nearly fifteen thousand people are murdered on American soil—about forty people lost every twenty-four hours. In Las Vegas, before the horrific massacre from the hotel window of people attending a country-music concert, a life went down to gun violence on average once a day. That bears repeating: In most major cities, someone dies each day from a gunshot. The weapon of choice, most often a handgun; the victims and perpetrators disproportionately young African American men.

  As former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter has so forcefully said, if a foreign enemy killed fifteen thousand American citizens, there would be hell to pay. If the Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of young black men, this nation would be in an uproar. But for some reason we are hardened to domestic gun deaths and remain eerily silent. Maybe it is in slow motion—we refuse to hear it or see it because we place too little value on the lives of young, black men.

  This humanitarian crisis is not in some far-off nation, but here on our streets, in our neighborhoods, in our homes. America cannot be strong abroad if we are under attack at home. Morally, economically, and for the good of this nation’s strength and security, we must change this hideous situation. It is wrong for police officers to patrol streets in crime-ridden areas at a disadvantage in weapons. As president of the United States Conference of Mayors, I worked with my colleagues in proposing policies to increase mental health facilities, reduce prison terms for nonviolent offenders, and broaden programs to reach at-risk youth. We want to limit the guns and strengthen the rules about who can buy them and what they can buy. We must get Congress to address the cadaver in the living room, as Republican and Democratic mayors, police chiefs, and law enforcement officials have done.

  From 1980 to 2012, a total of 626,000 people, a disproportionate number of them African American men, were murdered in America. That’s more citizens lost to murder in thirty-two years than all of our servicemen killed during World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. I refuse to accept that America is so callous about human life. This must stop.

  The response in Congress has been tepid because of the racial dynamics: most of the victims are young blacks, not part of the Republican base, not worth the risk of offending the powerful National Rifle Association. People are scared to speak up. Or perhaps, as a nation, we have bought into an evil notion—that the lives of these mostly young African American men killed every day have less value and thus don’t deserve our urgent attention.

  Instead of grappling with this problem, we desperately look for quick fixes and want to “get tough”—more prisons, more guards, more guns. But history tells us that that will just make things worse. We can’t imprison our way out of this problem. America has more people incarcerated than more than a dozen other countries combined. And many nations with fewer people in prison have less crime and lower murder rates. Since the early 1980s, the number of incarcerated people in the United States has increased more than fourfold, going from less than a half million to about 2.2 million people today. That increase is more than double the rate of inflation over the same period. In Louisiana alone, since 1990, the population in prison has more than doubled, from about 19,000 to about 40,000 today. That leaves about 1 in 86 adults in our state incarcerated, with nearly half serving sentences for nonviolent, mostly drug-related offenses. America spends about $70 billion every year on corrections, roughly on par with the budget for the entire Department of Education. Indeed, on average, public schools spend about $12,000–$13,000 per pupil per year. To incarcerate one person for one year costs about $30,000, depending on the state. In two decades, Louisiana went from spending about $275 million on incarceration to $750 million today. Remember Joseph Norfleet? The state will spend several million dollars keeping him behind bars for life. And Louisiana’s violent crime rate is higher now than it was in 1977.

  I have seen it up close, standing over the body of a young African American boy, gunned down like a dog, lying on the street, eyes open, tongue protruding, lifeless. You stare and think this should not be.

  You look paralyzed at the police officer in the operating room of our trauma unit, a gunshot to th
e head. You think this should never be. I have seen more than I want to see. But once you’ve seen something, you can’t unsee it.

  I attend as many of the funerals as I can. The city owes the families some presence, a sign that we grieve with them, knowing things aren’t right. It is hard beyond words to put yourself close to a family shattered by violent loss. It is a duty I will not miss when I’m not mayor. But in fulfilling this responsibility, I have come to see that whether mother or father, son or daughter, grief is not filtered by whether the deceased was a police officer, an innocent child, or a young man with a rap sheet, “in the life.” When you are standing at the casket and hear the sobs and feel the heartache around you, the distant cries of Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter fade as you realize that we are all losers in this culture of violence. This is a problem that can be fixed. It requires a national, holistic policy in public health—not unlike our efforts to contain Ebola or our newfound recognition that the opioid epidemic needs a sweeping commitment to mental health and substance abuse treatment.

  Treating the cause and not just the symptom is important. It was not done in the 1980s and ’90s when we locked up mostly African American crack cocaine users and threw away the key. We had a “war on drugs.” “They” were criminals and had to be dealt with by the justice system, political leaders argued. But yet today, with a mostly white face on the opioid crisis in the Rust Belt and the northeast, we’re talking in much more holistic, public health terms. There is empathy and compassion for those with addiction. Policymakers today talk about destigmatizing drug addiction. Police are being trained to administer Narcan, a drug that saves the lives of those overdosing. These are good changes, but I worry about the lingering effects of the old mentality. Black men and women are still in prison for drug possession charges decades ago, and so the cycle continues.

  And so you might ask, with so much urban warfare in the poorest streets, how have we responded as a nation? Even little kids can tell you, “Out here it is kill or be killed”—that cold, that simple. Yet for too many Americans, this reality may as well be on another planet. Murder and violence are the poisonous fruit grown from the soil of injustice, racism, and inequality—fertilized by guns, drugs, alcohol, and disintegrated families. Hope fades, hate grows, people feel they have nothing to lose. To those who say it has always been this way, I answer: We made this problem by neglect; we can be proactive and fix it.

  All of this happens in the shadows of statues whose message has always been, as Terence Blanchard said: African Americans are less than.

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  Every murder leaves a wake of destruction, the collateral damage of gunshots. An innocent child loses a father; a mother’s heart is broken; a family is sent reeling into an abyss. But the endings don’t have to be entirely bleak. Consider Leonard Galmon. Leonard’s father was killed on the streets of New Orleans when he was four; his seventeen-year-old mother was alone. As Leonard moved through school, he found a path in the Recovery School District that led him to Cohen College Prep, a charter school. With the help of his teachers, Leonard applied to colleges and universities. He was accepted to Yale University with a full scholarship. Leonard’s story made the front page of the press, and more articles and editorials followed. He was honored by the City Council and the State Legislature. Congratulations and donations flooded in from across the city; he showed the determination to find a way. He had good help, which is what many more young African American men on the bitter edge need in order to turn themselves around; they, too, can do great things with the right support and guidance.

  Those of us who had easy paths to education should realize how steep the odds are for first-generation college students; only one in ten who start college actually graduate. With hats off to Leonard Galmon, I look forward to the day when it will not be front-page news when a young African American from New Orleans is accepted by Yale, because so many others followed in Leonard’s path.

  Imagine with me two children representing the hundreds of kids living on opposite sides of oak-lined St. Charles Avenue, the famous street with the streetcar tracks. They live a few blocks away from each other, but a world apart in every other sense. In Central City, a boy named James, fourteen, goes to public school; he lives on Seventh Street with his mom and two younger brothers, a few blocks downriver from St. Charles. A one-bedroom apartment in a long, thin, rundown building. Every morning, James’s mom catches the 5:30 bus to a downtown hotel. She won’t get back from her second job as a security guard until nine that night. James gets home from school. Not much is going on in the afternoon. As the sun sets, James is restless, hangs with friends at his corner. His mom tries her best, but the drugs, easy money, and guns are everywhere, and most of the time no one’s at home to help him resist the lure of the street. One day, James’s mom finds a pistol under his bed. Imagine young James, in tears, telling her the same thing I have heard from kids just as young: “It’s for protection.” Again, I hear: “Mayor, out here it’s either kill or be killed.”

  Meanwhile, four blocks on the upriver side of St. Charles, at a home in the Garden District, another fourteen-year-old, Mike, goes to private school. The family lives in a large four-bedroom house. Mom is a lawyer, Dad’s in finance. They’re good people, working long hours downtown, but the nanny is home for Mike when school lets out, unless he’s at practice for the tennis, football, or basketball teams, or stays for Chess Club or Quiz Bowl practice. Every night, the family eats dinner; Mom or Dad makes sure he does homework. Mike in the Garden District hopes to follow in Dad’s footsteps. James in Central City: his dad’s in Angola prison.

  On Mardi Gras, the two boys head to St. Charles Avenue, drawn by the exotic splendor of the Zulu King, the beauty of the Rex parade, the backbeat of the St. Augustine Purple Knights Marching 100, the bounce of Al Johnson’s voice singing “Carnival Time” in a truck parade.

  James watches from the lake side of St. Charles, Mike from the river side. For a brief moment, they occupy the same world, hearts beating to the same rhythm, catching beads and dancing in the same street. In between floats, as kids play in the street, perhaps they meet or reach for the same pair of beads, joined in the synthesis of time, geography, culture, race, and music, all shared, touching the same reality, things they both want, perfect symmetry for one moment in time.

  But when the parade ends, they go back to their lives on different sides of St. Charles Avenue, to different worlds.

  In James’s Central City, the average household income is less than $36,000. In Mike’s world, in the Garden District, the average household income exceeds $128,000. In Central City, 69 percent of households are run by a single parent, mostly a mother. In the Garden District, only 3 percent are single parent households. In Central City, people are twice as likely to rent rather than own, five times as likely not to have a vehicle. To make ends meet, the mom earning minimum wage must work day and night, typically two jobs; latchkey kids wait hours for Mom to come home.

  Since 2010, Central City has seen more than three hundred shootings. Walk a few blocks away, it is a different world; there were only two shooting victims in the Garden District over the last seven years. Think again about fourteen-year-olds, James and Mike, each walking home that Mardi Gras night. For James, as on many nights in Central City, NOPD searched the area after a shooting. Witnesses say it was a young black man in a hoodie. Cops, already on edge, see James with his hood up and pull toward him fast and close. James jerks his hand out of his pocket. He is holding a black cell phone. Will the police know that? Sometimes this is how tragedies happen, and for young men like James, the margin of error between life and death is razor thin. If we replace James with Mike from the Garden District, the difference in that margin of error would likely allow Mike to live.

  These same two neighborhoods produced Joseph Norfleet and Peyton Manning. They’re about the same age and may have played on the same football team at the nearby A. L.
Davis playground some thirty years ago. Imagine them meeting in some football scrimmage and then going their separate ways. One on a pipeline to prison, the other to NFL prosperity.

  Some people are cynical and say we cannot change. I believe we can. The great part of being American is that we believe in endless horizons, that for every problem there is a solution, that no breach or divide cannot be repaired. I have hope because of young people like Leonard Galmon. Out of despair, hope rises. Leonard went to Yale because hope was his compass.

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  In 2012 we launched a program called NOLA for Life with the stated agenda of reducing homicide and giving youngsters on the margins activity and structure as our budget allowed. We asked police officers, mothers of murder victims, criminologists, focus groups with young men “in the life,” How can we reduce this problem? Can we find a strategy worth applying on a greater level? Each group told us essentially the same things: solutions for prevention have to be visible on the streets. You have to change a lot in a given culture to reduce murders when killing is so widespread. More jobs, good schools, healthy neighborhoods, stronger families, a better police department—all play a pivotal role; we also learned that murders happen in small groups of young African American men who hang out together.

  The same profile emerges time and again. Roughly one in three murders happens in the same four neighborhoods, and 80 percent of the victims are young black males. Many are high school dropouts and unemployed. Eighty percent had an arrest record; more than half of them are under twenty-nine, and close to 80 percent of the murderers knew their victims. After talking to young men who fit the profile, we learned that they want to get out of the life. We go to those young men doing violence and we literally sit them down and say, “We value you, we love you. Put down the gun and we can help you. If you don’t, we will take action to protect the city.”