When crime stopped at zero!

The official murder rate in New Orleans had dropped to zero

Excerpt:

“This is one of the most interesting experiments in crime we’ve ever seen. Without effective courts, corrections, or rehabilitation, we have reduced the crime rate by 100 percent.”

New Orleans Crime Swept Away, With Most of the People

Excerpt:

But the bullets and the drugs and the fear are gone now, swept away by Hurricane Katrina, along with the dealers and gangs and most of the people.

There has not been a single killing in this violence-prone neighborhood, or anywhere else in New Orleans, since the chaos that immediately followed Hurricane Katrina subsided. New Orleans, the nation's most dangerous city, has suddenly become perhaps its safest, and what had easily been the country's murder capital now has a murder rate of exactly zero. Although several people were believed to have been killed in the disorder that followed the floods for several days, the last killing officially recorded by the police was on Aug. 27, two days before the hurricane hit. A bar owner was found shot to death that day in his establishment on Magazine Street.

And when the city was finally evacuated, the criminals left, too.

Since then some 60,000 to 80,000 residents have returned, a fraction of the city's previous population of 450,000. What is remarkable to criminologists, though, is how few criminals seem to be among them.

Comment: As a student of economics, I have read Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything . Freakonomics is a daily feature of the NYTimes and generally interesting. As tragic as Katrina was (This is the 2 year anniversary), there were some silver linings to those swirling storms! The crime rate dropped.