If the link does not work, go to Google. But I would suggest reading a lengthy May 2006 article on violence and gangs in New Orleans that appeared in Time magazine. The Gangs of New Orleans - TIME
Let me try to expand a bit on an earlier post with these points:
1. Extreme violence in the city is not new. I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that in the late 1970's the city had an especially large class of individuals who were defined as "career criminals"--a felony arrest as an adult on five different occasions or a felony conviction as an adult on two different occasions. Note that this definition excluded those with lengthy juvenile records. And even then there were large numbers of juveniles who seemed to have no sense of morality and who were capable of committing the most violent crimes.
2. The city has long had a disproportionately large underclass both in terms of real numbers and percentage of the Orleans Parish population from which those committing violent crime come. This is NOT to say that most who are poor are violent criminals or criminals. In fact, I use the term "underclass" in both an economic and a cultural sense. But New Orleans has too many young men who are totally fatalistic, who believe they have no future, who place no value on education, and who place a high value on violence, excitement and living in the present. With that mindset, being a drug dealer looks like a good life option.
3. As reflected in the Time magazine article, the city's criminal justice infrastructure is very weak. The New Orleans police department is too small, is not properly trained, and has some history of corruption and brutality. And for several reasons--whether it be the reluctance of witnesses to cooperate, the quality of police investigations, the training and selection of prosecutors, the election of lax judges, and the willingness of jurors to convict--the city's criminal courts do not convict criminal defendants with nearly the same frequency as do courts elsewhere in the state.
A major factor, I think, is the relative absence of "social capital", which is basically trust in the community. It affects the ability of adjacent governing entities, city council members, neighborhood organizations, jurors, witnesses and judges to trust one another because of shared values and to engage in some level of cooperation. At some point, the importance of the bigger unit has to outweigh that of the tribe. Not so in New Orleans where it is still all about the tribe because only fellow members of the tribe can be trusted.