The highest-profile case involving the police is the Danziger Bridge shooting in eastern New Orleans, where six days after Katrina, a group of police officers wielding assault rifles and automatic weapons fired on a group of unarmed civilians, wounding a family of four and killing two, including a teenager and a mentally disabled man. The man, Ronald Madison, 40, was shot in the back with a shotgun and then stomped and kicked as he lay dying, according to court papers.
One cannot help but wonder if the usual antagonists failed to get behind the push for justice in this case because of the difficulty in painting it as a racial killing. Exactly fifty percent of the gun men are black.
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Note that the NYT finds the following outrageous rather than a rational reaction by real men devoted to protecting their families and property rather than robbing their neighbors and shooting at rescue helicopters:
Broken levees left 80 percent of New Orleans submerged, but in unflooded Algiers Point, for instance, a mostly white enclave in a predominantly black neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi River, armed white militias cordoned off many of the streets.
They posted signs that boasted, “We shoot looters.”
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So?
Good.
Those men live there. The New York Times reporter does not. Presumably actual long-time residents know better than him that:
It also should have been expected that a large fraction of New Orleans’s lower class blacks would not evacuate before a disaster. Many are too poor to own a car, or too untrustworthy to get a ride with neighbors, or too shortsighted to worry.
Judging from their economic and educational statistics, New Orleans’ blacks are not even an above-average group of African-Americans, such as you find in Atlanta or Seattle, but more like Miami’s or Milwaukee’s. About half are below the poverty line. With the national black average IQ around 85, New Orleans’ mean black IQ would probably be in the lower 80s or upper 70s.
And of course nobody, despite what they may say, is all that much startled that, when the city’s whites and more prosperous and/or foresightful blacks left, New Orleans quickly turned into its demographic analog, Haiti—where 2004’s Tropical Storm Jeanne unleashed similar mayhem and chaos.
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Naturally, the story fails to report that most of post-Katrina crimes were committed by black residents — just as most of the pre-Katrina crimes were — who also spread bizarre, later-debunked rumors about everything from the cause of the disaster to the horror-movie behaviour of their fellows.
