Mayor Mitch Landrieu said a couple of weeks ago that the city could handle two issues at once, in response to opponents of his plan to remove four historical monuments from the public square instead of focusing on reducing crime.

It turns out, the city can’t apparently walk and chew gum at the same time, as indicated by Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

While the local media and the Landrieu administration continued their narrative that the months-long monuments debacle had absolutely zero impact on crime, analysis conducted by Jeff Asher, the city’s leading crime analyst paints another picture.

Since 2013, armed robberies and carjackings in New Orleans have skyrocketed and will see a 200 percent increase by the end of the year, with just a week left to go.

Not to mention, there were more carjackings in 2015 than there were in 2013 and 2014 combined. Just in this month of December, there have been 68 armed robberies in the city. This puts it on track to follow with the past few months which all saw over 90 armed robberies each.

The most alarming carjacking this year occurred when a man was in his pickup truck in the Lakeview neighborhood, an area that is known for being one of the safest in the area.

The man was pistol whipped and dragged out of his car, while a few carjackers stole his vehicle. While the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) continued to tell residents that crime was down in their area, they were forced to form their own community meetings about crime and continue paying for their own private patrol for the neighborhood.

And just this weekend, more armed robberies and more carjackings took place across the city. Two carjackings occurred in the Lower Ninth Ward and on Piety Street, while two armed robberies happened in the Algiers area and New Orleans East.

During the monuments debate, which the Hayride covered extensively in a series of exclusive reports, the New Orleans Gambit claimed that we were inflating the issue that monuments were taking precedent over crime.

The Gambit wrote an entire piece dedicated to defending Landrieu in the sense that the city could tackle monuments and crime at the same time.

At the time, the Hayride joked that Landrieu’s press conferences on particular crimes apparently solve the actual crimes, as the Gambit cited that the Mayor had held a lot of press conferences dedicated to crime. Still, with all the press conferences, violent crime has continued to soar in the city, as it did last year.