Masques of Death (A sewer of applied liberalism, New Orleans was lawless long before this week.)

The American Prowler ^ | 9/2/2005 | George Neumayr

[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.

[Southack]

"When you dont have any money, a vehicle, or anywhere else to go. What are you supposed to do? Answer that question and this whole crisis would have been averted."

Not true. The crisis itself is a combination of local mismanagement of levy and educational funds for the past several decades combined with Mother Nature and capped off by roughly a third of the able-bodied population that **chose** to remain in place when they had been ordered to evacuate.

Thus, contrary to your inane claim, answering your "one question" would not have averted this crisis.

...And where do you go and how do you get there? You walk **away** from the disaster area to any area of civilization that is connected to our infrastructure grid (e.g. food, water, sanitation, electricity, medicine, roads, phones, law/order, etc.).

Remaining in a lawless disaster area without food/water is as idiotic as "riding out a storm" when you've been given days of advance notice to evacuate. It's repeating your earlier mistake, writ large.

Likewise, shooting at the rescue helicopters and boats that are being sent to aid your evacuation is a pretty large mistake, too.

[wildcatf4f3]

even if they had electricity--the water! "here watch me plug in my new------- ZAPP!!!"

[Tall_Texan]

By the way, a Cadillac dealership did lose its inventory.

All of them or just the lavender and maroon ones?

[justa-hairyape]

What are you supposed to do?

You use the tools god gave you. Your legs and feet. You do realize that we existed as a species for thousands of years before cars and money were invented. I survived near Los Angeles for a number of years without a car. Went through many pairs of shoes though.

[Lancey Howard]

I just saw this on another thread and thought it approriate for this thread as well.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

Oh, great another bloody apologist for lawlessness. What you see in N.O. is animal mentality that's been coddled by liberalism as an acceptable way to behave. That attitude killed N.O. There was no crime spree after 9/11 in NY. There was no looting with the great blackout that crippled much of the east coast. Those areas, yes, infested with liberalism, were not dominated by it, and therefore society could function during their crises.

[DieselBoy]

Sad times of FR when people focus just on the negatives like looting and not the total loss of human life. No authority no law down there.

'When you dont have any money, a vehicle, or anywhere else to go. What are you supposed to do?'

Sad to know that im the only person that knows people that live like that.

[DieselBoy]

9/11 did not destroy a whole region like Katrina did.

[wildcatf4f3]

All the bridges are down. Where are they going to go. How are they going to "get away"?

[JasonC]

Nope, no breaks, only bullets.

They can have all the bottled water and Cheerios they like. But that is not what is happening. What is happening is, they are raiding the gun section at WalMart and shooting cops. Please remove your head from its present location.

[x]

There's a time and a place for these things and this isn't it. Whatever New Orleans's troubles and faults were, kicking the city when it's down is pretty low. This is a lot like Newt Gingrich blaming Susan Smith's murder of her children on liberalism. It's not the response of a flesh-and-blood human being who can see and hear and think, but of someone who's become an ideological machine, spitting out a party line on every occasion, and spinning every tragedy or catastrophe for partisan advantage.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

You underestimate the economic and emotional impact of 9/11.

[ChicagoHebrew]

I was 5 blocks away from Ground Zero when the Towers fell on 9-11. Throughout downtown, people quickly abandoned their stores and shops and fled by foot. The police were overwhelmed with search and rescue operations. But New Yorkers didn't loot. Despite all the empty shops with windows smashed, New Yorkers didn't act like raving animals and steal everything in sight. Instead, there were dozens of people lining the street passing out free water, food, and necessities.

[wildcatf4f3]

I still wouldn't loot luxury items. I'm just not like that. Perhaps, I was raised right.

[DieselBoy]

9/11 had horrible emotional and economic impact. However, Katrina is going to hurt more.

Gas prices are already going through the rood and now there is less of an ability to refine crude oil. I talked to some friends in Charolette this morning and they told me that gas stations were running out of gas.

[ChicagoHebrew]

Pray tell, DieselBoy, where are you from? This is not a "Deep South" problem, this is an urban, black problem. It is the same kind of looting that took place in Los Angeles after the Rodney King case. Is LA a Third World Country?

There were plenty of urban blacks working downtown in New York on 9-11. Despite all the abandoned stores, there was no looting or rioting. This is a New Orleans problem, plain and simple.

[patriciamary]

and would you rape and kill innocent people,sure they're just doing it to survive,They're nothing but animals let out of the cage.So why don't you go down and stand in the middle of these people for 5 minutes.I bet you wouldn't last one.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

All the bridges are down. Where are they going to go. How are they going to "get away"?

They live in an area that's 7 feet below sea level on a good day to begin with. A hurricane is coming. They did not get out of the way ... because ...

[oyez]

A lot of NO police are AWOL. They have the some problems everyone else has. They have most likely evacuated with their families. Given the choice of keeping a family or keeping a job, the family gets the first choice.

The NO police could predict better than anyone how dangerous the situation would get, anyway.

[DieselBoy]

Well after 9/11 there were rescuers there almost immediately. There was leadership and most people wernt trapped in the city.