Posted on 09/05/2005 2:47:58 AM PDT by Uncle Joe Cannon
New Orleans police to be pulled off streets
By Chris Adams, Martin Merzer and Susannah A. Nesmith Knight Ridder Newspapers
NEW ORLEANS — On the seventh day, the mayor of New Orleans said he would surrender control of his shattered city to federal and state officials, and authorities issued dire predictions of the human cost of Hurricane Katrina.
"We need to prepare the country for what's coming," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday. "We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine."
Last night, Mayor Ray Nagin said his entire police force would be pulled off the streets by tomorrow and all firefighters, paramedics and emergency dispatchers also were being sidelined. They will be sent to Baton Rouge for evaluation and counseling, he said.
He noted that two police officers committed suicide in recent days, and he said the other uniformed officers were traumatized by recent events. National Guard troops and state law-enforcement officers will replace them, he said.
"I'm not going to sit back and let another one die," Nagin said.
In one incident yesterday, seven men fired at a sheriff's deputy who had been sent to New Orleans from another part of Louisiana. The deputy was hauling a boat to a staging area for a rescue mission at the time, police said. Police officers shot the seven men, police said, killing two.
"The security forces won," Nagin said. "We're going to make this city safe. Anybody out there who has any ideas of doing anything but evacuating — there will be serious consequences."
Also yesterday, clergy and their flocks prayed for the souls of the dead — and for deliverance of the living. "God didn't bring this destruction on us," Vince Munoz of Biloxi, Miss., told 40 people at what little was left of the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Biloxi, where congregants worshipped in an outdoor courtyard.
"It's the nature of the planet since the Garden of Eden," he said. "God is using this to help us reach out to each other."
In a separate incident, a civilian helicopter lay on its side in New Orleans after an apparent crash landing last night. Details weren't immediately available, but early reports said two crew members suffered injuries.
Chertoff's comments and others by federal officials echoed the predictions of state and city officials and seemed designed to condition Americans for death counts that could reach the thousands. President Bush yesterday called Katrina, which struck the area last Monday, a "tidal wave of disaster."
"I think it's evident it's in the thousands," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said yesterday on CNN before he headed to the area.
Louisiana officials released their first official death toll — 59 — but said they knew of 100 other victims in the state, and they expected the number to soar as attention turned from searching for survivors to recovering the dead.
"We were working for the living, and now we are working for the dead and the living," said Dr. Louis Cataldie, a state medical official in Louisiana. "It's pretty tough, pulling out dead bodies."
In St. Gabriel, La., northwest of New Orleans, authorities guarded a 125,000-square-foot warehouse transformed into a morgue capable of holding more than 1,000 bodies. Residents said trucks, some refrigerated, had been stopping there for days, though no one knew if any bodies had been delivered.
"I wasn't able to help the living," said St. Gabriel Mayor George Grace, "so I was not at all upset about having a suitable place to house the dead."
In the New Orleans area, down this blocked street and around that tattered corner, portions of the city blinked back to life. Some people emerged from their homes for the first time in almost a week; some traffic lights even burst into green, yellow and red.
"Today, Sunday — right now — this is the first time I've come out," said Deborah Phelps, 56, of the Bywater section, near the French Quarter.
Throughout the region, people reached out to each other, often with sad results.
Rescue teams along the upper Gulf Coast struggled to gain access to wrecked inland communities, and when they did reach them, they often discovered bodies.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said 12 dead were found in Laurel, Miss., almost 100 miles inland.
In New Orleans, an odd, eerie sense of serenity was punctuated only by the sound of helicopters hovering above rescue sites.
Missing were the usual post-storm sounds of recovery: the hum of portable generators, the buzz of chain saws clearing roads, the tap-tap-tap of homeowners hammering blue tarpaulins on broken roofs.
One reason: Few survivors remained in the city that little more than a week earlier was home to 485,000 people. Most of the living had been evacuated, but casualties still floated down the streets and lay abandoned on highways.
Still, holdouts refused to leave, to the amazement of appalled volunteers who searched house-to-house through flooded, broken, starving neighborhoods.
At one point, a U.S. Navy helicopter hoisted a resident in a basket, brought her into the helicopter and whisked her away to one of the area's evacuation centers. Her neighbors wept and waved as they watched her go.
They said they were staying behind to care for older residents who refused to leave.
"That is not a reasonable alternative," Chertoff told "Fox News Sunday." "We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean this city."
A water-rescue team from Jefferson County, Ky., worked as hard to persuade people to evacuate as it worked to find them in the first place.
"The ones who didn't want to leave at first are now realizing they're running out of food, water and medicine, and it's time to go," said Eddie Whitworth, a team member.
Whitworth said the rescuers found two families that didn't want to leave the bodies of loved ones, but ultimately they were convinced that they had to save themselves.
Those who insisted on remaining behind included some of the city's quirkiest inhabitants, people such as Larry Wheeler, a disabled Vietnam veteran who sat in a lounge chair outside his apartment on dry but tree-clogged Sophie Wright Place. He smoked a cigarette and listened to the radio.
He pointed to his second-floor apartment. "That's Fort Larry right up there," he said.
Much of the metropolitan area remained flooded, but portions of the city had avoided the floods, though not the chaos provoked by the hurricane and its aftermath.
The sense of danger that was prevalent Thursday and Friday had dissipated but not disappeared. People who had been afraid to come out of their homes for fear of looters finally did so. Police, National Guardsmen and deputy sheriffs from far-away counties and parishes patrolled the city — with weapons at the ready.
In Jefferson Parish, some traffic signals were coming to life. Work crews in lift trucks worked on traffic signals on Causeway Boulevard. On River Road, which hugs the Mississippi River levee, some signals were already on.
To the north, in the overwhelmed city of Baton Rouge, hundreds of evacuees continued to pour into makeshift shelters, often seeking lost relatives.
One man carried a sign with the name of his wife's family scrawled on it. Children searched lists for names of missing siblings. A mother asked volunteers for help finding her daughter. In other developments:
• Oil refiners made progress in restoring some of their lost production capacity. Exxon Mobil, Marathon Oil and offshore pipeline operators said their operations were beginning to ramp up.
• Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a doctor, worked on patients at the makeshift medical-treatment center at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Frist said he arrived Saturday and called the progress made at the airport facility "amazing."
"Yesterday was organized chaos," he said. "Today, there's no chaos."
• Emergency managers in Texas and many other parts of the country began coming to grips with the long-term consequences of the mass relocation of Americans generated by Katrina. More than 250,000 Louisiana evacuees are living in Texas. Others were expected as far away as Utah, West Virginia and Iowa.
Well, it might be that said officers were photographed looting along with the common criminals. Picutes like that tend to hamper further career promotion.
"it's a small percentage of people who are the major problem."
I agree.
He is already the cause of too, many of his constituents deaths.
P.C. kills and so does incompetent fools like "Ragin-Nagin" "Stanko-Blanco" and "Punch-Drunk-Landrieu."
Now Nagin is going to get tough like "slick klintoon" and looks out for his peeps. "Too late Nagin!!!! you belong in Federal Prison as Heavy D's Bitch."
Lies Are The Opiate Of The Liberals,
NSNR-CSAOTL
Get some sleep, then maybe you will see that I am comparing our military to the good people of LA who did/are doing everything they can to help their fellow citizens.
As a NY'er, I will say that although we have more than our fair share of isiots, the overall population has a cano do attitude and and the firemen are the best of the best. I have a few buddies who are cops and firemen, and they are committed professional, and far far different than the bums we see on the tv.
And it's their homes too because of the NO residency requirement for city employees.
The military court that found England, et al guilty must be "a perfect example of PC ideology" right?
I stand by the comparison....the honorable and good people in both situations are newsworthy...not the idiots.
Oh why stop now, you incompetent fool? You have the blood of PLENTY enough on your hands, Nagin. Do I need to count the ways????
...."Last night, Mayor Ray Nagin said his entire police force would be pulled off the streets by tomorrow and all firefighters, paramedics and emergency dispatchers also were being sidelined. They will be sent to Baton Rouge for evaluation and counseling, he said.
"......
F^&*(ing idiot. Now the stupid mayor has sent everyone that knows the city home, so the Feds can do the work.
How about taking these 2000 or so folks, and put them under the jurisdiction of the feds. Let them at least direct traffic, drive their firetrucks, run supply chains to the local hospitals, drive the buses for the evacuation.
Now the Fed troops have to do all the back-up jobs, rather than let them find people trapped in attics, etc.
Idiot!
Well, it might at least reduce looting.
Finally, this idiot says something rational.
And what are you do if they put their hands on their hips, give you that looks and announce:
"H--- no! I ain't gonna sign nuthin' and I ain't gonna give ya no name of no relatvie either..."
The police are a vital cog in hiz honor's bribe and kick back department. Plus they hold the back up crack stash in evidence rooms.
I would offer the thought that "informed and intelligent Democrat" is a contradiction of terms, an oxymoron if you will. If you are informed, you can't be a Democrat if you are intelligent. By the same token, if you are intelligent, you cannot be a Democrat if you have all the facts.
America will never be safe as long as a single Democrat holds elected public office.
I guess seven days of sitting back was enough, huh Nagin? While you blamed the Feds for not bailing your pathetic butt out earlier?
I have known lots of NOPD. This is uncalled for. Many of them are good, hardworking guys who want to be the good guy in a city where crime is very high per capita.
They are paid low. They have to often work a second job to make ends meet. More than one family has met the qualifications for food stamps. And the fact that they are paid low enough to make that qualification is a sad thing in and of itself.
They had a bad job to do anyway, policing a city that required big skills in crowd control and dealing with a rough criminal element.
And then the storm came.
The men in this situation faced their entire lives shattered. Their homes were gone, their families threatened or dead, having to move through chaotic situations surrounded by death, lack of communications, and being fired on.
The guys in NYC were gallant and heroic, but didn't have their entire lives destroyed. They had homes to go back to. Their loved ones weren't lost in that morass of black water. What they were trying to protect, the people of New York, the property of New York, mostly existed.
The guys in New Orleans had it differently. They were expected to police what was no longer a city, but a swamp of dead bodies, looters, and frightened people.
I can understand why some left. I can understand why some suicided. I am amazed that any stayed on the job at all. Those guys are heros in my book. To stay on the job when all you have worked for is washed away in the muck shows a heroism that goes beyond the pale of many of us.
I won't deny there is graft in NO. I won't deny the corruption. But to paint all those guys like they were crooks is wrong, wrong, wrong, and shameful.
I guess it depends on what the meaning of "is" is, as per this post.
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