Guardian UK: Four years on, Katrina remains cursed by rumour, cliche, lies and racism

Four years on, Katrina remains cursed by rumour, cliche, lies and racism
Ordinary people mostly behaved well. Those in power panicked, spread fear and fiction, and showed eagerness to kill

Rebecca Solnit
The Guardian, Wednesday 26 August 2009


Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts. Right now, the United States is plagued by an army of "birthers" who claim that because Barack Obama was not really born in America, he's not legitimately president. Their evidence is non-existent, their arguments loopy, but people who find our non-white president unacceptable would rather scour the Hawaiian medical records system and invent bizarre theories than face their own internal turmoil. Or racism.

What people were willing to believe about Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans four years ago is a more serious matter. Of racism. And cliche. The story, as the mainstream media presented it at the time, was about marauding hordes of looters, rapists and murderers swarming through the streets. The descriptions were pretty clearly focused on African-Americans, the great majority left behind in the evacuation of the city (which was then two-thirds black anyway).

There were supposed to be a lot of murder victims and murderers in the Superdome, the sports stadium the city opened up as a refuge of last resort. The rumours were believed so fervently that they were used to turn New Orleans into a prison city, with supplies and would-be rescuers prevented from entering and the victims prevented from evacuating. The belief that a Hobbesian war of all-against-all had broken loose justified treating the place as a crime zone or even a hostile country rather than a place in which grandmothers and toddlers were stranded in hideous conditions, desperately in need of food, water, shelter and medical attention.

Louisiana's governor at the time, Kathleen Blanco, announced as she dispatched National Guard troops: "I have one message for these hoodlums: these troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will." She and the city's mayor had called off the rescue efforts to focus on protecting private property – with lethal force if necessary. The sheriff of the suburb across the Crescent City Connection bridge from downtown New Orleans turned back stranded tourists and locals at gunpoint. "As we approached the bridge," wrote two stranded paramedics, "armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads." .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/26/katrina-racism-us-media

2006 murder rate tops in nation
Posted by dashea June 04, 2007 7:22PM
Homicide Watch: Click here to see an interactive map of all 2007 homicides, along with details of each case and the status of each investigation.

By Brendan McCarthy
Staff writer

Using even the most generous population estimate, New Orleans finished 2006 as by far the nation's most murderous city, with more slayings per capita than other notoriously violent cities, including Gary, Ind., and Detroit, according to statistics released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigations.


http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_new_orleans.html

In 2003, New Orleans’s murder rate was nearly eight times the national average—and since then, murder has increased. In 2002 and 2003, New Orleans had the highest per capita city homicide rate in the United States, with 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizens—compared to New York City’s seven. New Orleans is a New York with nearly 5,000 murders a year—an unlivable place. The city’s economy has sputtered over the past generation partly because local and state officials have failed to do the most elementary job of government: to secure the personal safety of citizens.





FROM WIKI

New Orleans' violent crime rate is high compared with other cities in the United States. Homicides peaked at 421 in 1994, a rate of 86 per 100,000 residents.<95> The homicide rate rose and fell year to year throughout the late 1990s, but the overall trend from 1994 to 1999 was a steady reduction in homicides. From 1999 to 2004, the homicide rate increased. New Orleans had the highest homicide rate of any major American city in 2002 (53.3 per 100,000 people) and again in 2003 (275 homicides).<96>
Violent crime is a serious problem for New Orleans residents, but far less of a problem for tourists. As in other U.S. cities of comparable size, the incidence of homicide and other violent crimes is highly concentrated in certain low-income neighborhoods, such as housing projects, that are sites of open-air drug trade.<96> The homicide rate for the entire New Orleans metropolitan area was 24.4 per 100,000 in 2002.<97>
After Hurricane Katrina, media attention focused on the reduced violent crime rate following the exodus of many New Orleanians. Conversely, a number of cities that took in Katrina evacuees had a significant increase in their murder rate.<98> Houston, for example, had a 25%<99> increase in murders from the previous year. Captain Dwayne Ready stated, "We also recognize that Katrina evacuees continue to have an impact on the murder rate." Police have not kept records of how evacuees have affected crime rates other than homicide.<99> As more residents return to New Orleans, the trend is starting to reverse itself, although calculating the homicide rate remains difficult given that no authoritative source can cite a total population figure.<100>
There were 22 homicides in July 2006, the same as the monthly average for the city from 2002 until Hurricane Katrina.<101> There were 161 homicides in 2006.<102>
On Thursday, January 11, 2007, several thousand New Orleans residents marched through city streets and gathered at City Hall for a rally demanding police and city leaders tackle the crime problem. Mayor Ray Nagin said he was "totally and solely focused" on addressing the problem. The city of New Orleans implemented checkpoints starting in early January 2007 from the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. in high-crime areas and, as of January 20, 2007, they had made over 60 arrests and issued more than 100 citations.
Although the city has lost more than 40% of its pre-Katrina population, it has recaptured an infamous unwanted title, as the nation's "murder capital", according to the FBI.<103> By November 2007, local media reports claimed homicides had already eclipsed the previous year's numbers.<104> The city recorded a total of 209 homicides in 2007.

Nothing is what it is to you, it has to fit your ideology. Guess what? Katrina was a mess. Andrew was a mess. Hugo was a mess. And some people suck. They really do.

Some people suck. Not in some ideological sense, they suck because they have no moral compass and as soon as the guard is down they go off. That is because they don't really understand right from wrong, they understand getting caught. Ask the Palestinian merchants on the roofs of their stores with rifles after Hurricane Hugo. They know what happens when law enforcement is out of commission, and they saw their neighbors and their police officers trying to rip them off. Not because they were starving, no one was starving. The military was on the way, any reasonable person would have assumed that. Some people are immoral. Once you grasp that, you stop looking for excuses for them.

Everyone left in New Orleans was a murderer and a thug? Is that your thesis?

Some piece of shit newspaper never misses an opportunity to try to make this country look bad and they have a standing reservation in Marmarworld.

America was universally horrified by Katrina and what they believed to be happening in New Orleans, and what they expected to find in New Orleans. It wasn't unreasonable to expect a high death toll from water, wind, and murder. We had seen the devastation before. We had seen the social breakdown before. Taking into account that New Orleans wasn't such a safe place to start with, no it wasn't some right wing dream come true, it was a rational fear that all kinds of Americans had.

It also wasn't an opportunity for smug ass people in England or San Francisco to broadcast their malevolence and inject it into a situation which was already a petri dish for ugliness. This was a natural disaster, and while it might have turned out differently in California or London, in the South it took on a character which was bound to frustrate the fuck out of anyone who doesn't know when to shut the fuck up and set aside their politics.

The people who sprang to their feet and opened their wallets, who packed their cars and trucks and headed for New Orleans with the cash and goods donated by they churches and neighbors were largely REPUBLICANS and CONSERVATIVES from neighboring SOUTHERN states. Does it sting? White, redneck, republican, poor white trash, and all those other things we think or say, that's who was on the way while most of us were still watching TV and saying "Isn't it awful."

My thesis is, that you need to stop your ridiculous habit of trying to shit on everything and everyone, and trying to force every thing that happens in this country into some kind of linear stairsteps to the great idea. It just doesn't work that way. The country is too big, the people too diverse, and the culture too fickle.

In all seriousness, why do you bother posting on this board? Seems like you'd be much happier somewhere else, or do you come here purposely to stir the pot and be a contrarian?
Most people in America were indeed horrified by what happened after Katrina, but there's a sizeable minority who were not at all. The Guardian is just pointing that out.
And as to this "ridiculous habit of trying to shit on everything"....Again, sincerely, WTF are you talking about? Are you having a really bad day or something? Where is this coming from?

You're right. It's hard to find a board where people make an extra effort to see things as they are, even people who want to see big changes. But the changes I want to see are already constitutional, and I think that is where you and I differ. Another place where we differ is that I might think it would be nice if some folks change how they feel about certain things ( like gay rights) but I don't really care if they do change how they feel, as long as the law and court rulings are the realization of the constitutional protections not currently being applied. I want to see us take better care of the environment, but because of what we actually know and not what we can imagine and at a price we can afford and not at any price.

I also think that if you want to change the world for the better, then about half or better of it would be improved by being more like America, instead of simply aspiring to be a refugee to it.

38 people died; 175,000 homeless; 25,000 homes destroyed; 100,000 homes damaged; 1.3 million homes without power; 22,000 National Guardsmen on duty; $20 billion in damages; $10 billion cleanup; $7.3 million insurance claims. There are still parts of Homestead/Florida City that remain as they were the day after the storm. Andrew remains the most expensive natural disaster ever to hit the United States.