Seen in another newsgroup:
A Perfect Storm of Lawlessness
New Orleans' vicious looters aren't the real face of the city's poor-their
victims are.
1 September 2005
New Orleans hasn't even been disarmed yet, but the story of those
who
looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being
re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that "looters
are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them." The
final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate
people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in
brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought
didn't
come.
In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized
New
Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day
before the situation grew truly desperate-and it was their increasingly
lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer
rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed
saving.
Let's go back to last Sunday morning-such a long time ago, it now
seems. Most New Orleanians with means-the most resourceful poor, the
middle
class, and the affluent-left the city of nearly half-a-million residents
that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they
hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who
valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who
stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human
capital as well.
Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the
government on a good day-impoverished women, children, and elderly folks
who
went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their
government to take care of them. And those were the smart ones-those who
moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of trans****tation out of
the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own
physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes
in
the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during
Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trapped-starved and dying
of
dehydration.
And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who
terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good day-and have now
taken
over the stricken city. What's happened is the predictable civil
deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure can't control
or
contain its core criminal class in peacetime.
Katrina didn't turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This
week's looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for
sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through
the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed
New
Orleans' murder rate to several multiples above the national average in
normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005
with 330 or so murders-compared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the
same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans'
intractable crime problem, but it's necessary, since it explains how this
week's communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect
storm
for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.
During the mid-1990s, New Orleans made some progress in cutting down
its murder rate from its one-time peak as the Murder Capital of America.
With the help of the feds, the city weeded out the worst of its police
force
(including two murderers) and implemented some new policing techniques
borrowed from successful cities like New York, including COMSTAT. But New
Orleans-and the state judicial system-has never cemented a sustainable
institutional infrastructure to build on early progress, and the murder
rate
had risen perceptibly again.
New Orleans, first off, doesn't have the middle-class or affluent
tax
base to afford the professional police or prosecution force it needs-crime
has created a vicious cycle, pu****ng out taxpayers who fund the police.
Nor
have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of
financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors
need
to do their jobs.
In New York, the mayor, police, and prosecutors know that taking one
killer off the streets means preventing more killings, because a murderer
frequently murders again. In New Orleans, killers and other violent
criminals remain free, because in many cases, they aren't arrested or
tried;
conviction rates remain abysmal. The lawlessness these criminals create in
pockets of the city breeds more killers and more lawlessness. Witnesses
and
crime victims in the inner city fear to come forward: they know that even
if
a criminal winds up arrested, his associates will be free to intimidate
them.
On a normal day, those who make up New Orleans' dangerous criminal
class-yes, likely the same African-Americans we see looting now-terrorize
their own communities. Once in a while, a spectacular crime makes
headlines-the shooting death of a tourist just outside the French Quarter,
or the rape and murder of a Tulane student. But day in and day out, New
Orleans' black criminal class victimizes other blacks. Churches put up
billboards in the worst neighborhoods that plead: "Thou shalt not kill."
The
inner-city buses shuttle what look like hundreds of war veterans around
the
city-young black men, many of them innocent victims, paralyzed in
wheelchairs.
This week, this entrenched criminal class has freely roamed the
streets-and terrorized everyone. On Monday, New Orleans still had food and
water stocked in stores across the city, but young looters began sacking
stores, tra****ng the needed food and stealing TVs, DVDs, and other
equipment. If the uncoordinated, understaffed New Orleans police had even
a
prayer of keeping order, it was Monday. By Tuesday, the looters had armed
themselves with ample weapons supplies available in stores all across the
city; by Wednesday, the armed gangs, out of food and water like everyone
else, were not only viciously dangerous but desperate, hungry, and
thirsty.
But while the looters have re****tedly killed police offers and have
shot at rescue workers, they're mainly victimizing, as usual, other poor
blacks. The vicious looters aren't the face of New Orleans' poor blacks.
Their victims are: the thousands of New Orleanians who made their way to
shelter before the storm, and who rescued others and brought them to
shelter
during and after the storm-but who now cannot get the help they
desperately
need.
This week's looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another
potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute)
was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown
apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the
storm,
but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.
Was this week's looting preventable? Failure to put violent
criminals
behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans'
officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police
officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the
same
time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now,
those
uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims-according to multiple
accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter
the
city.
Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged
city.
They've hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at
least
a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in
stores to those who needed it most. And they've likely hampered rebuilding
efforts down the road: they've smashed much of intact Uptown and the
French
Quarter, which will surely be a pyschological barrier for those who knew
that the storm didn't destroy their homes and their livelihoods-fellow
citizens did.
Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile
authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still
rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at *****sing a rapidly
deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in
New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent
victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an
embarrassment to New Orleans-and to America.
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