Posted on 09/03/2005 8:04:59 AM PDT by Carl/NewsMax
New Orleans Police Chief Edwin Compass said Friday that hurricane rescue efforts were hampered when relief workers came under attack by the city's criminal element, prompting conditions that resembled "urban warfare."
"We have never had an urban warfare battle like this on any front in the history of our nation," Compass told NBC's "Dateline."
"You're fighting in buildings that are pitch black with darkness. These individuals have root - the criminal element have looted all the gun shops and gun stores in this city, so they're armed, they're dangerous."
Federal Emergency Management Agency Chief Michael Brown, under fire for his agency's slow response, echoed Chief Compass's complaint, telling CNN: "We are working under conditions of urban warfare."
Though the city's crime rate is ten times the national average, U.S. news outlets downplayed the connection between New Orleans' outsized criminal element and delays in rescue efforts.
Saturday's London Times, however, painted a bleak picture of the challenges faced by local police as they tried to restore order.
"One New Orleans police officer wept as he described seeing bodies riddled with bullets, and the top of one man's head shot off. He said some looters were armed with AK-47 rifles, and compared the situation with Somalia, with police outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks . . .
"An effort to remove patients and staff from Charity Hospital, in the city centre, was suspended after it came under sniper fire . . .
"'It's a war-zone, and they're not treating it like one,' he said, referring to the federal government . . . Gunmen continued to fire on troops and rescue helicopters, and police officials said that many officers had stopped reporting for duty, cutting manpower by 20 per cent."
Hopefully they used the smoke as cover. The Lost City of New Orleans is now the Kingdom of the Seal.
And since most of the gangbangers are drug dealers who also practice extortion, they probably had the best guns money and extortion could buy.
Where they can be shot? Texas LEOs and civilians, with CHLs and/or "deer rifles" (or in my case an ugly black semi-auto version of a battle rifle in 7.62x51, with scope) in the back of their pick 'em trucks will not put up with any of that... er.. stuff. Of course my neighborhood is pretty safe, surrounded as I am by two divisions of the US Army. :)
I tend to not give much credence to that number, unless Wally World had a gun warehouse in NO. That would be somewhere around 1000 to 1500 guns. Have you been to the sporting goods department of your local WalMart? They have about a dozen guns on display. They'll have maybe a couple or three times that many in the back, but those will be mostly the more popular .22s, not the 30-06 or .270 deer rifles. So say maybe 50 guns per store. You believe the gun safes in 20 to 30 WalMarts in NO were successfully looted? Be kind of hard, since there don't appear to be that many WalMarts in New Orleans proper.
I agree. At the first sign of trouble there should have been a shoot to kill order.
Wal-Mart basically knocked off that Japanese 'Just in Time Delivery' method of distribution. Walmart just does it on a vast retail scale. People would probably be shocked to hear how many copies of a book Amazon prefers to keep in stock.
Keep it under control down there!
No kidding. I remember when the "word is bond" evidence came out, and how freepers immediately figured out from that clue that the sniper was a black muslim!
And yet Moose got a book deal out of his incompetence. I imagine the mayor of N.O. will get a book deal as well.
I was in New York during 9/11, and the blacks in the city were, in my opinion, very patriotic. Everyone came together in a kind of solidarity, for the first few weeks at least. There was NOTHING like what happened in New Orleans. I think Giuliani was partly responsible for that, not only because he handled it so well at the time, but because he had instilled respect for law and order over the previous years. If 9/11 had happened under Mayor Dinkins, I hate to think what the reaction would have been.
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