Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing by Jeffrey S. Adler (review)

While historians attempt to explain the meteoric rise in incarceration after World War II, Jeffrey S. Adler invites us to consider a wider narrative. Adler’s work Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing investigates the collective actions of the criminal justice system in New Orleans and the interwar racial climate, while exploring many “complex and often counter-intuitive relationships between violence and reactions to violence and between crime and punishment” in the process (pp. 2–3). Adler’s focus on the years 1920–1945 allows the reader to consider numerous watershed moments in American history, such as the Great Migration, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II, and their effect on race, justice, and Jim Crow. New Orleans, while a violent southern city, provides much insight into other similar locales at the time, especially in the area of policing, politics, and economics. The disjuncture between crime rates, actual violence, and white perceptions of violence provides the paradox that is the major theme of the work. These white perceptions of crime fueled the development of a criminal justice system in New Orleans that continues to evolve in often tragic ways.

In the 1920s, custom and not law dictated the criminal justice system’s disregard for African American crime. As long as white New Orleanians perceived that black crime was neatly tucked away within racial boundaries, the criminal justice system ignored what it referred to as a “‘negro problem’” (p. 21). In many cases, where ample evidence existed of black guilt in a homicide, prosecutors refused to charge the accused. Releasing these individuals back to the street, along with the endemic inaction of the criminal justice system, left African Americans feeling helpless. Hence, it is no surprise that the rates of African American violence soared as black people increasingly turned to self-help. As time progressed, the cultural and social history of the United States might lead one to believe that violent crime and homicide skyrocketed in New Orleans. Instead, according to records Adler uncovers, it decreased. The economic downfall of the late 1920s and 1930s reduced crime in the Big Easy.

Unfortunately, these statistics did not matter to police and prosecutors. National-headline-making crimes, the increase in property crimes, and the rising anxiety of white people in New Orleans that the banditry would continue to grow among African Americans began the transformation of crime control into race control. Increased militarization of police, as well as the evolution of the brutal methods of confession extraction, combined with police officers seeing themselves as protectors of the white racial order. The growing importance placed on perception, fueled by race and anxiety as opposed to reality, signaled a law enforcement shift that continued well into the twentieth century and beyond.

The major strength of Adler’s work rests in the sources. He has succeeded in finding an urban area that had no dearth of crime and homicide statistics and records. Adler has reviewed a total of 2,118 homicide cases during the interwar period, and his primary source materials serve as a valuable foundation for any examination of criminal justice in New Orleans. He also expands his view beyond the courts, analyzing other diverse records such as coroners’ records and newspapers. Utilizing this fantastically cohesive body of primary sources, Adler helps explain the origins of the current incarceration crisis, which most assuredly rest in the interwar period.