Project Safe Neighborhoods: Making a Difference in New Orleans

The following post was adapted from the remarks made by U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, Jim Letten, at the Project Safe Neighborhoods Annual Conference, being held this week in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2001, the Department of Justice launched Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). Project Safe Neighborhoods is a nationwide commitment to reduce gun and gang crime in America by networking existing local programs that target gun and violent crime and providing these programs with additional tools necessary to be successful. This past week, prosecutors, federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement officials, community leaders and advocates gathered for the PSN annual conference. It is fitting that the 2010 National Project Safe Neighborhood’s National Conference was held in the of New Orleans. Nowhere in this country is the daily bare-knuckled struggle for survival – of life and death and honest government versus corruption – played out more poignantly than it is here. Indeed, we are a city – a region – at the epicenter of intense, unique and extraordinary struggles.

• We struggle for economic and environmental survival in the face of an unprecedented environmental disaster and attendant challenges.
• We face an increasingly successful struggle against what had been endemic and systemic public corruption. That effort – led by federal enforcement – was characterized by one local newspaper as “an attack on corruption with ferocity unmatched in recent history.”
• We struggle to rebuild our infrastructure, economy, and institutions in the wake of our nation’s worst national disaster following Katrina.
• And, perhaps most importantly, we face a protracted daily struggles against the scourge of violent crime, the street - level drug trade, and the poverty, decay, corruption and hopelessness that fuels it.

But New Orleans is a great American city. It is a wonderful center of industry, commerce, and culture with people who never give up. Thanks to Project Safe Neighborhoods and the commitment of federal law enforcement and our state, local, and private sector partners, it is a place of great success stories as well.

• For example, there is an ongoing recovery effort to renew numerous damaged and displaced local criminal justice systems ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Just three years later, those institutions have received some $133 million in grants from the Bureau of Justice Assistance alone.
• The Office on Violence Against Women has planted a successful Family Justice Center in the heart of downtown, providing one-stop protection, legal, medical, social, and other services for victims of domestic violence.
• There is the beginning of a radical shift in how the public views corruption, crime, and quality of life in a never-before-seen, increasing intolerance for inept, wasteful government. In its place is an emerging appetite for transparent and accountable government and safe streets.
• We’ve also seen the historic reorganization and rebirth of the New Orleans Police Department under a new reform-minded superintendent, led by a new, energetic and innovative mayor, in a historic partnership with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

As we continue to grapple with the highest per capita homicide rate in the United States, we look to the enforcement, prevention, and re-entry strategy which Attorney General Eric Holder presented as the cornerstones of Project Safe Neighborhoods. By building both short - and long-term solutions for what has been for too long a debilitating crime problem, through partnerships, and with resources, we will build a New Orleans with a safe, promising future for all our citizens.