National guard troops to patrol New Orleans

The governor did not specify how many troops and officers she planned to deploy. Yesterday, Mayor Ray Nagin asked for as many as 300 National Guardsmen and 60 state police officers.

It was the first time the National Guard has been used for law enforcement in the US since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Nagin had sought the troops after five teenagers in a sport utility vehicle were shot and killed in the city’s deadliest attack in at least 11 years. Police said the attack was apparently motivated by drugs or revenge. Also, a man was stabbed to death on Sunday night in an argument over beer.

“Today is a day when New Orleanians are stepping up. We’ve had enough,” Nagin said. “This is our line in the sand. We’re saying we’re not going any further.”

Nagin said he would not allow criminals to take over when the city was still trying to recover from the hurricane. The mayor said troops should be posted in heavily flooded neighbourhoods to free police to concentrate on hot spots elsewhere.

Community leaders have raised fears that the violence could discourage people from moving back to New Orleans.

The National Guard had as many as 15,000 soldiers in the city in the weeks after Katrina. As many as 2,000 stayed until February, said Louisiana National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Pete Schneider.

Blanco said plans were being crafted last week to step up anti-crime efforts, but the weekend killings forced authorities to move faster. She said she was talking with New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley about his exact needs.

Riley welcomed the support because the ranks of his department were depleted. The police force has about 1,375 officers now, compared with about 1,750 officers before Katrina. The population of 465,000 has rebounded to about half its size before the storm.

The governor urged the mayor to put a juvenile curfew in place. New Orleans has a curfew for juveniles, but Riley said it was not being enforced because there was no place to put young offenders.

Blanco offered two warnings: “First, to parents, keep your teenagers off the streets and out of trouble. Second, to judges, I am urging you to keep hardened criminals where they belong – in jail and off the streets. We must protect our citizens.”

Nagin’s request for help had been backed by the City Council.

“If we don’t have wind knocking us down, we have shooters knocking us down, and that’s unacceptable,” said City Council President Oliver Thomas.

Reaction to the mayor’s request was mixed.

“As we tell people to come home, we have to keep these areas safe,” said LaToya Cantrell, president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, a heavily flooded neighbourhood. “It’s long overdue. Neighbourhoods should not have been left alone to begin with. Pulling out was a mistake.”

But Sherman Copelin, president of the New Orleans East Business Association, cautioned that handing over some neighbourhoods to troops unfamiliar with those areas could be a mistake, saying officials should not “let someone come in and be a housekeeper.”

The killings over the weekend brought this year’s murder toll to 53, raising fears that violence was back on the rise in a city that was plagued by violent crime before Katrina drove out much of the population last year.

Crime has been creeping back into the city: 17 killings in the first three months of 2006, and 36 since the start of April.

At least three other people, ages 16 to 27, have been fatally shot in the same area where the five teenagers were killed early on Saturday.

In addition to Nagin’s request for troops and state police, the City Council said it would consider increasing overtime for police to put more officers on the street. It also called for a “crime summit” within two weeks.