He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing, and reported the following:Murder in New Orleans explores the collision of violence, race, and criminal justice in the South’s largest city from 1920 to 1945. It analyzes changing patterns of violence and policing, charting the impact of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, racial segregation, Jim Crow, and World War II. In the wake of World War I, New Orleans experienced a series of counter-intuitive trends in crime and punishment that combined to generate mushrooming racial disparities in law enforcement and criminal justice, eerily presaging late twentieth-century developments in policing, incarceration, and race relations. Deadly violence soared during the 1920s, when the economy boomed, and, surprisingly, homicide plunged during the Great Depression, even as the economy collapsed and poverty increased. Rapidly changing trends in gun violence, spouse killing, and street life played particularly important roles in shifting levels of murder. For African American New Orleanians, policing became more aggressive and punishment more draconian precisely when crime decreased. Deteriorating race relations shaped this process, and the city’s African American community went from being under-policed to being over-policed, in inverse proportion to rates of criminal violence. At the start of the era, African American murder skyrocketed, but policemen, prosecutors, and jurors routinely ignored this violence; local courts convicted white homicide suspects more frequently than African Americans, and police brutality mainly targeted white suspects. By the 1930s, the patterns had reversed. African American violence plummeted, yet horrific racial disparities developed, with African American New Orleanians far more often beaten and killed by the police, convicted at higher rates, and incarcerated for longer terms. In New Orleans, the roots of the modern carceral state began to emerge during the 1920s and 1930s, when trends in law enforcement and punishment bore scant connection to patterns of crime.Learn more about Murder in New Orleans at the University of Chicago Press website.
Page 99 explores a crucial component of the argument in Murder in New Orleans, explaining why African American violence plummeted during the 1930s, despite worsening poverty and deteriorating race relations in the city. This portion of the book focuses on the social pressures that reduced African American gun violence.
The larger argument in Murder in New Orleans, however, connects this decrease in lethal violence to larger trends in law enforcement. Precisely as the African American homicide rate plunged, local officials and white commentators insisted that African American New Orleanians posed a growing threat to the safety of white residents and to social order in the city. As a result, municipal policemen became increasingly aggressive and violent toward African Americans. Police shootings surged; coercive interrogations became more commonplace, race-based mass arrests emerged in a core response to robberies and burglaries in the city. Racial disparities in prosecutions, convictions, and executions ballooned as well. Ironically, Jim Crow criminal justice emerged at the same time that African American crime dropped precipitously. Crime and punishment in interwar New Orleans shifted in opposite, counter-intuitive ways, redefining the relationship between race and the law in the city and presaging the age of mass incarceration.
--Marshal Zeringue
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