NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans police are investigating yet another series of vehicle break ins in the CBD.
An employee from a CBD hotel spent part of the morning helping guests whose vehicles were burglarized late Thursday or early Friday morning. They were parked in a high-rise garage at O’Keefe Avenue and Girod Street.
“It’s actually closed off by doors and we paid $50 a night to valet, so you would think that it would be, you know, safe, but they’re finding ways anyway to get in,” hotel guest Addison Archer said.
The burglars hit Archer’s SUV. She’s in New Orleans from Destin, Florida to visit a local university.
“It’s just a little disappointing,” Archer said. “It happens every once and a while back home, but obviously it’s gotten out of hand here.”
It appears the burglars targeted a series of mostly high-end vehicles. We spotted broken glass and damaged cars on several floors of the parking garage. Customers from nearby apartment buildings who park in the garage complain car break ins are happening way too often in the city.
“I wish this didn’t happen in our city,” Will Coffey said. “It keeps happening and unfortunately it’s happening in the CBD.”
“It’s the Big Easy, but it’s not that easy,” Amanda Collins said. “But I still love it as long as the crime is taken care of.”
Jim Huge is the CEO of Premium Parking that manages the garage. He says a car pulled in, people got out and hit 6 to 7 vehicles.
“You could hit cars like that probably within 5 minutes.”
Huge says the garage has security cameras and a guard on duty, neither of which was much of a deterrent.
He’s at a loss for how to stop the break ins given the manpower shortage at the NOPD.
“They’re telling us we need to act as the police, and we don’t have the capabilities to do so,” Huge said.
Huge said he would be sharing video of the suspects and their vehicle with NOPD investigators.
Data from the metropolitan crime commission shows there have been more than 4,300 vehicle burglary reports so far this year.
The number is actually down 32 percent from this time last year.
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