Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

The Setting
The Vieux Carré is the centerpiece of New Orleans’s tourism. The Quarter, or
Quarters as it is locally referred to, is a collection of mostly eighteenth and nine-
teenth century West Indian Creole, Spanish, and Victorian influenced architecture.
It combines a residential area, which has undergone many ethnic and cultural tran-
sitions, with a high concentration of historic sites (notably, Jackson Square with
the St. Louis Cathedral and the Pontabla Apartments), art galleries (Royal St.),
restaurants (everywhere), and bars and adult entertainment (Bourbon St.).
On the one hand, locals seem to view tourists with a tolerant ambivalence. On
the other hand, tourists are recognized as a crucial asset to the economy of the city
and are accorded gracious and hospitable treatment. At the level of street culture,
however, preying on and ripping off tourists in a variety of ways including robbery
is seen as a way of “getting over” (outsmarting the naïve out-of-towner). These
activities can include everything from tap dancing and miming to various hustles
and con games (e.g., “I betcha I can tell you where you got dem shoes”), theft of
uncontrolled property, “breaking” cars, grabbing chains and purses, pickpocket-
ing, and armed robbery. Tourists are viewed as legitimate targets and are vulnera-
ble. They behave with great naïveté in their search for authentic out of the way,
backstage experiences, people, and things.
Findings
For purposes of the study I combined armed robbery (taking anything of value
from a person by use of force or intimidation while armed with a dangerous
weapon) and simple robbery (not armed with a dangerous weapon) and refer to the
combined crime as street robbery. Street robberies of tourists or other visitors to
the city from outside of the state of Louisiana for the years 2001 (N = 377) and
2002 (N = 175) gathered from police reports form the empirical basis of the study.
(Following the events of September 11, 2001, the number of tourism and conven-
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tion visitors to the city dropped dramatically during the remainder of that year and
did not begin to recover until the winter of 2003–2004.)
For the 552 cases there were 979 perpetrators; meaning it was not uncommon
for the victim to be outnumbered in the robbery event. The most common robbery
event (84%) involved a single male as a victim. In the small number of robberies
where females were listed as the victim (first named in the incident report) only
2% were women alone; all the others were accompanied by a male companion.
Racial differences in victimization essentially modeled the racial composition of
tourist and convention visitors to the city with 86% being identified by the police
as white. Four hundred thirty (86%) of the incidents involved white victims. All
victims were over 19 years of age and under 60, with 47% in the 25–35 age group.
Table 1 provides data on the origin of tourist victims.
Offenders, as described by victims, were 100% male (with 27 incidents involv-
ing female accomplices). In 80% of the incidents the perpetrators were described
as black with the most common pattern being two black males (46%) followed by
28% of the incidents with a single black male perpetrator (this percentage is con-
sistent with the racial composition of the city). All offenders were described as
being young (16 to 30 years of age) with 2% described as maybe in their late 50s
or early 60s. In 94% of the cases, some type of weapon was present, with 58% of
the incidents involving handguns. The second most common category of weapons
was a knife, box cutter, razor, or sharpened screwdriver (22%).
The map shown in Figure 1 identifies the location of the robberies in this study.
Seventy percent of the robberies occurred in perimeter locations such as North
Rampart Street and beyond. Police have focused on this area with what they infor-
mally refer to as border patrol. As one police informant described it, “I look for
people who don’t ‘fit’; I stop them, the would-be perpetrator often runs away and
I warn the out-of-towner that they are in a dangerous area and should return to the
French Quarter” (Nolan, 2004).
The robberies that occurred within the bounds of the French Quarter also tended
to be on the perimeter and in areas with dim lighting, low pedestrian density, and
no apparent police presence. These areas are perhaps attractive as robbery venues
because of easy proximity to the crowds of Canal Street and the anonymity it
affords as well as easy egress to the nearby public housing projects, the Treme, or
The Tourist and His Criminal: Patterns in Street Robbery 
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