You were just robbed or attacked in New Orleans. Here is what to do, in order. Get somewhere safe and call 911 if you are hurt or the person is still nearby. If you are safe but shaken, call NOPD at (504) 821-2222. Report within 72 hours — Louisiana ties victim compensation to that window.

Right now: the numbers that matter

Nothing on this page matters more than this section. Save these before you read further.

  • Emergency, or the person is still near you: 911
  • NOPD non-emergency, to file a report: (504) 821-2222
  • File online instead: NOPD online reporting
  • In person: 1615 Poydras St., New Orleans, LA 70112 — Monday to Friday, 8:00am to 5:00pm
  • VictimConnect (any crime, call or text, free and confidential): 1-855-484-2846
  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text): 988
  • RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673
  • Louisiana Crime Victims Reparations (money for bills the crime caused): (225) 342-1749 or 1-888-6-VICTIM
  • Orleans Parish reparations coordinator: (504) 202-9229

You do not have to decide anything else tonight. The rest of this page will still be here tomorrow.

The first hour after a mugging

Your body is going to do things you did not ask it to do. Shaking, a flat calm that feels wrong, replaying the moment on a loop — all of that is ordinary. It is not a sign you are handling it badly.

Do these, roughly in this order:

  1. Get somewhere with people and light. A store, a bar, a lobby, a bus stop with a crowd. Distance first, everything else second.
  2. Call someone. Not for logistics — so you are not alone in your head. This is the single thing people say they wish they had done sooner.
  3. Write down what you remember, immediately. Notes app is fine. Clothing, direction they went, vehicle, time, exact corner. Memory for this decays within hours, and the report goes better with it.
  4. Do not chase your phone. Find My will show it moving. Following that dot has gotten people killed. Give the location to police instead.
  5. Freeze cards and lock your phone remotely. Bank apps do this in about two taps.
  6. Photograph any injury, even minor bruising, before it changes. It matters later for reimbursement.

Filing the NOPD report — and why the 72-hour clock is real

File even if you think nothing will come of it. Louisiana’s Crime Victims Reparations program requires the crime be reported to law enforcement within 72 hours, unless there is a good reason it was not. No report, usually no reimbursement.

You can file three ways: by phone at (504) 821-2222, online through NOPD’s reporting portal, or in person at 1615 Poydras Street on weekdays. Ask for the item number before you hang up. You will need it for everything that follows — insurance, reparations, your employer, your landlord.

To get a copy of the report later, NOPD Records is (504) 658-5455, open weekdays 9:00am to 2:45pm.

Money: what Louisiana will actually reimburse

Most people never learn this exists. Louisiana’s Crime Victims Reparations program pays up to $15,000 for expenses a violent crime caused, and up to $25,000 in cases of total permanent disability.

It covers medical and prescription bills, dental work, mental health counseling, lost earnings, childcare that lets you keep working, crime scene cleanup, forensic exams, relocation costs, and replacement of items taken as evidence.

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Two deadlines decide eligibility. Report to law enforcement within 72 hours, and file the application within one year of the crime. Both have good-cause exceptions, so apply even if you have missed one — the board decides, not you, and rejections can be appealed.

Applications go through the sheriff’s office. In Orleans Parish, call the reparations coordinator at (504) 202-9229. Statewide, it is (225) 342-1749 or 1-888-6-VICTIM. Decisions usually land in 30 to 45 days.

The part nobody warns you about

The aftermath is longer than the incident, and it is not a character flaw.

Research published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress and cited by the U.S. Office for Victims of Crime found that 25 percent of crime victims experience post-traumatic stress disorder in their lifetime, compared with 9.4 percent of people who were never victimized. Current PTSD ran 9.7 percent among victims versus 3.4 percent among non-victims.

Practically: sleep goes first, then the route you used to walk without thinking becomes a thing you plan around. Counseling is a reimbursable expense under reparations — that line item exists precisely because this is the normal course, not the exception.

If tonight is very bad, 988 answers by call or text, always.

What a safety app can and cannot do here

Be skeptical of anything promising it would have prevented this. Most safety apps are built around a button you press after a threat has started — which assumes a free hand, an unlocked phone, and enough warning to act. In the situations described on this page, people usually had none of those.

Crowd-alert apps are a different shape and worth knowing honestly. Citizen broadcasts incident reports near you, which some people find steadying and others find makes the city feel worse; its real-time incident detail sits behind a paid tier, so the thing you would want at 1am is often the thing you have not paid for.

Neither model does much for the specific gap that shows up in these stories: nobody knew where you were, and nobody knew when you did not arrive.

The gap: nobody knew you never made it

Read enough of these accounts and one detail repeats. The people who would have come did not know anything was wrong, sometimes for hours. Not because they did not care — because nothing told them.

That gap is what Edge Orbital builds for. Tripwire Recon is our iPhone app for the human mesh — the handful of people who would actually show up for you. Instead of waiting for you to press something mid-incident, it is designed around the arrival that does not happen: your people know the walk home started, and they know if it did not end. The same idea applied to a campus is campus radar.

It would not have stopped what happened to you. Nothing in an app store would have. What it changes is how long you are alone with it afterward.

Sources

Phone numbers and program rules verified 2026-08-05. Programs change; if a number here is wrong, the city and state pages linked above are the authority.