by Sam Winston

Over the past couple days, the mainstream media has picked up on the story of New Orleans as the nation’s murder capital for a second year in a row, as noted here a few weeks ago. The Times Picayune ran this story in addition to the Associated Press running a similar piece accompanied by video.

They site the number of murders given by the New Orleans Police Department, which is 209. However, the number of murders in New Orleans is actually around 219. NOPD doesn’t include “justifiable homicides” in their total. The Orleans Parish Coroner’s office does.

This from the police department that a year ago delayed releasing statistics for dubious reasons, then brazenly boasted about homicide totals as the lowest in 30 years without regarding their meaning in terms of murder rate, which was the highest in the nation.

As documented by Allen Johnson of Gambit Weekly recently, the department then flip-flopped to disregard homicide totals and focus on a diced up murder rate for only a certain part of the year to brag about some sort of decrease this year.

The continuation of childish number games by NOPD are troubling to say the least. Give the people some credit and tell it to them like it is. That goes for media that take the 209 number on good faith as well.