While New Orleans has been preoccupied with other things, the city has had a surge of crime. The city has even become more violent than Chicago. There has been the perception that New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu simply isn’t interested in the crime problem.

Meanwhile, the people of New Orleans are demanding answers. The Metropolitan Crime Commission is laying the blame for the crime surge on one person, Mitch Landrieu.

From Nola.com:

Despite working more collaboratively and efficiently, New Orleans’ police and prosecutors are making little headway against a rising tide of felony-grade violence because of city government decisions that have hobbled their performance and endangered the community, the Metropolitan Crime Commission said in a new report released Monday (May 22).

“Police and prosecutors are applying their resources more efficiently and effectively, but community safety has not improved,” the non-profit watchdog organization said in its 2017 Orleans Parish criminal justice system accountability report. “The critical shortage of NOPD officers has not improved over the past four years. … The department lacks the manpower to timely respond to calls for service and adequately address the high rate of crime.”

The MCC report traces New Orleans’ current crime predicament back to the desk of Mayor Mitch Landrieu, first elected in February 2010. Landrieu’s two-year police hiring freeze, along with timid recruitment efforts in the two years that followed, allowed the department’s manpower to wither by 25 percent, from 1,546 officers in 2009 to 1,165 at the end of 2016.

[..]One of the most startling statistics in the MCC report is that the number of arrests made by the NOPD plummeted 44 percent between 2013 and 2016, as the effects of the department’s manpower shortage and the federal consent decree became more pronounced. In the same sample period, the percentage of arrests made for serious felony allegations climbed from 19 percent in 2013 to 28 percent last year.

The latest carnage in New Orleans is the discovery of a dead man stuffed in a trash can. The man has yet to be identified.

While New Orleans continues to degrade, the city continues to focus on the real priorities: making sure Confederate monuments are “properly displayed.” In the meantime, the city of New Orleans to get more and violent. The evidence is clear, that too is one of Mitch Landrieu’s “accomplishments.”