Word: criminologist
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...Orleans was a disaster site before Katrina. So far that year, 202 people had been murdered. Computer models predicted that about 107 more were going to be killed before the year was out. "We were watching the lid come off," says Peter Scharf, a University of New Orleans criminologist. At that rate, not only would New Orleans have once again ranked as deadlier than New York City or Los Angeles, but it would also have been so much more violent that it really belonged in another country altogether. By the time Katrina hit, most law-enforcement types in the city...
...their old neighborhoods, they also lose something good. They lose reasons to do the right thing. "One of the things that keeps people straight is the fact that there are people who are important to them around. They don't want to embarrass themselves," says Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon. "As you disperse people into unfamiliar environments, without these people they care about, there is less control over them, and they could become more troublesome...
...first two months after the storm, there was relative peace--even in Houston, to which 150,000 people had fled. Evacuees were involved in just three murders in September and October, Houston police say. "Could this mean that hurricanes are actually good for crime?" wondered criminologist Scharf...
When I spoke to criminologist Blumstein about what happened in Houston after Katrina, he was not surprised to hear that evacuees were killing one another in a different place. "People who kill one another tend to be people who are like one another," he said. But he was intrigued to hear that the Houston police had noticed such a cultural difference. In that difference, he said, is hope. "Maybe there's a lesson here for how the New Orleans system ought to start shaping...
...dispute the total number of murders upon which the TIME analysis was based. And the increase in bloodshed is an ominous milestone for a city desperate to rebuild and make itself stronger than it was before. "Are we back to the good old days?" wonders Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the University of New Orleans. "Are all the things that made New Orleans embarrassing before the storm coming back...