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Even though I had been writing about street crime for nearly a decade, nothing could have prepared me for the lawlessness I encountered when I first arrived in New Orleans in late July 2007. It was murder that brought me there in the first place; I moved to the city to begin working on a book about a troubled Iraq war veteran named Zackery Bowen, who returned to the French Quarter after a nine-month tour of duty to kill and dismember his girlfriend before leaping off the roof of the glitzy Omni Royal hotel. My decision to relocate was not popular among my friends and family members. Even one of my local sources, a friend of Bowen's, warned me, "It's going to be a trial by fire, man."

"Given the number of shootings, robberies, and murders, it's hard to say we are in control of New Orleans right now," admits one detective Summertime is always high crime season in New Orleans—released from school, the city's teenagers are hot and restless. Meanwhile, a scarcity of tourists stumbling down Bourbon Street puts service-economy workers in the criminals' crosshairs. The summer of 2007 promised to be worse than most. A rash of robberies had shaken the French Quarter that spring, many perpetrated by a sadistic mugger who prowled the neighborhood in his car looking for female marks, then beat them senseless and took their cash. My wife and I found an apartment in the lower French Quarter—the more residential end of the neighborhood, full of small restaurants, gay bars, and Creole cottages, and home to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Soon after we moved in, the neighborhood was hit by a rash of violent crimes. On August 10, a group made up of two men, three women, and a 14-year-old boy committed three armed robberies in the Lower Quarter in just 90 minutes.

One August afternoon, my wife went out to do errands on Decatur Street and found herself watching helplessly as a waitress coming off her shift was robbed and savagely beaten on the sidewalk just steps away. She came home shaken. Decatur is one the busiest streets in the French Quarter, close to an Urban Outfitters and a Hard Rock Café, which made the daytime holdup all the more unnerving.

I learned quickly that in post-Katrina New Orleans, you can never let your guard down. Along with my friends in the Quarter and Marigny, I began to obsessively check blogs like NOcrimeline.com and Citizen Crime Watch, which often provide a more realistic view of street crime than the city's sole paper, the Times-Picayune. ("Violence Claims More Victims," read a typically tepid Picayune headline in late October, after a week's worth of shootings culminated in three deaths.)

By summer's end, fear had caused me to completely alter my day-to-day lifestyle: I no longer carried a wallet, preferring instead to stick a single credit card and a few dollars in my front pocket. After dark, I walked down the middle of the street to avoid muggers crouched behind parked cars. And I rarely allowed my wife to venture out alone at night, an anachronism with which I became entirely comfortable.

In February, a day after Fat Tuesday, I was walking my three dogs when a scruffy man in his twenties passed me on an old squeaky dirt bike, glaring when I offered a wave. In New Orleans, this is unusual—it's still the Deep South, after all—so I stood on the corner and watched him slowly pedal away. Just before he reached the next street, he rode up to a middle-age woman carrying a large purse and suddenly threw a mighty punch, striking her on the side of her face. She fell down screaming; he leaped off his bike and landed on top of her, grabbing for her purse. But the woman wouldn't let go. As I dialed 911, her screams attracted the attention of several nearby residents, who came rushing out of their homes to help. Surrounded, the man took off running, leaving his bike, the battered woman, and her purse on the side of the street. By the time the NOPD arrived on the scene 15 minutes later, he was long gone. This is what it's like to walk your dog in New Orleans.

Assigning and dodging blame for this deterioration has become a favored municipal pastime. Though the town's famously corrupt police department has taken much of the heat, many cops claim it's the city's entrenched leadership that should be held accountable. "Nagin's been nonexistent," says Officer Ed Cirillo, a homicide detective in the 2nd District who requested a pseudonym due to the department's policy restricting interviews. "We need someone to step in and get aggressive with the crime problem. We're still waiting for that to happen." On a humid evening in late fall, Cirillo is sitting at his desk uptown when the code for "shots fired" crackles over the radio. He shakes his head.

A dark-haired, broad-shouldered Louisiana native, Cirillo knows all too well that he's caught up in an epic losing struggle. He crams his hulking frame into an NOPD cruiser and heads toward the location of the shooting, a dangerous section of the Irish Channel neighborhood that has recently been the scene of multiple shootings. By the time he arrives, the perp has fled and there is no victim in sight. Cirillo begins searching the garbage-strewn vacated residences on the block, many of which serve as stash houses for drugs and guns. He pays special attention to the knee-high grass in front of abandoned homes, mindful that gunmen have taken to using the weeds as cover. After a half hour, he spots a dreadlocked 16-year-old crouched in a narrow alleyway between two vacant buildings. As Cirillo pulls the youth from his hiding place, he sees an AK-47 and a 9mm rifle lying on the ground by his side. Apparently, the teenager had been attempting to take out a rival, but missed. The suspect insists the weapons aren't his. Cirillo ignores him, taking note of the tattoo of the number 13 between the boy's eyes, a sign that he's repping the 13th Ward—a rough uptown neighborhood along the Mississippi River. It's famous for being the birthplace of Cash Money rapper B.G., who once dubbed New Orleans "Chopper City" ("chopper" is street slang for an AK-47).

Cirillo handcuffs the 13th Ward gangster, who is also wanted for armed robbery, but he has little faith that the kid will be behind bars for long, and not just because of the 60-day rule. The city's juvenile system has been crippled by a sprawling population of "emancipated youth"—parentless kids sent from post-Katrina exile in cities like Houston and Atlanta back to New Orleans to attend school. In December, six inmates—including a 17-year-old awaiting trial in a murder case—escaped from the New Orleans Youth Study Center by simply wriggling out a window. Ten other prisoners escaped from the facility the year before.

In December, six inmates—including a 17-year-old awaiting trial in a murder case—escaped from the New Orleans Youth Study Center by simply wriggling out a window. Ten other prisoners escaped from the facility the year beforeFailures like these have made New Orleans a haven for criminals across the country. "A lot of these thugs came back after Katrina because they know how easy it is to commit crime in New Orleans," says Cirillo. "They know that if they're caught, there are rarely repercussions." He sighs heavily. "The minute people start thinking this situation is normal, we've lost control," he says. "But given the number of shootings, robberies, and murders, it's hard to say we are in control of New Orleans right now."

The extent of the chaos was brought home last October by the much-publicized murder of Thelonious Dukes, a 19-year NOPD veteran. Late one night, Dukes was working on a project in his driveway in New Orleans East, a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city (mostly abandoned since Katrina), when two gunmen ordered Dukes into his home and awoke his wife. They pushed the couple to their knees and demanded cash and jewelry. Dukes complied, but when the men began to threaten his wife, he lunged for his sidearm, squeezing off two shots before the intruders returned fire. His wife was hit in the foot; Dukes took two bullets to the torso and leg, and died soon after.

If the notion of a cop murdered in his own home wasn't chilling enough, the kicker came two weeks later. One of the suspects in the case, 20-year-old Elton Phillips, who was also wanted for armed robbery, was found to have briefly taken refuge in an unlikely hideout: the home of District Attorney Eddie Jordan. Though Jordan, the first African American DA in New Orleans' history (whose penchant for flashy haberdashery earned him the nickname The Hat), soon resigned, the damage the city sustained during his tenure endures. His disastrous years in office were marked by thousands of Article 701 releases, abysmal conviction rates, and a race discrimination lawsuit—brought by dozens of white former employees who claimed they were wrongfully terminated due to race—that resulted in a $3.7 million judgment against the DA's office. Elton Phillips was a friend of Jordan's live-in girlfriend. To this day, Jordan insists he was unaware that his houseguest was wanted by the cops.