Text 14839, 147 rader
Skriven 2005-09-02 15:14:38 av Alan Hess
     Kommentar till en text av TIM RICHARDSON
Ärende: looting after Katrina
=============================
Even some New Orleans police officers are looting.  It's a bad scene down
there.  Cops and Guardsmen being attacked - it's pure chaos.
*********


http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/printedition/bal-te.neworleans02sep02,1,73507
19.story?coll=bal-pe-asection
Those remaining in city fending for themselves
'We've been abandoned,' police officer says


By Douglas Birch
Sun National Staff

September 2, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- A bitter rain fell as the big policeman in the blue T-shirt with
an automatic rifle led his last patrol down flooded North Rampart Street
yesterday, heading for the hotel where his wife and children were holed up.

Once he and four other colleagues fetched them, he said, he was getting them
out of the battered swamp that is New Orleans.

The 35-year-old veteran officer and some of the men following him, who spoke
only on condition that their names not be used, said that three days after
Hurricane Katrina roared through the city, they felt abandoned and forgotten by
municipal, state and federal officials.

They had no food, no water, no fuel, no rescue boats, no life preservers and no
clear idea of what they were doing.

Several said they were planning to leave.

At a time when Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said the city's police were being
taken off rescue duty to fight looting, some officers at the Oscar L. Medrano
precinct house, near the French Quarter, said they had heard rumors police were
being evacuated from the city. Whether the rumors were true or not, they were
ready to believe it.

One quiet 28-year-old policeman with a buzz cut packed his gear early yesterday
and hitched a ride to a convenience store just west of the city, where his
father promised to pick him up.

It wasn't clear whether he had authorization from his commanding officer to
leave his post, at a time when National Guard or state police were still
nowhere to be seen near his precinct house.

His fellow officers looked like battle-weary soldiers and said they were too
busy protecting themselves, their families and the station house to do much
else. A 25-year-old, three-year veteran of the force said he and his fellow
officers had been shot at by looters and showered with bricks from an overpass
on the nearby interstate highway.

No one was bothering to re-supply them, he said, or give them the equipment
they needed to rescue stranded citizens. They were forced to siphon gasoline
from abandoned cars to fuel the precinct's generator and to commandeer boats
and cars.

'We got no food'
"As policemen, we've been abandoned by everybody," he said bitterly, wearing a
white T-shirt, badge, blue shorts and black boots and carrying a Kalashnikov
Russian-design assault rifle, his personal weapon.

"We get no food. We have to get all our own food. See that Winn Dixie over
there?" he said, referring to a supermarket ransacked by looters. "That's where
we get what we need. All you can do is fend for yourself."

On a Baton Rouge, La., radio station Thursday, one caller claimed that two
uniformed policemen were seen looting a grocery store. Several people called to
complain about the report, with some suggesting that looters had stolen police
uniforms and were posing as officers.

But a few of the police at the Medrano precinct confirmed that officers had
commandeered food and fuel, and said it was a simple matter of survival.

It wasn't clear whether the disillusioned officers who went on the patrol to
rescue the family of a brother officer, all from the Medrano precinct house,
were representative of the mood among city police as a whole.

But state officials said yesterday that a program had been set up to "debrief
and retrain" New Orleans officers who had failed to show up for work during the
crisis, suggesting that the police officers abandoning their jobs might be more
than just an isolated problem.

The patrol led by the 35-year-old officer from the Medrano precinct looked more
like an armed gang than a group of police officers, although they wore badges
on their casual clothes and wielded shotguns and automatic weapons.

They trudged through intersections filled with thigh-deep water, the color of
weak coffee and stinking of the bayou, gasoline and sewage.

They disappeared heading down a broad avenue in the direction of the downtown
hotels. A reporter trying to follow was warned away by police in a rowboat, who
said the area was dangerous.

The policeman with the buzz cut said Katrina had hit the station hard Sunday
night and Monday morning, but by the afternoon, as police emerged to start
rescue operations, conditions seemed to be improving.

Hope fades fast
"I thought that it was going to get better," he said. "But the water still kept
rising. And, it went downhill from there. We thought we would lose power for a
day or two. But then the levee broke. We ran out of food and water."

The looting in the downtown precincts, he said, started on a small scale. But
it quickly escalated. Most of the convenience stores were trashed for fresh
water, food and beer. People began pushing trashcans filled with looted goods
through the water. Every automobile from a downtown dealership was stolen.

Then the shooting incidents began. On Wednesday, he said, a SWAT team
responding to a call in the Magnolia Projects in Uptown was ambushed by
snipers. The team was pinned down for a time, before they were extracted.

Rumors spread that the police were going to be pulled out of New Orleans and
sent to Dallas or Houston, along with other flood refugees, he and other police
said. Their duties, the rumors claimed, would fall to federal troops. As one
day dragged into two or three, with little communication or support, the
buzz-cut policeman said, officers began to fear that they were forgotten.

"We just don't have the supplies," he said. "The federal troops, they have
unlimited resources, unlimited access to anything they need. They have
generators. They have boats. They have trucks. We can't rescue people any more.
It's pretty much 100 percent out of our hands."

As attacks on police escalated, he said, the mood in the precinct house
gradually changed, from a concern about saving the lives of others to fears for
their own survival. "There's nothing we can do except protect what we have, and
protect ourselves," he said.

The officer recalled one patrol where he and three other armed officers drove
past a crowd of perhaps 1,000 people. "They chased our car," he said. "They
were grabbing at it, trying to get in. Trying to get whatever they could. It
was like a Third World country down there."

The officer said he didn't blame those stranded in New Orleans, who are mostly
the poor with no way to get out.

"They're hungry," he said. Police, in fact, felt a certain kinship with the
refugees inside the Superdome and those marooned in their lightless homes, he
said.

"Basically, we're living the same way as the other people here," he said.

Copyright + 2005, The Baltimore Sun | Get Sun home delivery

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