(Reuters) – Sylvia McKenzie has seen it all in her New Orleans neighborhood where she was once held up at gunpoint on her front step: Drug deals, shootings and even prostitution on a nearby street.
What she has not seen much of, she says, are police officers who she believes could clean up the area she has lived in for 40 years if they so chose but who face an uphill battle gaining residents’ trust after a series of missteps.
“Those streets have been bad for years and nothing has changed,” she said in her eastern New Orleans neighborhood, damaged in Hurricane Katrina, where she complained blighted homes and overgrown lots were inviting crime. “You’re taking a chance every time you come out your door.”
Like many New Orleans residents who doubted police involved in killing two civilians in the 2005 aftermath of Hurricane Katrina would ever be held accountable, McKenzie is heartened by guilty verdicts returned in the case earlier this month.
But relations between police and New Orleans residents, especially those in long-neglected crime-ridden neighborhoods, remain fraught, and the jury is still out on whether public confidence in the police will now improve.
