If you watched CNN this past weekend, you may have caught the presentation of a special “Behind the Scenes” documentary with Soledad O’Brien titled “One Crime at a Time” that dealt with crime in New Orleans. Broken up into two parts, the show aired on Saturday and Sunday at 8:00 PM eastern time. I wasn’t able to watch the first half of it but I did catch the half that aired on Sunday night.

CNN’s “One Crime at a Time” is indeed timely. The second and final segment of this documentary aired the day before CQ Press released the 2008 edition of “City Crime Rankings,” an annual report on crime statistics in America’s cities. While statistics listed on the website of the New Orleans Police Department show declines in some categories of violent crimes in 2008 compared to corresponding statistics from 2007 and “One Crime at a Time” reported that New Orleans has had 25 fewer murders this year than there were by late November last year, CQ Press still ranked the City of New Orleans as the most crime ridden city in the United States.

According to an article posted on CNN’s website about the rankings published by CQ Press, 209 murders occurred in New Orleans in 2007. Let’s put this disturbing statistic in perspective. According to www.icasualties.org, a politically independent website that keeps track of US and coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of people murdered in New Orleans in 2007 is only nine fewer than the number of American hostile military deaths in Iraq so far this year. It is significantly greater than the number of American deaths in Afghanistan in any single year since the beginning of America’s presence in that country.

The second segment of “One Crime at a Time” began with the following conversation between Soledad O’Brien and New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley. O’Brien asked, “Can you arrest and prosecute your way out of this?” “Absolutely, positively not. No way. No way,” replied Chief Riley. After being asked by O’Brien what he proposed might be the solution for the debilitating crime problem in New Orleans, Riley replied that “the solution is to make a better, better educated, better employed, more wholesome, more vibrant community. You do it through education. You do it through economics. You do it through job opportunities. Knowledge is just power.”

In “One Crime at a Time,” CNN reported that in New Orleans “about 40 percent of homicide suspects arrested walk free without ever being charged.” In an online article written by Soledad O’Brien about the show, she reported that “after Katrina hit in August 2005, thousands of accused felons in New Orleans walked out of jail because the D.A.’s office failed to charge them before their legally mandated release dates.” We’d all like to believe that things are slowly but surely beginning to turn around in New Orleans. So far, most gains have been modest but if you didn’t see “One Crime at a Time” and you either read the transcript or you are lucky enough to catch an encore presentation, you will also find that “behind the scenes” there are small groups of dedicated, civic minded attorneys who have literally made it their mission in life to make New Orleans a safer city. In the meantime, we teachers might consider taking stock in the words of Police Chief Riley.

The ultimate goal of the Teaching the Levees curriculum and one of the underlying principles of the Social Studies program at Teachers College is to promote good citizenship and civic involvement through the teaching of events like Hurricane Katrina. Thus, Chief Riley has hit a bulls-eye in asserting that despite New Orleans’ very real problems, “the solution is to make a better, better educated, better employed, more wholesome, more vibrant community. You do it through education. You do it through economics. You do it through job opportunities. Knowledge is just power.”

The idea is that students who are trained to become good citizens are likely to be successful in promoting these things. Assuming Riley is correct then we’re at least on the right track. If saving New Orleans “one crime at a time” is unsuccessful then maybe saving New Orleans one classroom at a time might be a more viable option.

The world recently witnessed the decisive and historic election of the first African American to the Presidency of the United States. Following the election, teachers and professors across the country spent the second half of the election week devoting class time to discussing the events of November 4th and the important implications of America’s choice of Barack Obama to be the next President. Here at Teachers College my classes were no exception to this likely norm.

In a class I’m currently taking about the history of segregation in schools in the United States, our discussion of the election results turned to an Op-Ed written by Thomas Friedman and published in the New York Times on the day after the election. In it, Friedman exhibits a legitimate and shared sense of excitement at the results of the election and asserts that with the choice of the first African American to be President the Civil War has finally come to an end. Despite his acknowledgement that “the struggle for equal rights is far from over” and his effective concluding statement calling to “let reconstruction begin,” a number of my classmates agreed that in comparing the choice of Barack Obama for President to the end of the Civil War it might be all too easy for the casual reader to underestimate or forget about the amount of work that is left to be done on the civil rights front in this country.

Just as the vast majority of Americans probably know that the Union won the Civil War, almost any American historian would point out that the states of the former Confederacy had the final say in the political battles that took place during the period of time we now refer to as Reconstruction. Unfortunately, today this era is commonly defined by the wholesale retreat of the United States government from an agenda that advocated civil rights for African Americans. Indeed, it would be roughly another century before America embraced any true sense of racial equality.

Before the election, President-Elect Obama’s campaign website offered a specific plan to rebuild the Gulf Coast. The plan stated that “fewer than half” of the schools in New Orleans reopened this September, “only one of the seven major hospitals in New Orleans is operating at pre-hurricane level,” and “the city’s homeless population is approximately double what it was before the hurricane.” If the Civil War is truly and finally over then the call for reconstruction, both literal and metaphorical, couldn’t come at a more appropriate time.

It just so happened that my Grandmother was visiting my parents in Upstate New York when Katrina hit New Orleans and the surrounding areas. While I myself have never lived in or around New Orleans, my Grandparents lived in a suburb of the Big Easy for decades and numerous other family members have called Gulfport, Mississippi their home for decades as well. My Grandmother moved to Gulfport after my Grandfather passed away in 2000 and to this day I shudder to think of what I might be writing about in my first post here had she been at home in that last week of August 2005.

After the skies cleared over the Gulf Coast and the water finally receded from places like the Ninth Ward, more than 1000 people lay dead and others were never found. Among the survivors were thousands of people who returned to their homes to survey the damage. Others, however, returned home simply to find that, for all intents and purposes at least, their homes no longer existed. My Grandmother was one of these people.

Today it is widely known and agreed upon that the response of the federal government to Hurricane Katrina could be described as lethargic at best. Except to gather the few belongings and memories that were not ruined by the flood, my Grandmother did not return to the Gulf Coast. People were still living in FEMA trailers when President Bush failed to mention New Orleans in his 2007 State of the Union Address almost a year and a half after the hurricane hit land.

Within days of this posting, Americans will cast their votes and decide which presidential ticket should lead America for at least the next four years. While I certainly don’t intend to divulge who I will vote for on November fourth, it seems fitting and appropriate that America choose the candidate who is most in touch with the needs of the American people; the candidate with an inclusive mindset, foresight and fresh perspectives who will be able to provide the kind of steady, even keeled and decisive leadership that will not only prevent another Katrina but will also best guide America through the current economic situation and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Election Day, vote for the candidate who you think best represents the vision of America as a land of equal opportunity for all people, vote for the candidate who you think best understands Americans in the Ninth Ward as well as in the suburbs, vote for the candidate who you think might have done the better job handling the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the levees but most of all, VOTE.