J effrey S. A dler . Murder in New Orleans

Jeffrey S. Adler’s Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing brilliantly interweaves the story of the sharp rise and paradoxical decline of lethal violence in the Crescent City between 1920 and 1945, with an equally gripping account of how the interwar period marked a critical juncture in the history of crime and punishment in urban America. Across six meticulously researched, statistically detailed, and beautifully crafted chapters, Adler charts the upsurge and etiology of lethal violence in New Orleans during the early 1920s; details the demographic, topographical, and political forces contributing to the decline of homicide rates in the Depression years; and then explains why the plunge in violent crime failed to prevent the ensuing militarization of the police during the 1930s. In the book’s first three chapters, Adler examines the homicide explosion that gripped New Orleans during the early 1920s. Shockingly, “New Orleanians slaughtered one another twice as frequently as Chicagoans during the height of Al Capone’s power, and the city had more homicides than the combined totals of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont” (9). Between 1920 and 1925, New Orleans’s homicide rate swelled by 139.5 percent, an increase substantially higher than the cities of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Saint Louis. In accounting for the soaring rates of lethal violence, Adler points to the rise in rural migration to the city, the blurred lines between private and public in an urban center with a limited housing supply, and a criminal justice system indifferent to violence. In his profile of several murder cases, Adler paints a portrait of a criminal justice system comprised of law enforcement officials who halfheartedly investigate crimes, district attorneys and prosecutors who routinely dropped charges against violent offenders, and juries beholden to popular conceptions of justice that dissuaded them from convicting defendants, including those who admitted their crimes.

Archaeology · Criminology · Economic history · Great Depression · Homicide · Medical emergency · Militarization · Poison control · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suicide prevention · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medicine · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies