When New Orleans homicide detective Andrew Waldron's phone rings, he answers, no matter the time of day or night. One year, the NOPD lieutenant left his family's Christmas celebration to go to a murder victim's house after the survivors invited him over.

Part of it is a drive to be there for people who are suffering. But empathy has a practical side, too. A tipster may not always ring twice. And in a city as small as New Orleans, he said, the family he comforts after one killing may someday include a suspect of another.

Building community trust and collaboration is just one factor that the New Orleans Police Department now credits for a stark turnaround in a key measure of its success: its ability to solve murders.

As of Aug. 12, the homicide unit's clearance rate this year stood at 98%, according to NOPD data. In 2022, when New Orleans became the nation's murder capital, NOPD cleared just 43% of its homicide cases.

As of Aug. 12, 52 people have been killed in New Orleans, and police classified 49 as murders. About two-thirds of the murder cases this year have resulted in arrests. But this year's clearance rate was boosted because several older murders were also cleared in 2026 that are included in the total number of cleared cases.

They include seven killings dating as far back as 2021. One was the 2024 mass shooting outside Republic night club that wounded 11 people and killed Jezreel Poleate, 24.

Melanie Talia, CEO of the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation, the nonprofit that supports some NOPD initiatives, cheered the work of the force that resulted in the improved numbers.

"The strategies that (NOPD superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick) and her team have put into place are working," said Talia. "They're working with local, state and federal partners, with the department of health and the community."

Fewer cases, deeper investigations

The rising clearance rate is an achievement for a department that struggled for years to solve killings. That was largely because of the sheer volume of them, Waldron said. Nationally, homicide detectives carry about five or six cases per year. In 2022, when 266 people were killed in the city, many NOPD detectives had 15 or 16 each.

"It was unbelievable the amount of work we had: 266 murders, carjackings, armed robberies, waves of juvenile crime," Waldron said of 2022. "At some point, you have to triage them. There are only so many hours in the day."

The NOPD's homicide unit has 16 active homicide detectives, three cold case detectives and three civilian investigators who work throughout the city's eight patrol districts, police said. Today, most have three or four cases each.

The lighter caseload gives detectives more time to dig into investigations and make arrests — something police and their supporters say can prevent one killing from spawning another.

"Solving these has a bit of a compounding effect," said Matthew Stone, a former NOPD detective and spokesperson for the NOPJF. "The faster they solve them, the harder it is (for individuals) to seek retribution or escalate when they are already locked up."

Waldron, who leads the homicide unit, said arrests have also helped curb drug violence and turf battles.

"There’s not that many individuals who are pulling a trigger and killing people on the street," Waldron said.

NOPD targets those suspects and builds cases against them, often with help from federal and state partners, including Louisiana State Police’s Troop NOLA. A decade ago, when the homicide clearance rate was 27%, those partners assisted with only a handful of cases.

Now, they're involved daily, from responding to crime scenes to sharing case files containing intelligence about other criminal activity and networks, NOPD said.

"You can't have siloed investigations," said Waldron, who joined the NOPD in 2008, its homicide unit in 2011 and an FBI violent crime task force in 2016, where he remains assigned. "You can't have this 'my case' syndrome. ... I think that's traditionally where certain departments, to include ours in the past, have faltered. This is a team sport."

The math behind 98%

The historic decline in killings has also helped improve the clearance rate simply by creating fewer cases that need to be solved, according to Jeff Asher, cofounder of AH Datalytics, who recently retooled the city's public safety dashboards.

The same dynamic in New Orleans has played out nationally, but not to the same extent. As violent crime has waned, the national murder clearance rate has climbed from 48.5% in 2022 to about 69% today, FBI data shows.

"If you have a drop in murder, you have a higher clearance rate," said Asher. "When your denominator shrinks, you don't need as much in your numerator."

A department's annual murder clearance rate is a widely reported statistic by U.S. police forces that compares the number of murders reported that year with the number cleared that year, including cases from previous years. A murder can be cleared by an arrest or, less frequently, by exception, meaning a suspect has been identified but won't be arrested, possibly because they're dead or already jailed and facing charges in a different jurisdiction.

Asher said every crime metric has limitations, and homicide clearance rates are best considered alongside crime, arrest and prosecution rates.

Those metrics are also improving in New Orleans. Crimes against persons are down 32% from 2023, according to the city's public safety dashboard.

Since August 2025, the district attorney's office has secured indictments in 64 of 87 homicide cases, while three were not indicted by a grand jury and about 20 remain under review, according to Orleans Parish District Attorney spokesperson Kendrick Antonio Thomas.

The district attorney's office has said its partnership with the NOPD has helped prosecutors build strong cases.

"We talk daily," Waldron said of the district attorney's homicide unit. "We meet once a week in person at minimum... just to go over cases."

The murder that wasn't

Advances in surveillance cameras, DNA analysis, cell site records and social media have opened new investigative paths. But the growing trove of evidence still requires detectives to make sense of it.

"It always takes some detective, somewhere, making the right decisions," said NOPD deputy superintendent Nicholas Gernon, who oversees the NOPD's Investigations and Support Bureau. "That sometimes gets lost in those sexy, cold-case-files forensic shows."

Sometimes, that evidence shows there was no murder to solve.

In July, NOPD opened a homicide investigation after a man was found dead in a Broadmoor backyard.

"The individual had a leather belt tied around his neck, but he was so decomposed that you would never know how big his neck was," Waldron said.

Surveillance footage showed the man had been walking around with the belt around his neck. Waldron didn't know whether a mental health episode, intoxication or something else explained it, but the footage helped establish that his death was accidental, not a murder.

"Before cameras, that's a murder we would have never solved," Waldron said. "I would have called it a murder, but it didn't happen."

Waldron said he has investigated hundreds of homicides, and that he and his fellow detectives will continue working to clear old cases.

"A lot of those cases are workable, and we're doing that," he said. "The job and the challenge never get old, and I think that's what drives a lot of us."

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