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

Is New Orleans safe at night?

48% of New Orleans's crime-related 911 calls happen between 6pm and 6am, and 19% of them fall between midnight and 6am. That share swings from 16% to 66% 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 reported crime-related 911 calls after dark

Neighborhood	6pm–6am	Share	Index
1 Iberville	1,830	53%	12/100
2 Central Business District	1,760	51%	13/100
3 French Quarter	1,726	53%	13/100
4 Central City	933	48%	19/100
5 Seventh Ward	684	50%	25/100
6 Marigny	661	47%	26/100
7 Tremé - Lafitte	636	49%	26/100
8 B. W. Cooper	532	49%	28/100
9 St. Roch	510	54%	32/100
10 Tulane - Gravier	496	43%	29/100
11 Milan	466	44%	32/100
12 Gert Town	431	46%	38/100
13 Broadmoor	409	46%	37/100
14 St. Claude	401	48%	35/100
15 Dixon	398	45%	40/100
16 Mid-City	381	40%	36/100
17 Lower Garden District	370	46%	38/100
18 West Lake Forest	339	45%	37/100
19 Garden District	323	47%	41/100
20 Florida Area	295	52%	43/100
21 Bywater	267	45%	44/100
22 Florida Development	243	54%	49/100
23 Bayou St. John	242	41%	48/100
24 Lower Ninth Ward	230	54%	51/100
25 Hollygrove	225	46%	49/100

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 45%. 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
City Park	66%	39	91/100
Florida Development	54%	447	49/100
Lower Ninth Ward	54%	425	51/100
St. Roch	54%	946	32/100
French Quarter	53%	3,226	13/100
Iberville	53%	3,445	12/100
Old Aurora	53%	219	69/100
Florida Area	52%	562	43/100
Pines Village	52%	345	55/100
Desire Area	52%	281	61/100
Fischer Development	52%	150	74/100
Holy Cross	52%	310	59/100

Least night-weighted

Where what gets reported is most concentrated in daylight hours.

Neighborhood	Night share	Incidents
New Aurora - English Turn	16%	5
Lakeshore - Lake Vista	26%	22
Audubon	26%	106
Filmore	28%	109
Black Pearl	30%	67
Lakeview	32%	97
Algiers Point	32%	127
West End	33%	63

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 19% 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 16% to 66% 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 1,830 crime-related 911 calls between 6pm and 6am — 53% 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?

City Park is the most night-concentrated in New Orleans: 66% of what is reported there happens between 6pm and 6am, against a New Orleans median of 45%. 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 and check in on arrival.

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.