Business owners in New Orleans are fed up with the rise in crime in the city, thanks to incompetent government officials.
New Orleans’ murder rate is on track to hit 74.12 murders per 100,000 population this year, a mark that would put the city among the highest in the world and the highest New Orleans has ever recorded since 1994.
“I think there is a lot of people that have worked in the French Quarter and loved to work in the French Quarter, but they just don’t feel safe coming down here anymore,” Christian Pendleton of the Louisiana Restaurant Association told WWLTV.
“They don’t feel safe, leaving work at night and having to walk to their cars because of the lack of police presence in the French Quarter and knowing nothing is happening to criminals when they’re found, they’re getting the proverbial detention slip,” he added.
Murders began surging in the city in 2020, jumping to 201 from 119 in 2019. That number rose again in 2021 to 218, an 83 percent increase over 2019’s number.
“It’s definitely affected our lives down here because you don’t want to walk alone,” French Quarter resident Lucy Burnett told the station. “I don’t go out alone, and I certainly don’t go out at night. I’m starting to worry about it in the daytime.”
New Orleans has been hit particularly hard by a violent crime surge, with experts pinning the blame for the rise on pandemic-related restrictions and protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020 that fueled the defund the police movement.
Similarly, small businesses and corporations in Chicago are also leaving the Windy City due to surging crime.
“We would do thousands of jobs a year in the city, but as we got robbed more, my people operating rollers and pavers we got robbed, our equipment would get stolen in broad daylight and there would usually be a gun involved, and it got expensive and it got dangerous,” said Gary Rabine, owner of 13 businesses in Chicago.
Billionaire Ken Griffin also announced last month that he is moving his hedge-fund firm Citadel out of the city, citing crime as a major concern over the past few months.
“If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” Griffin told the Wall Street Journal. “I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from.”
