One of the most pressing issues for families in New Orleans today is the recent escalation of violent crime. Since the new year began, the city's residents have witnessed 15 murders, only one of which has been tentatively "solved" (i.e., a suspect identified). Perhaps the most shocking of these, to many members of the community, involved a home invasion and the slaying of a young mother, and attempted slaying of her husband, before their two-year-old son. What, you may ask, is the nature of the problem? The answer, if there is one, is painfully complex.

Crime in New Orleans has long been an issue. And this issue has been inextricably linked to issues of race and class. In the 60's and 70's, desegregation led many families to flee the city and, as is fashionable in this country, take up residence in the suburbs. The most fearful of these did not settle for the environs of New Orleans, but crossed the lake and sought refuge in the consolingly white and overwhelmingly Republican enclaves of Covington and Mandeville. The majority of those who were left were African-American. A minority of whites also remained—many of whom were upper-middle class and wealthy (and, therefore, somewhat insulated), along with a contingent of liberals who, in the 80's and 90's, reclaimed and renovated a number of crime-ridden (mixed or poor) neighborhoods successfully. Unfortunately, in New Orleans, as elsewhere, the price of gentrification is often that many poorer residents are displaced or, if they are not, the relatively more privileged individuals who find a gem in a former "hood" are frequently subject to the resentment and, at times, violence that is bred by poverty and discrimination.

I moved to New Orleans in 1999. While I was warned, upon arrival, of the unpredictable and widespread crime, none of it touched me and I wasn't afraid. Initially, I rented an apartment in the city's lovely and historic uptown. Later I lived Bayou St. John, another architecturally distinguished but recently revived neighborhood, in which I continued to live a life unaffected by crime. It was not until I met my current husband, Chris and we decided to purchase a home in the Faubourg-Marigny, a traditionally French neighborhood, with a bohemian flair, that I became suddenly and dramatically cognizant of the persistent discontent of New Orleans' underclass.

Although we were never directly threatened, crime was all around us. In the first year after we moved there, there was a spike in burglary, armed robbery, assault and murder. It was the summer of 2002, and word on the street was that, come summer time, in much of New Orleans, idle black teenagers, the product of poor parenting and a notoriously bad school system, had nothing better to do. Most of the local bars were hit as were many individuals on foot in the neighborhood, at all hours of the day and night. At one point, a jogger was shot at 7 a.m. on an adjacent street (who mugs a jogger?). In themselves, these events were disconcerting to me. What made the issue of neighborhood crime yet more critical—what pushed it beyond the realm of rational consideration—was that I was pregnant. Suddenly, all of the interesting challenges of living in a "transitional" and bohemian neighborhood seemed menacing to me. As the full-time custodian of an incipient new life form, taking a walk or even stepping out of my front door, I felt vulnerable; every strange or eccentric character (and, in the Marigny there is no dearth of strange and eccentric characters) triggered a wave of anxiety, every drunk passed out on a street corner triggered disgust, and, most notably, every black male youth or adult I happened to pass (or worse, who happened to be walking behind me) triggered fear.

My misgivings persisted in the year after Dylan was born, though the crime wave did, to a degree, subside. I was never fully comfortable pushing Dylan's stroller through the streets of my neighborhood, though I knew and still know of other families--urban pioneers, artists or later day hippies--who live there with an admirable determination to make urban living viable for people with children. Try as I might, I could not muster my peace of mind. I resented having to look up and down the street before leaving my front door with my baby to walk to my car. I lay awake at night listening to the noise in the street, which was sometimes jarring, wondering what I would do, where I would hide, were my home to be burglarized. And I did not answer the door to strangers. If Chris was at home, I would alert him to the knock at the door. If Chris was not at home, I would simply ignore it. Perhaps, had we been a couple without a child, with the ability to enjoy the attractions of the neighborhood—its bars and restaurants, its venues for late night music—I could have endured. As a new mother, however, who rarely went out after dark and whose primary responsibility at home was to my child, it was not a life that I enjoyed.

And so I began to push for a move. Not to the suburbs, exactly (though the idea had become more palatable to me than it had ever been previously), but to Algiers Point, a neighborhood across the river from the French Quarter. It was also historic and distinct, but offered yards and lush vegetation and the comforting abundance of "normal" people. Family people. People who walked dogs or jogged or pushed strollers, even in the evening, with apparent ease. People who sat out on front porches in the morning with coffee or in the evening with a glass of wine, and greeted passers-by. It was, in a word, a "friendly" neighborhood. A neighborhood in which I would not, I felt, fear the outside world. It was also a largely white neighborhood, though it housed a certain number of middle and lower income blacks and abutted blacker and poorer neighborhoods. I realized that this fact fed my decision but did know how better to negotiate the knot of race and class and its relationship to one's quality of life than to attempt to distance myself from it.

The rest of my story is unimportant here. We found a house that Chris was able to renovate and sold our home in the Marigny. We moved in the spring of 2005. I felt relieved when, after Katrina, the neighborhood did not flood and suffered only wind damage. I felt further relieved when services were returned to us early in the fall. Finally, I have felt an uncomfortable mixture of relief, nausea and profound sadness through the recent crime wave, with the knowledge that the aforementioned home invasion, which marked the sixth murder of fifteen in the first three weeks of 2007, took place one block from our former home.

Helen Hill was a documentary filmmaker, a Harvard graduate and an avid grassroots activist, passionately engaged in the city's recovery. Paul Gailiunas was a family doctor who treated a largely black and poor clientele on a sliding scale basis in his privately owned clinic. Francis was the baby boy with whom they returned to the city after Katrina to help to rebuild. Because their home in Bayou St. John had flooded, Hill and Gailiunas chose to rent a house in the Marigny. According to friends, Gailiunas had multiple reservations, both about returning to the city and moving to the Marigny, which, according to reports, was especially volatile after the storm.

On the morning of January 4th, the couple's home was invaded by an armed intruder, who, speculation has it, had attempted, unsuccessfully to break into a room at a nearby bed and breakfast. According to Gailiunas, the intruder came in through the back door, which may have been open (Gailiunas suggested that Hill might have been in the back yard with the family's pet, a pot-bellied pig). Gailiunas awoke to the sound of his wife's distressed voice and found her struggling with the intruder who then shot her in the neck and pursued Gailiunas, who held his son in his arms, into the bathroom where the intruder shot him three times—twice in the arm and once through his hand. The intruder then fled, taking nothing from their home. Miraculously, both Gailiunas and his son, Francis survived (though Gailiunas suffered permanent nerve damage to his hand).

The murder reverberated throughout the community. The day after it was reported, everyone I knew, but most particularly those friends of mine who are parents, struggled with the crime's shocking brutality. It was too close to home. Moroever, many of our friends knew (and universally loved) Hill and Gailiunas. In the week following the crime, the Marigny neighborhood association organized a grassroots march on City Hall to demand a halt to the wave of violence which drew some 3000 participants and in which nearly every neighborhood in the city was represented.

There has been much speculation about the murder, and about the NOPD's failure to apprehend the perpetrator or account for the crime. But no one really has an answer for why it occurred. What is clear about New Orleans today:

1) The NOPD, which complains that no witnesses are willing to come forward, is widely mistrusted; seven police officers were recently indicted on murder charges for the Danziger Bridge Incident, an alleged shooting of innocent citizens in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. All seven were returned to work by Chief of Police, Warren Riley.

2)The District Attorney's fails to convict murderers (only 7% of those apprehended for murder are ever convicted).

3) Many people, many of whom are African-American, have returned to New Orleans to nothing—no home (or a home that was destroyed and uninsured), scant and unreliable city services, a school system in shambles, a health system in shambles. In short, it's not an easy place in which to live.

4) The drug trafficking that was always an issue in this city is perhaps more so, post-Katrina since the city's traditional neighborhood turfs and hierarchies have been disrupted, and the influx of a large number of out-of-state laborers, often working for cash, has created a new market for drugs and prostitution.

5) In his State of the Union Address, the President of the United States acknowledged the inventor of Baby Einstein videos, but failed to address the dire situation in New Orleans and the entire Gulf region.

This past week, I sat and read, tearfully, an editorial in the Times Picayune by Gailiunas himself, who had this to say to me and my fellow New Orleanians: "I am begging you to reach out to your neighbors, across the borders of race and class, and help them when they need you. Don't stand by while people hurt each other. There has been an outcry against violence in New Orleans since Helen's death. Please do not stop until things improve…No one is going to fix New Orleans for you. You need to do it for yourselves. Please do these things now, for yourselves and for my poor, sweet wife. I know this is what she would want."

Reading this, I felt mixed emotions. Of course, I want to help, for Helen's sake, for all of our sakes. But I'm not sure what else I can do to help my neighbors, other than participate, as I did, in such protests as the march on City Hall. I realize, too, that this is not just about New Orleans or a "New Orleans problem" but, rather, a national problem. One for which we are all, to some degree, responsible and in which we have all, to some degree, been complacent. What I can do is to write this and, in so doing, make others aware that we, in this beleaguered community on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, are struggling for our well-being, physical and mental: against corruption, against crime, and against incompetence, within an environment that, one and a half years later, remains largely crippled.