New Orleans' Tragedy and Triumph on 6-Year Katrina Anniversary

New Orleans' Tragedy and Triumph on 6-Year Katrina Anniversary

By Michael Deibert

Huffington Post

Posted: 8/29/11 10:53 AM ET

(This article was cross-posted on the Huffington Post, where it can be read here)

When five New Orleans police officers were found guilty earlier this month of a series of murders, shootings and a subsequent cover-up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it seemed a symbolic coda to a catastrophic act of nature that descended upon the Crescent City six years ago today, abetted in its destruction by human failings both at the time and since.

The officers were convicted of killing two people and wounding four others on September 4, 2005 on the Danziger Bridge, an expanse that spans the city's industrial canal, in the chaos of a city largely left to fend for itself after being deluged by a Category 5 hurricane that the entire federal and state government saw coming but did little to prepare for.

Seventeen-year-old James Brissette and forty-year-old Ronald Madison were killed that day, though the conditions that set the stage for their killings had been in place long before and, despite progress in many areas since the storm, a number of them of them remain today.

But despite the city's population having been cut nearly in half since the hurricane, and though large sections of neighborhoods and landmarks such as the former Six Flags amusement part sit eerily abandoned, the heart of the city where jazz was born is still beating.

There is probably no city in the United States that possesses greater physical beauty than New Orleans. From the great mansions of the Garden District, to the latticed-balconies fronting the former pirate haunts of the French Quarter, to the creole cottages in the Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods existing in various states of dilapidation, for much of its compact central area New Orleans represents a perfect merging of architectural ideas, similar to the aesthetic wholeness one finds in a place like Paris.

Likewise, its music and cuisine, unique and defiantly redolent of the city's individual flavour and history, make it a fascinating cultural quirk in a national landscape that is increasingly bland and homogenized.

But the revelry and indulgence take place to a backbeat of violence and urban dysfunction so severe that last year the city's homicide rate clocked in at 10 times above the national average, on par with those of violence-racked locales such as Guatemala, where warring street gangs and drug cartels do daily battle.

The prevalence of violent crime in the city would be a challenge for any police force, no matter how well-trained and equipped, but it has proved especially taxing for the 1,395-member New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), whose own struggles have often mirrored the city's larger ills.

An investigation of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) published in March by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) concluded that "basic elements of effective policing--clear policies, training, accountability and confidence of the citizenry--have been absent for years" and that "constitutional violations span the operation of the entire Department."

The city's mayor Mitch Landrieu, the scion of a Louisiana political dynasty that includes a former mayor (Moon Landrieu) and a current United States senator (Mary Landrieu), came into office in May 2010 with a wave of optimism. He promptly appointed as the city's new police chief Ronal Serpas, who had previously served as police chief of Nashville but a sea of crises, some of them rooted in Katrina and beyond, awaited them.

On Sept. 2, 2005, four days after Katrina made landfall. Henry Glover, an African-American resident of the Algiers section of the city, was shot by an NOPD officer.

When bystanders took the grievously wounded Glover to an improvised police station, they were surrounded by policeman who handcuffed them along with Glover, who bled to death. Glover's body was then driven in a car commandeered by a policeman who burned both the vehicle and Glover's body after setting it aflame with a traffic flare.

Serpas' second in command, Assistant Superintendent Marlon Defillo, retired last month after criticism about his actions in the Glover case grew to a crescendo. A 33 page report from State of Louisiana's Department of Public Safety and Correction concluded that Defillo "repeatedly failed to acknowledge that the circumstances as presented to him were sufficiently suspicious as to require follow up" and that his actions "were neither reasonable or responsible."

This March, two NOPD officers received stiff sentences in connection with the case.

Further complicating matters, wealthy New Orleaneans have institutionalized the peeling off of active-duty police officers into what here are known as "paid details," whereby officers are allowed to work for private companies or individuals while in NOPD uniforms.

The DOJ report called the system an "entrenched and unregulated" phenomenon that facilitated corruption within the department. But the city's elite have been loathe to change it, no matter how much it undermines the capability of law enforcement over the urban landscape as a whole.

To his credit, Serpas in May announced that the NOPD was creating a civilian-administered Office of Police Detail Services that would set restrictions on how many hours officers could work and how they would be paid.

And amid the struggles, there are signs of hope.

The NOPD is currently in the process of negotiating a consent decree with the DOJ, a measure by which a federal judge would mandate and oversee that the report's dozens of recommendations be implemented. A newly invigorated body, the New Orleans Office of the Independent Police Monitor, is also now charged with overseeing the behavior of the NOPD and allegations of police misconduct.

This year, standardized test scores for students in the Recovery School District (RSD), a special state-wide school district administered by the Louisiana Department of Education and which took over most of the city's schools after Katrina, improved for the fourth year in a row.

Students from schools still within the Orleans Parish School Board - whose institutions mostly now fall within the mandate of the RSD - also improved.

This marks a dramatic change in momentum for a city that for decades had failed to provide even the rudiments of a good education to its youth, and one in which early interventions are the key to reducing the appalling homicide rate the now stalks its streets.

For much of its history, the aura of New Orleans has been informed by the interplay of light and shadow, comedy and pathos. A city at least partly built of the legacy of slavery nevertheless helped produced the most ebullient and expressive of African-American idioms, and continues today to hold a mirror up to the country at large of some of its best and worst qualities.

The struggle to rebuild New Orleans - and the debate about what kind of New Orleans that will be - continues six years on, as the winds and rain of a once-mighty storm grow ever more distant, but never fully disappear.

Old Habits Die Hard in New Orleans

Old Habits Die Hard in New Orleans

By Michael Deibert

Truthdig

(Read the original article here)

NEW ORLEANS—One balmy night in late April, Floyd Moore, a 31-year-old with a history of drugs and weapons violations, was riding his bicycle past the B.W. Cooper Housing Development in the impoverished Central City neighborhood of this port city hemmed between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.

He never made it to his destination.

The slaying was highly symbolic of the tide of violence washing over New Orleans. At the site of a public housing development that for several years has been in the process of being torn down in part and re-envisioned as a mixed-income area, police recovered more than 100 shell casings—including some from an assault rifle—around Moore’s lifeless body. A 21-year-old man from the neighborhood of Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi, is being sought for the killing.

* * *

Things were not supposed to turn out like this.

This city of nearly 344,000 boasts a unique, enticing cultural bouillabaisse in which optimistic “NOLA Rising” bumper stickers are common. An always eclectic and rollicking music scene has been joined by a vibrant artistic renaissance spurred both by local artists and hundreds of transplants from other parts of the United States who have moved here in recent years to take part in the hoped-for rebuilding following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Last May, the city welcomed as its mayor Mitch Landrieu, the scion of a Louisiana political dynasty that includes a former mayor (Moon Landrieu) and a current United States senator (Mary Landrieu).

With Landrieu, the city also got a new police chief, Ronal Serpas, who had previously been police chief of Nashville, Tenn., and who said at his swearing-in ceremony that, under his watch, the 1,395-member New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) would focus on violent crime “like a dog on a bone.”

However, last year New Orleans witnessed 175 murders, or roughly 52 per 100,000 residents -- 10 times above the national average and a level that puts the city’s homicide rate just behind that of violence-racked Guatemala (at 53 per 100,000), a country beset by warring street gangs and drug cartels. In a fairly typical 24-hour period this month, four people ranging in age from 20 to 52 were slain in different parts of the city.

Far from making a dent in the shocking homicide rate, the NOPD has instead been nearly consumed by a series of scandals, with many residents wondering aloud whether Serpas will survive as chief.

“We have a thriving drug trade, a lack of legitimate employment that creates a labor force for drug dealers, and a compromised criminal justice system,” says Peter Scharf, a professor at the Department of International Health and Development at the city’s Tulane University.

An investigation of the NOPD published in March by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that “basic elements of effective policing -- clear policies, training, accountability and confidence of the citizenry -- have been absent for years" and that "constitutional violations span the operation of the entire Department."

The report went on to detail the "severely deficient" training of officers and a worrying system of what are known as "paid details" whereby officers are allowed to work for private companies or individuals while in NOPD uniforms. The report called the system an "entrenched and unregulated" phenomenon that facilitated corruption within the department.

For weeks, Serpas himself has been mired in a mini-scandal of his own, one focusing on the outsourcing of traffic camera reviews to a company owned by a close friend. A police investigator has said that he has thus far found no evidence of wrongdoing on the chief’s part.

“The problem is when it comes to the police department, we have an endemic layer of corruption,” says Simone Levine, deputy for the New Orleans Office of the Independent Police Monitor, where a staff of four is charged with overseeing the behavior of the NOPD.

“You have good officers but then you have a culture that really hasn't had much input from the outside world,” Levine says.
* * *

Rather than welcoming the Justice Department’s report, several neighborhood associations from more affluent areas of the city have attacked the proposed changes in the paid detail system and in their ability to hire individual NOPD officers to provide security. Last month, Serpas announced that the NOPD was creating a civilian-administered Office of Police Detail Services that would set restrictions on how many hours officers could work and how they would be paid.

A May 25 letter to Serpas co-signed by leaders of the Hurstville Security District and Garden District Security District asked “how the citizens can be assured that the appropriate base level of police protection will be provided,” while a May 31 missive to Serpas from the Upper Hurstville Security District complained that residents would no longer be able to select the police officers who patrol their neighborhood.

“If we weren’t hiring them, what would they be doing?” says Karen Duncan, the chair of the Upper Hurstville district’s board of commissioners. “They wouldn’t be out patrolling less affluent neighborhoods. We’re not taking them away from something else.”

Also taking aim at crucial city services is a poisonous political battle in Louisiana’s state Senate, up the river in Baton Rouge. Some legislators have been rushing to patch a $1.6 billion gap in the state’s budget by proposing, in part, $11.7 million in cuts from the state’s Department of Children and Family Services. In addition, $58 million in cuts are proposed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican. The reductions would affect precisely the kind of early-interception programs so needed in high-crime city neighborhoods such as Central City, Pigeon Town and Gert Town.
* * *

Quite apart from the concrete grimness of districts blighted by unemployment and crime elsewhere in the United States, many of the more impoverished parts of New Orleans have a ramshackle, semi-rural ambiance more reminiscent of Kingston or Belize City than anywhere else, a curious cultural and aesthetic echo in a place that is often called the northernmost city in the Caribbean.

It was an aura visible in Central City recently, at the dedication of a Head Start training center named after late longtime community activist Peter W. Dangerfield.

With a brass band gliding along this city’s distinctive “second line”rhythms and a feast of Crescent City cuisine underneath a tent, members of neighborhood groups such as the Central City Economic Opportunity Corp. (EOC) reflected on their struggle against often great odds to help redefine the experience of so many who live on the downside of advantage here.

“People need decent housing, they need jobs, they need child care,” says Priscilla Edwards, the EOC’s executive director and a 40-year Central City resident.

Among other services, the group has provided senior care in the neighborhood since 1970 and child care since 1980. With state funds, the EOC provided a multimedia after-school program for school-age children from 1970 until 2005, when the building housing the program was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

“We’ve been affected greatly by the cuts in human services,” Edwards says. “They cut services on the backs of the poor, the most vulnerable.”

Indeed, to the visitor New Orleans, despite its great charm, can often seem like a city out of place and time, where the fortress-like class dynamic one sees in economically stratified societies such as those of Central America has somehow set down pernicious roots and remains obstinate and far more resilient than the delicate oleander blossoms that perfume the city’s streets in springtime.

New Orleans is a place where old habits die hard. It is a place where the city’s disenfranchised majority waits, like tourists gathered for the St. Charles Avenue streetcar as it approaches, clattering through the night and illuminated by lights from within. Like the city itself, trying to at long last reach its safe destination.