[austlar1]

I am tempted to regale SSP visitors with my experiences back in the Dark Ages as a temporary census worker for the 1974 "Victims of Crime Impact Study", which was a special census study of crime in the US back in the last days of the Nixon administration. I was living hand to mouth in the French Quarter at the time and needed this temporary gig to make ends meet. I moved to SF a short time later. As a census data collector, it was my job to interview pre-selected households, mostly in the Iberville projects adjacent to the French Quarter and in the Treme. It soon became obvious that very few black people we interviewed were comfortable discussing anything related to crime. It did not matter that we were seeking information to determine the actual crime rate, and we reported none of our findings to law enforcement. There was hardly anybody willing to provide accurate information. It seemed as if nobody was ever a victim of crime. We went to these homes in pairs, and after a while we just quit trying to gather information and submitted bogus data in order to collect a paycheck. I am not proud of this, but it was the tail end of the Viet Nam era, and most of my generation was not enamored of the Nixon administration. That was how we justified our slacker behavior at any rate. Within less than a decade nobody in their right mind would have tried to knock on doors in that particular housing project. More than a few tourists strayed over in that direction over the years from the Quarter and met a bloody end. I think that the Iberville project was pulled down after Katrina, so it is probably a different ballgame there today with some new construction, etc.