Posted on 09/01/2005 10:22:08 PM PDT by nickcarraway
New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country. By mid-August of this year, 192 murders had been committed in New Orleans, "nearly 10 times the national average," reported the Associated Press. Gunfire is so common in New Orleans -- and criminals so fierce -- that when university researchers conducted an experiment last year in which they had cops fire 700 blank rounds in a neighborhood on a random afternoon "no one called to report the gunfire," reported AP.
New Orleans was ripe for collapse. Its dangerous geography, combined with a dangerous culture, made it susceptible to an unfolding catastrophe. Currents of chaos and lawlessness were running through the city long before this week, and they were bound to come to the surface under the pressure of natural disaster and explode in a scene of looting and mayhem.
Like riotous Los Angeles since the 1960s, New Orleans has been a wasteland of politically correct dysfunction for decades -- public schools so obviously decimated vouchers were proposed this year (and torpedoed by the left), barbaric gangster rap culture no one will confront lest they offend liberal pieties, multiculturalist frauds who empower no one but themselves, and cops neutered by the NAACP and ACLU.
Criminals have ruled New Orleans for some time, convincing many members of the middle class, long before the hurricane, that the city was unlivable. In 1994, New Orleans was the murder capital of America. It had 421 murders that year. Criminologists predicted 300 murders this year, a projection that now looks quite conservative.
Criminals dominate their neighborhoods to the point that people don't even call in crimes. The district attorney's office, tacitly admitting that the city's law-abiding citizens live in fear, has taken the "unusual" step of establishing a local witness protection program to encourage the reporting of crime, reports AP.
According to the New Orleans Police Foundation, most murderers get off -- only 1 in 4 are convicted -- and 42 percent of cases involving serious crimes since 2002 have been dropped by prosecutors.
Meanwhile, cops, when they can get away with it, have been living out of town. It is far too scary for them and their families. New Orleans Police officers are required to live in the city but many ignore this residency requirement, according to the Times-Picayune. The paper discovered that many top-ranking New Orleands cops lived in the suburbs and that most cops, both black and white, wanted the residency requirement rescinded.
For reasons of political correctness -- critics of law enforcement say lifting the residency requirement will mean more white cops eager to brutalize residents of the inner city and fewer black cops understanding of them -- the residency requirement remains, though cops breaking the rule told the Times-Picayune that it seriously hurts recruitment. It also -- this is particularly evident in Los Angeles where cops involved in the Ramparts scandal turned out to be ex-criminals -- distorts recruitment.
If the New Orleans Police Department has appeared feeble during the chaos -- and in some cases complicit in it -- policies like the residency requirement explain the breakdown. (Perhaps another factor that has rendered the NOPD feckless in the face of a rising murder rate is the criticism of its handling of a minority Mardi Gras.) Americans who have seen cops join in the looting ask: Why are police officers behaving like criminals? Well, because PC police departments like the NOPD hire them. Aggressive, let's-just-meet-the-quota-style affirmative action has become the door through which criminals enter the police academy.
More than the physical foundations of New Orleans will need to be rebuilt over the next few years. Its politically correct culture in which pathologies are allowed to fester in the name of "progress" forms much of the debris that must be cleared away if civilization is to return to New Orleans. A city which boasts as one of its businesses memorial "death t-shirts" -- clothing made popular by the frequency of gangland slayings in New Orleans that say things like, "Born a Pimp, Died a Playa" -- was headed for collapse even without a hurricane, and had become, as the exodus of cops illustrates, unlivable.
Conservative black leaders have been mau-maued into silence whenever they tell the truth about this barbarism and call for dramatic reform. But they are the ones who must lead the city now, and the phonies at organizations like the NAACP who despite all their rhetoric haven't done a thing to help the black underclass should step aside. Hurricane Katrina has made vivid the civilizational collapse they have long tried to conceal.
George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.
No,but I wouldn't be raping,killing and stealing drugs from hospitals to survive.Give me a break.
yes, and I'm not just suggesting it. I can also give you examples of when lieing and killing are justified if you really don't understand the concept.
give em all 40 acres and a mule and say, "Thats IT!! We're even" Now STFU!
No rational person is going to deny some hapless poor person stuck in such a situation basics like food, water, medical supplies. There should have been some sort of emergency plan in place to commandeer stores and to deploy police and others there to distribute such necesssities. Apparently there was not - thanks in large part to the widespread corruption there. There was even an interview today with an older man who stated that he was a Christian and how he felt terrible about going into an (already looted drugstore) and taking some basic necessities to survive. He hoped that he could repay the owner. one day. That fellow ain't the problem.
In such chaos and anarchy, the real problem is that the thug element rapidly takes over and leaves next to nothing for those truly in need of the necessities. Some desperate person walking out with food, etc. wouldn't be shot be shot - and you know it. You're being quite disingenous here. It's the thug element we're talking about. They're the ones carrying out the jewelry, the TVs, etc. (How in the hell is a plasma TV going to be of use in a place that won't have electricity for months?) Asking that question, and answering it honestly, requires a making a judgement about the looter's character - something that is the sin-of-no-forgiveness to all liberals.
Anyone firing a weapon at rescue personnel should be gunned down on the the spot - no mercy. Roving gangs of thugs - who've already carried out rapes and murders - should be dealt with ruthlessly. Shot on the spot. No trial, no lawyers, no ACLU, no SPLC. I'll be interested to see if you come up with an excuse for some nihilistic POS firing at a rescue boat or trying to loot a hospital where they're trying to keep patients alive.
Jeez. Tell that to the elderly, the mothers, the children. A minority is acting like animals. The majority is just trying to survive.
I think I would have headed for that Cadillac dealer that was wiped out.
Short term, maybe, not long term. The psychological scare of people just going to work and being attacked for nothing they did has a far great impact than the weeks worth of warnings of an impending hurricane.
Gas refineries can be replaced. We actually might get to drill in Anwar.
We aren't seeing a changed New Orleans. We are just seeing clearly what was already there.
New Orleans...the city that needs to go away.
I don't recall anyone on 9/11 shooting at the police and firemen and preventing them from doing their jobs.
Oh i agree that people shooting at rescuers should be shot. However there are thousands of people down there not looting. They dont have food or water. They cant go anywhere or get rescued.
Ill admit that some of those looters are animals, but others are just trying to survive. No one can seem to admit that.
The difference between NYC and NO? Fewer thugs and more honest, forceful city government? Guliani would have had the first looters shot on site. So people didn't loot.
Apparently there's no moral authority inside and in control of many of those people. And we are well aware of the loss of life down there. There's going to be even more loss of life, and the blood will be on the hands of the handwringing Enablers.
I second that. I do NOT want my tax dollars spent on a fools errand to try and hold back mother nature in that place.
Nam Vet
That's irrelevant since the looters you are defending you claim have no cars.
point taken
We didnt hear too much about that before Katrina. Maybe because no one cared...
They are poor because of decisions they have made. There are opportunities abound for people who are willing to work, not to mention the affirmative action programs, and gov't $ available for schooling for minorities. I had to put up with that "diversity" crap all through college, and aside from some legitimately helpless people, they made their bed. You are where you are in life because of choices you make. You can't change all that in 4 days before a hurricane...
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