Can New Orleans Do Better?

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The mayor must navigate that tricky terrain in the midst of a new scandal in New Orleans' notoriously corrupt and ineffectual police department. It was bad enough that some officers were accused of deserting their posts and looting Cadillacs during Katrina, but now two officers stand accused of beating a retired African-American schoolteacher who they claim was drunk and resisting arrest (he denies it) in the reopened French Quarter--a brutal attack that was caught on video and left Nagin's welcome mat looking all the more tattered. The officers have pleaded not guilty to charges of battery. Nagin has promised that new acting police superintendent Warren Riley will "handle it very seriously," but Riley's record is checkered with suspensions, one involving his alleged failure to act promptly enough after a woman told him that a police officer had threatened to kill her. (Soon after that, her body was found in a swamp, and the case remains unsolved.)

Nagin dismisses the criticism as the dying gasps of New Orleans' Old Guard. "We've moved away from the corrupt politics of the past," he told TIME recently. "I think those who are bashing me and questioning my leadership skills are usually unhappy with the new way of doing things." Nagin has been doing things differently for quite some time. Raised poor in New Orleans, he attended Alabama's Tuskegee University on a baseball scholarship, earned an M.B.A. from Tulane University and worked his way up the ranks to vice president at cable giant Cox Communications by turning around its flagging New Orleans cable system. After hearing his son complain about New Orleans' dearth of career opportunities, Nagin entered the 2002 mayoral race only two months before the Democratic primary and ended up the choice of a city tired of its banana-republic image.

The outsider set out to run New Orleans government like a business. He eliminated a $25 million budget deficit, renegotiated many municipal contracts on more favorable terms and cut red tape by putting applications for permits and other requests online. He won high marks for an anticorruption drive that targeted notorious centers of graft like the Taxicab Bureau and resulted in the arrests of many low-level city officials.

But around the time he endorsed Republican Bobby Jindal over Democrat Blanco in the 2003 race for Governor--a miscalculation that has left a noticeable chill in his relationship with Blanco--New Orleanians began to have second thoughts about Nagin. For all his reforms, residents wondered whether their long-awaited antipolitician could realize critical projects like transforming the city's abysmal schools or breaking its dependence on the low-wage tourism industry. In a city suffering some of the nation's highest poverty and crime rates, African Americans questioned whether their concerns fit on Nagin's pro-business agenda. One of New Orleans' leading black ministers, Bishop Paul Morton, even called Nagin "a white man in black skin" a few months after the election.