NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans averages about 200 murders each year, but the NOPD often struggles to solve the crimes.
Now, help is on the way from the federal government.
"On Monday, the 27th of September, the first team of Bureau of Justice Assistance experts will be in New Orleans and they will begin the process of looking at all of our practices and policies in investigating homicides," said NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas.
Serpas said he requested the assistance during a trip to Washington, D.C. over the summer.
The team, he said, will review about 200 NOPD cases to get a feel for local policies and practices, before comparing them to national best practices for investigating homicides.
"From that we will learn and make whatever adjustments are necessary or be able to celebrate if they find that we are at best practices," Serpas said.
Rafael Goyeneche with the Metropolitan Crime Commission applauds the move.
"You don't have to go out there and reinvent the wheel,” Goyeneche said. “A lot of the problems that we have here have been encountered in other jurisdictions and they've been corrected, and we can do that here, and we're finally reaching out and receiving some of that assistance. I think it's a step in the right direction."
Serpas said the Justice Department team will also work to identify some root causes of the city's murder rate.
Dr. John Penny, a criminologist at SUNO, said those answers are already well understood.
"Families, education, and degradation -- those things continue to be the things we focus on, in terms of when, where, how, and who's committing crimes," he said.
Penny hopes the team can help boost murder conviction rates here, but he believes the NOPD could also benefit from local resources.
"We have a criminal justice department at Southern University of New Orleans. We could well have given them lots of reasons why crimes are committed -- and still are willing to do that," Penny said. "We live here. We have a sense of what goes on in this city. We know what the educational system has been like. We know about family life. We know the economics. We know the social conditions that exist in this community and we could well speak to those things if given the opportunity."
Goyeneche said, historically, only about two in 10 violent crimes, including murder, result in successful prosecution. Serpas said both academic and investigative specialists will be coming down to help.
