NEW ORLEANS — The man known as Tat-2 didn’t want his passengers to feel uneasy as he gave them a personal tour of greater New Orleans the other day.


“I’ve got guns on me galore, so you don’t have to worry,” he said, as steered his red Charger through a particularly distressed area.


New Orleans has a fair number of such areas, and Tat-2, whose real name is Gene Thacker, knows them all pretty well. For 12 years Mr. Thacker has been in the bounty-hunting business. For two weeks now he has also been the central figure in “Big Easy Justice,” a 10-part series on Spike on Tuesday nights.


Mr. Thacker is not the first person in his line of work to land a reality series. “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” on A&E, has been around for eight seasons. But he may be the most heavily tattooed. The ink extends all the way to his fingers: “Hate” on one hand, “Love” on the other. “Game” on one hand, “Over” on the other.


“When I come after you,” he said, “game’s over. I’m going to get you no matter what it takes, and I’m not going to stop until I do.”


In his time on the job, he said, he has brought in more than 10,000 bail jumpers.


Besides Tat-2’s tattoos, the other feature that sets “Big Easy Justice” apart is, of course, the setting. New Orleans has always been full of colorful characters, both law-abiding and law-breaking, but Hurricane Katrina in 2005 gave the city both a new visibility and new, overwhelming problems, destroying social systems, along with buildings and roads. Sociologists and other experts are still studying Katrina’s ripple effects, but Mr. Thacker has an intuitive, street-level hypothesis.


“The problem with Katrina was this: It took certain neighborhoods, and when they came back, it mixed everybody up, bad with good, good with bad,” he said. “And that’s when, for lack of better words” — and then he used a familiar expression involving a fan.


That has meant that there are plenty of bail jumpers for him and his crew — Viper, Wally and Arsenio — to pursue, and they cover the full spectrum: people charged with drunken driving, assault, drug crimes, even homicide.


“Police departments, especially post-Katrina, they’re so overloaded and they’re so in demand that they don’t have the time to look for these people,” Mr. Thacker explained. The police are also limited by jurisdictional boundaries. Bounty hunters have few restrictions in that regard.


“These criminals aren’t dumb,” Mr. Thacker said. “They know these policemen have to go home, or there’s a certain line, an invisible line, they can’t cross. They’ll go and they’ll run to another parish. They know that, ‘O.K., I’m wanted in J. P.’ ” — Jefferson Parish — “ ‘I can go hide in Orleans, or St. Tammany, or wherever.’ Whereas we can just go right on over there and pick them up. I just got a case this morning from Georgia.”


One place bail jumpers like to hide is the Iberville public housing complex, a group of red-brick buildings not far from the tourist-heavy French Quarter that is ominous even in broad daylight. “Nothing but guns and drugs and shootings — you name it, it goes on there,” Mr. Thacker said, turning into the complex, which is the focus of a grand rehabilitation plan but at the moment is still an example of urban blight. Metal doors locked at the bottom can be troublesome for Mr. Thacker’s crew.


“One time we literally had to put a chain to the truck and yank the door off to get in,” he recalled.


In other places Mr. Thacker frequents, like the Lower Ninth Ward, doors aren’t an obstacle because on many houses there are none; the buildings are still a wreck from the flooding that followed the hurricane. On Charbonnet Street near North Claiborne Avenue, he stopped outside some dilapidated, abandoned houses where a bail jumper might try to hide. Tips from his network of sources might steer him to a jumper who is squatting in such a place. After dark is the best time to go looking.


Bounty hunters, who in Louisiana must be licensed, have the authority to force entry if they believe their target is inside. But Mr. Thacker, who is 41 and a lifelong resident of the area, said force wasn’t his first choice.


“That’s not the way I like to do it, because you never know what’s on the other side of a door,” he said. On the show, though he is armed and presents an intimidating persona, he is often seen trying to talk a suspect out of a hiding place, and even doing a bit of counseling. He knows that bounty hunters have a bad reputation. They certainly did when he first got into the business after starting his career in law enforcement.


“People thought of bounty hunters as renegades,” he said of that time. “There were a lot of bad stories, a lot of bad people doing a lot of bad things.”


Some in the profession won’t even use the term bounty hunter because of the negative connotations, but Mr. Thacker isn’t much for word games.


“Fugitive recovery agents, fugitive investigators — people call them all kinds of things,” he said. “But at the end of the day, you’re a bounty hunter.”


Some might argue that Mr. Thacker, who came to Spike’s attention through a regular segment he had on a local news show, isn’t doing the image of New Orleans any favors with “Big Easy Justice.”


YouTube clips from the show have generated some scathing comments about the tactics seen on the Spike series. “Just another TV show making bucks off the misery and injustice done to others,” someone posting under the name unanimous300 wrote. The writer urges the Spike crew to leave New Orleans alone, concluding, “Haven’t we been through enough?”


But one of the show’s producers, Al Roker — yes, the weather guy — said in a recent television interview, “It’s not the New Orleans you usually think of when you hear ‘New Orleans.’ ” He added, “This is the darker side a lot of folks don’t go to.”


Mr. Thacker makes no apologies about showing that side of life.


“People need to see what’s really going on in their cities, in their states,” he said. “A lot of people want to say, ‘Oh, I live in a perfect place,’ but we don’t live in a fairy tale land. We don’t. Reality is you have good people and bad people.” The message “Big Easy Justice” should send, he said, is this: “It should show that there’s people who care enough out here to risk their lives every day and night to take these bad people off the street.”


In a way, having a national television show seems at odds with a trade that relies so heavily on stealth, on being able to sneak up on people. Is Mr. Thacker worried that the exposure will make his job more difficult?


“The whole thing is, the criminals we’re going after don’t know when we’re coming,” he said. “So by the time I’m there, it’s too late.”