Night-time safety · New Orleans · data through November 2026

Is New Orleans safe at night?

48% of New Orleans's crime-related 911 calls happen between 6pm and 6am, and 18% of them fall between midnight and 6am. That share swings from 29% to 54% depending on which neighborhood you are in — which is the whole point: the question worth asking is not whether New Orleans is safe after dark, but where and by which route.

These figures describe when reported incidents happen, not how dangerous a street is. Somewhere with a night-time crowd reports more after dark because more people are there — that is a fact about footfall as much as about risk, and it is why the tables below show the count and the share side by side.

Most crime-related 911 calls after dark

Neighborhood	6pm–6am	Share	Index
1 Iberville	2,284	54%	12/100
2 Central Business District	2,209	52%	13/100
3 French Quarter	2,177	54%	13/100
4 Central City	1,136	48%	20/100
5 Seventh Ward	852	49%	25/100
6 Marigny	816	48%	26/100
7 Tremé - Lafitte	785	49%	27/100
8 B. W. Cooper	644	48%	29/100
9 Tulane - Gravier	617	43%	29/100
10 St. Roch	609	53%	32/100
11 Milan	561	43%	33/100
12 Gert Town	539	47%	38/100
13 Broadmoor	502	45%	37/100
14 St. Claude	489	48%	35/100
15 Mid-City	488	41%	36/100
16 Dixon	486	44%	40/100
17 Lower Garden District	448	45%	38/100
18 West Lake Forest	397	43%	38/100
19 Garden District	375	46%	42/100
20 Florida Area	354	52%	44/100
21 Bywater	324	46%	45/100
22 Bayou St. John	305	42%	48/100
23 Florida Development	285	54%	50/100
24 Lower Ninth Ward	278	53%	51/100
25 Freret	267	38%	50/100

Changes most after dark

Ranked by the share of crime-related 911 calls that fall between 6pm and 6am, against a New Orleans median of 44%. A high share is not a high total — a quiet neighborhood whose few incidents mostly happen at night sits near the top — so the count is shown beside it.

Neighborhood	Night share	Incidents	Index
French Quarter	54%	4,012	13/100
Old Aurora	54%	269	69/100
Iberville	54%	4,254	12/100
Florida Development	54%	532	50/100
Lower Ninth Ward	53%	521	51/100
St. Roch	53%	1,155	32/100
Florida Area	52%	678	44/100
Holy Cross	52%	360	61/100
Central Business District	52%	4,276	13/100
Desire Area	52%	343	62/100
Fischer Development	50%	173	75/100
Behrman	50%	476	53/100

Least night-weighted

Where what gets reported is most concentrated in daylight hours.

Neighborhood	Night share	Incidents
Black Pearl	29%	83
Audubon	30%	144
West End	30%	73
Lakeview	31%	123
Filmore	31%	161
Irish Channel	33%	200
Lakeshore - Lake Vista	34%	32
Tall Timbers - Brechtel	36%	91

Common questions

Is New Orleans safe to walk at night?

48% of New Orleans's crime-related 911 calls happen between 6pm and 6am, and 18% fall in the small hours between midnight and 6am. That is a description of when incidents are reported, not a verdict on the city: the figure varies far more between neighborhoods than it does between cities, from 29% to 54% here. The useful question is which neighborhood and which route, not whether a whole city is safe.

Which neighborhood in New Orleans has the most reported crime at night?

Iberville, with roughly 2,284 crime-related 911 calls between 6pm and 6am — 54% of its total. Somewhere busy usually tops this list because more people are out, so read it alongside the daytime picture on its own page rather than on its own.

Which neighborhood changes most after dark?

French Quarter is the most night-concentrated in New Orleans: 54% of what is reported there happens between 6pm and 6am, against a New Orleans median of 44%. A high share does not mean a high total — a quiet neighborhood whose few incidents mostly happen at night will rank high here — which is why the table shows the count beside it.

How does SafeRoute use this at night?

The app scores each walking route against the same NOPD dispatch data, and can weight it toward the time you are actually walking rather than a flat all-day average. It also shows how much of each route runs on lit streets, and lets you share a walk.

Methodology

Every incident dispatched to the NOPD carries an occurrence time, which is bucketed into daytime (6am–6pm), evening (6pm–midnight) and the small hours (midnight–6am), split weekday against weekend, and weighted by severity so violence counts for more than shoplifting. A neighborhood's night share is the weighted proportion falling between 6pm and 6am; its night count is that share applied to its total. The city-wide chart weights each neighborhood by its own volume, so a busy centre is not averaged against a quiet suburb as though they were the same size.

New Orleans is the one city here not scored on filed police reports. NOPD's incident-report series carries no coordinates and no current-year data, so the only fresh geocoded feed is the Orleans Parish Communication District's 911 dispatch log. That log is mostly NOT crime — its largest call types are area checks, alarms, medical calls and traffic — so we keep only genuine offense call types (battery, robbery, burglary, theft, auto theft, weapons, drugs and similar) and discard the rest. Each surviving call is weighted by severity, summed within 1 km of a neighborhood's center, and normalized against citywide rates onto a 0–100 index, higher = safer. A dispatch means police were sent, not that an offense was confirmed, and this under-counts against a true report feed — so New Orleans scores are comparable within the city but should not be read against another city's number. Boundaries are the city's 72 Neighborhood Statistical Areas, less the U.S. Naval Base and Lake Catherine — the latter because the dispatch feed records nothing anywhere inside it, and a page reading “0 incidents, 100/100” would present missing data as proven safety. Time-of-day charts use the real dispatch clock time. Pages regenerate as new data is published.