Charges Filed in Katrina Inquiry
Picture this: A law-enforcement officer is operating in post-disaster area, cut off from any sort of central command. The mayor and police chief are on national television erroneously reporting on babies being raped. A large percentage of your colleagues have abandoned their duties. There are real threats to safety and order everywhere. The officer is scared, but armed and empowered. In a brief instant he makes a deadly mistake that costs someone their life.
The right thing to have done thereafter would be to simply admit, in the chaos after the storm, a mistake was made and a person was killed as a result. There would be recourse and due process and punishment. But the sympathy of the public and the authorities would be more in the favor of the peace officer than it would be if, as it actually turned out, he attempted to immediately cover the whole thing up with the aid of his superiors. Perhaps there would have been jail time, perhaps not. But the social wounds of the occurrence would have been easier to heal for the community and the families of the innocent victims would have better footing in which to plant their grief.
Unfortunately, with the tools and the willingness to cover the whole thing up, members of the New Orleans police department took the easier avenue, portrayed themselves as victims and the dead men as perpetrators. It will be hard to prove what actually happened in Algiers and on the Danziger Bridge. But a cover up is much easier to put together. The punishment will hopefully be much worse. The public can forgive a mistake, particularly given the situation. Everyone was frightened. But the action of hiding it all and twisting the facts is a malicious betrayal of the public’s trust and a grievous crime to the families of Henry Glover, James Brissette and Ronald Madison.
It also casts a dim light on the actions of the officers in the first place. If these men are willing to plant guns and destroy evidence would they also be willing to shoot unarmed citizens?
I think they would have gotten the same treatment as Dr. Pou got, which was largely sympathetic regardless of how the incident went down.
Once they went down the road of, well, we killed the wrong people lets drop a gun and mvoe on, they lost any potential of sympathy from me.
… and from just about everyone else too. Given the culture at NOPD, it’s hard to think that they would do anything else. Has the department ever gone on record as saying one of their shootings perhaps, might have been, unjustified? Have there probably been a few that were? It’s quite possible they were mistakes by overworked or under trained officers but the culture is to cover it up. That comes from the top. Then once the leadership is shown to be weak, every system from a government to a kitchen staff breaks down then.