After welcoming New Orleans evacuees, Houston copes with spike in crime

Sylvia Moreno:

The southwestern corner of this city is one sprawling low-rise apartment complex after the next, a once-hot real estate area that died with the 1980s oil bust only to be reborn in the '90s as a low-income, high-crime neighborhood. Now it's Katrina turf.

New Tony's Express, a neighborhood convenience store, is sold out of T-shirts and caps stenciled with the numbers 504, 985 and 337 — the area codes for New Orleans and southern Louisiana. The emergency room of West Houston Medical Center is so busy treating Hurricane Katrina evacuees the staff jokingly calls itself "Charity West," a reference to New Orleans' venerable Charity Hospital.

And now, police say that southwestern Houston, long recognized as a problem area, is facing another manifestation of the Louisiana exodus: crime.

Since Sept. 1, when an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Louisianans resettled in Houston after Hurricane Katrina, evacuees are believed to have been involved in 26 slayings, or nearly 17 percent of all homicides. The cases, according to Houston police, involved 34 evacuees — 19 of them victims and 15 of them suspects.

Late last month, investigators in the Houston Police Department's Gang Murder Squad announced the arrests of eight of 11 suspects believed to be linked to nine homicides on the city's southwest side and two others in nearby Pasadena, Texas. The slayings occurred since November, and all the suspects are displaced New Orleanians who landed in Houston after the hurricane.

"We did not initiate this effort with the intention of singling out New Orleans or Louisiana people," said Lt. Robert Manza, a police department spokesman. "It just so happens that every single one we arrested and three we're looking for are New Orleans residents.

"The message is clear: We're going to relocate these men from apartments in Houston to a prison in Texas. That's going to be their next home."

An increase in violent crime since Sept. 1 and a spate of homicides over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend involving Katrina evacuees have elicited urgent pleas from Mayor Bill White and Police Chief Harold Hurtt to the federal government to help pay the cost of providing increased security and hiring more officers. Hurtt is taking the request to Washington next week as part of a meeting of police chiefs. White is also in negotiations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Both officials are careful not to blame Houston's recent rise in violent crime solely on Katrina evacuees, saying such statistics were rising last year before the hurricane. They point to what they call the majority of law-abiding Louisianans now living in the city and say the crime rate per thousand for the evacuee population is not greater than it was among Houstonians before the influx of Katrina evacuees.

But the issue facing the city, officials said, is that Houston's population of 2 million grew by about 10 percent virtually overnight, straining all key city services such as schools, hospitals, emergency services and public safety. The addition of the evacuee population has reduced the ratio of police officers per thousand Houstonians to 1.9, compared with 2.3 before Katrina and with the national average of 2.8.

"We should not be penalized for opening up our city to folks who lost their homes," Hurtt said last week. "We are just trying to help them get back to normal as soon as possible."

Late last month, the police announced two initiatives targeting three "hot spots" in the city made up largely of apartment complexes, many of them with concentrations of Katrina evacuees. The Gang Murder Squad was created, and the 4,800-member police force, depleted by about 700 retirements in recent years, started overtime programs to increase plainclothes and undercover patrols, conduct warrant sweeps and respond more quickly to calls for service. In the first 19 days of this year, a new Neighborhood Enforcement Team Taskforce had responded to calls involving complaints by 110 Katrina evacuees. Of the suspects apprehended, 229 were evacuees, police said.

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