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."
NYC did a great job, but what happened in NO and the Gulf Coast makes 9/11 look like a minor event. The disaster area in NYC was confined to a relatively small area (city blocks) compared to NO's 181 square miles or the 90,000 square mile regional disaster area. The number of people affected is also far greater. NO had a police force of about 1,500 compared to the 38,000 NYC police force. The 9/11 attack lasted a few hours and the site was cleaned up by May 30, 2002, less than 9 months later. We are talking about years to get NO back on its feet.
Lets see... Maybe a platoon of the Salvation Army run amok?
Perhaps a gang of pink, euro-american caucasoids gone wilding?
A rogue sect of Mennonite's tired of being ignored?
This picture is truly Ironic, if we didn't know about what happened in New Orleans, we could swear that this picture was from some other part of the world in another country.
Did that finally happen? I'm asking seriously. I was out of touch for most of yesterday and could only read briefly, so I'd missed that if it happened.
Don't you think some of the thugs will indeed rear their ugly heads again in the evacuee centers? I hope TX deals with them better than LA.
and either way ? BUSH and the Republicans get the blame for it, and the Liberals, and the Democrats know full well too.
However, the first order of business for the New Orleans PD should have been to confiscate those firearms and bring them to the police station. Let the DVD players, gold rings, and Blackberrys go if they lacked the manpower to protect other stores. Even the Los Angeles PD figured that much out during the Rodney King riots.
As for the equally worthless Governor Blanco, she should have sent the National Guard in as combat units and not as emergency workers. Had the National Guard and state and local police suppressed the rioters ruthlessly, the rescue efforts would have gone much further than they have thus far.
Or there's going to be hell to pay, and not only in Texas.
he was on Fox last night with (I think)Geraldo as they warned of a riot at the COnvention Center ... he whined, and whined, and whined.
To the whiners of all races, I would have to ask: do you want 'leadership' of your own color, or people who will get the job done? Seems that's never asked around election time, the only time you see Democrats effectively mobilize.
That's my hope, too. I do not want the media in the middle of it, I don't want crybabies. The situation is desperate - shoot to kill, pile the bodies up, block all exits, and finish the job - wrong place, wrong time, too bad. And make sure that busybodies in the MSM are none the wiser. It isn't racist and it's nothing personal, just business. This whole thing is out of control; get it over with.
I know they are finding guns, knives, etc in the bushes outside the Astrodome - they are being frisked. However - the criminal element finds what they need - and once they started getting integrated into the communities(particularly in TX) they are going to continue their life of crime.
What the criminal element numbers are I don't know - but they have been getting away with murder (literally) in NO and they won't be in NO anymore!
I was wondering about that. How long would it have taken to have loaded the guns up?
What Maroon! I guess he's never heard of little dust up called the War of 1812, which is strange because the final battle was fought on land that's now in his own city. The urban warfare was in our nation's capital.
Then there was that little unpleasantness in the early 1860s. Lot's of urban warfare in that one too.
But then again he said "on any front", so I guess he's also not heard of more recent events such as Mogadishu or Falluja.
The MSM will now go into high gear with tear-jerker images designed to prime the pump of the charity and aid stories. They will play soft music with photos of women holding babies and crying.
They will NOT show the dead bodies with bulltet holes in them or with their head blown off. It is not network news, it is socialism USA.
Why should anybody be surprised at all this? Once there were no lights available to play midnight basketball, these youths had to find some outlet for their youthful energy!
But seriously, what did they expect? The city is full of criminals, gangs and drug addicts and these have been coddled or ignored for years. Why is it a stretch to think a civil disaster is not going to be looked upon as a "golden opportunity" by these same criminals?
All those other cities who think they have finished writing their Homeland Security Plan had best go back and review the section on "Security". In the likelihood they find themselves outgunned, they had better have Plan B - such as identifying and deputizing civilian militia and shooting-to-kill.
Anybody wonder yet what would happen in some of our cities or even small towns that have illegal immigrant gangs like MS-13? This is the tip of the lawless chasm we have been permitting and breeding for decades and we'd better start looking seriously at it instead of blaming George Bush for not getting there fast enough with air-conditioned busses!
Of course they did. Many did not want to evacuate. They saw their lottery ticket by staying behind with their eyes glued to the jewelry stores, the bank vaults, and the safe deposit boxes.
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