Surely, this CAN'T be true, CAN IT?

[HollynLA]

I've heard that Mayor Nagin was angry about this and mentioned this exact incident. Appearantly it was the mayor who told them to do there and then they were blocked. Appearantly a number of them died on the interstate bridge as well. Red Tape at it's worst.

[EverythingIsEverything]

I've heard that Mayor Nagin was angry about this and mentioned this exact incident. Appearantly it was the mayor who told them to do there and then they were blocked. Appearantly a number of them died on the interstate bridge as well. Red Tape at it's worst.

To me sounds like they where trying to contain a whole bunch of black people in one area, withhold food and water, turn away, buses, walmart trucks etc. Hopefully whatever the Truth of the matter is, it will come out, no matter how hard it may be to swallow.

[x-y-no]

I saw this email, but didn't post it here because I haven't seen any corroborating witness account yet.

This has at least some more credibility than some of the other stuff floating around out there, since the authors actually put their names to it. Nonetheless, I'd like to see more before I totally believe it.

[banshee]

If I'm not mistaken this is the same check point Shep Smith was screaming about last week on the news. From what I understood the Gretna police chief blocked some entrances into the city in order to maintain control in his city.

[clueless newbie]

I think here is the link with the details.

http://neworleans.craigslist.org/rnr/96324301.html

Would be interesting to see more corroborating accounts, but it seems quite plausible.

[stormie_skies]

I also remember the mayor mentioning something along these lines, although he wasn't very specific as to who turned the crowd of people around...

I hope its not true. If it is, the whole lot of em deserve to be charged with criminal negligence. I don't give a rats behind what you saw on TV - its no excuse to leave thousands of Americans - your neighbors - to die in the street like dogs...

[zoeyann]

Before I got power back I heard the interview with Aaron Broussard on WWl radio. They did shut down all poosible entrances to Jefferson Parish including foot traffic from New Orleans. The said this was because there were no buses there to evacuate people, and he did not know where that info was coming from, but also that there were problems in that with area with crime as well and they did not have an area for people to gather nor any food or water to assist them so basically it would be like just moving the problem from one area to the other. Personnally I feel like if these people could walk out of any of these areas. LET THEM! But then again I am not a public official.

[jasons2k]

I've heard that Mayor Nagin was angry about this and mentioned this exact incident. Appearantly it was the mayor who told them to do there and then they were blocked. Appearantly a number of them died on the interstate bridge as well. Red Tape at it's worst.

To me sounds like they where trying to contain a whole bunch of black people in one area, withhold food and water, turn away, buses, walmart trucks etc. Hopefully whatever the Truth of the matter is, it will come out, no matter how hard it may be to swallow.

Please stop it with the race card garbage. Just stop. It's getting old and by stating this you must have some divine knowledge that the entire police force was somehow white.

[greeng13]

I've heard that Mayor Nagin was angry about this and mentioned this exact incident. Appearantly it was the mayor who told them to do there and then they were blocked. Appearantly a number of them died on the interstate bridge as well. Red Tape at it's worst.

To me sounds like they where trying to contain a whole bunch of black people in one area, withhold food and water, turn away, buses, walmart trucks etc. Hopefully whatever the Truth of the matter is, it will come out, no matter how hard it may be to swallow.

Please stop it with the race card garbage. Just stop. It's getting old and by stating this you must have some divine knowledge that the entire police force was somehow white.

I agree with that!

[stormie_skies]

They just interviewed the Gretna Police Chief on MSNBC, and he confirmed that the bridge was blocked off. He wouldn't confirm anything about the food and water...he said he wasn't on the scene and didn't know, and would look into it.

He also said that if he had the chance to do everything again, he would do the exact same thing.

What a slimeball. Things like this make me empathetic to those who keep "playing the race card"....

[Anonymous]

I don't think this has to do with race or the Chief being a jerk. It is the police chief's job to protect the citizens of his city. HEaring all of the lawlessness and problems in New Orleans, if you were the police chief of a neighboring city, would you want those problems coming in to your town?

I don't blame him. With no facilities to help or evacuate any of them, and seeing the problems that were happening, I would have done the same thing.

[streetsoldier]

I don't think this has to do with race or the Chief being a jerk. It is the police chief's job to protect the citizens of his city. HEaring all of the lawlessness and problems in New Orleans, if you were the police chief of a neighboring city, would you want those problems coming in to your town?

I don't blame him. With no facilities to help or evacuate any of them, and seeing the problems that were happening, I would have done the same thing.

A policeman's job is to "protect and serve the public". To me, that means ANY "public" group, be it two or hundreds...especially during a disaster of this magnitude.

This "law-enforcement" official should have the full weight of the law thrown at him, IMHO.

[charley]

Here's where the story was published ~ it's an EMS magazine: http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publis ... 8337.shtml

And for some reason, when you click that link, it has moved the story to this site, instead: http://www.socialistworker.org/2005-2/5 ... roes.shtml

It's amazing the stories that are coming from people who were there and aren't politically motivated. Very, VERY sad how these people were treated. Inexcusable, imo.

[jburns]

A policeman's job is to "protect and serve the public". To me, that means ANY "public" group, be it two or hundreds...especially during a disaster of this magnitude.

This "law-enforcement" official should have the full weight of the law thrown at him, IMHO.

Your view is shortsighted and this is standard procedure. You contain civil unrest as much as possible. I can not imagine any town or county in the US, if their was rioting, looting and gunfire in the next town, not blocking access. He was serving and protecting the public of his juristiction.

[streetsoldier]

A policeman's job is to "protect and serve the public". To me, that means ANY "public" group, be it two or hundreds...especially during a disaster of this magnitude.

This "law-enforcement" official should have the full weight of the law thrown at him, IMHO.

Your view is shortsighted and this is standard procedure. You contain civil unrest as much as possible. I can not imagine any town or county in the US, if their was rioting, looting and gunfire in the next town, not blocking access. He was serving and protecting the public of his juristiction.

Are you now, or have you ever been a law enforcement officer? Just curious, as I seved in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, and at present Dennis (azsnowman) is a policeman in AZ; we are appalled.

[StrongWind]

A policeman's job is to "protect and serve the public". To me, that means ANY "public" group, be it two or hundreds...especially during a disaster of this magnitude.

This "law-enforcement" official should have the full weight of the law thrown at him, IMHO.

Your view is shortsighted and this is standard procedure. You contain civil unrest as much as possible. I can not imagine any town or county in the US, if their was rioting, looting and gunfire in the next town, not blocking access. He was serving and protecting the public of his juristiction.

So you're saying that if someone is trying to escape the rioting they should be sent back in to be killed?

[stormie_skies]

A policeman's job is to "protect and serve the public". To me, that means ANY "public" group, be it two or hundreds...especially during a disaster of this magnitude.

This "law-enforcement" official should have the full weight of the law thrown at him, IMHO.

Your view is shortsighted and this is standard procedure. You contain civil unrest as much as possible. I can not imagine any town or county in the US, if their was rioting, looting and gunfire in the next town, not blocking access. He was serving and protecting the public of his juristiction.

As I understood the accounts of both the evacuees who were there and the police chief, this occurred quite early in the crisis. I don't think it was any later than Wednesday - the police chief himself said that there were still concerns within his city that the levees protecting them would be overtopped (though, he conceeded, they would have only caused minimal flooding - not like New Orleans). He also said that the people in his city were not fully aware of the conditions on the ground in New Orleans or the severity of the flooding. Assuming both of these things are true, then this man had no reason to believe that any sort of "rioting" was going on in the first place - and it wasn't, there was no riot, much of the looting was for basic survival needs and the true threat of violent unrest didn't take hold until Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, when people started to believe that help would never arrive.

So what was the basis for this mans assumption that these people had arrived at his town to loot and riot? These people were begging for a way out of the city - why were they percieved as SUCH a threat that they not only had to be policed, but they had to be kept from contact with the safe community completely, denied the right to pass through the community (the police officers allowed people in cars to pass without question), and to even be forced off the semi-safety ofthe bridge with random confinscations and warning shots and threats???

I am usually very slow to - and annoyed with people who are quick to - "play the race card," but in this situation, I don't see how racism and classism could have NOT been a factor. The guy with the credit card and the SUV can pass on through, but the group of people who were most likely dirty,poor and mostly black who were begging to be shown a way to safety were assumed to be criminals, and were treated as such.

What that police department did was beyond inhumane. They need to be held accountable.

[streetsoldier]

It would be easy enough to identify armed suspects and disarm/arrest them on a bridge that's been cordoned off; just like in an airport, check them a few at a time.

Personally, I could not conceive of blocking I-40 (or any of the other St. Louis bridges) and denying access if a disaster struck East St. Louis, and people HAD to evacuate west into STL; there are ways to perform this properly.

[stormie_skies]

It would be easy enough to identify armed suspects and disarm/arrest them on a bridge that's been cordoned off; just like in an airport, check them a few at a time.

Personally, I could not conceive of blocking I-40 (or any of the other St. Louis bridges) and denying access if a disaster struck East St. Louis, and people HAD to evacuate west into STL; there are ways to perform this properly.

Exactly. Its clear that there was a sizable law enforcement presence in that area....they could have organized people into lines and searched them. We accepted more than 20,000 people in the Reliant complex here in Houston and haven't had any problems with violent crime at all. We searched everyone. We made sure there was a significant police presence. Its not rocket science...

[stormie_skies]

The two parametics who came out with this story were also interviewed by MSNBC last night. Here are a few more details from a story published by the Washington Times/UPI:

An eyewitness account from two San Francisco paramedics posted on an internet site for Emergency Medical Services specialists says, "Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot."
"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.
"All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down," he said.
The bridge in question -- the Crescent City Connection -- is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.
Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.
He added that the small town, which he called "a bedroom community" for the city of New Orleans, would have been overwhelmed by the influx.
"There was no food, water or shelter" in Gretna City, Lawson said. "We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people.
"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."
But -- in an example of the chaos that continued to beset survivors of the storm long after it had passed -- even as Lawson's men were closing the bridge, authorities in New Orleans were telling people that it was only way out of the city.
"The only way people can leave the city of New Orleans is to get on (the) Crescent City Connection ... authorities said," reads a Tuesday morning posting on the Web site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, which kept reporting through the storm and the ruinous flooding that followed.
Similar announcements appeared on the Web site of local radio station WDSU and other local news sources.
"Evidently, someone on the ground (in New Orleans) was telling people there was transport here, or food or shelter," said Lawson. "There wasn't."
"We were not contacted by anyone" about the instructions being given to survivors to use the bridge to get out of town, he said.
The two paramedics, who were trapped in the city while attending a convention, joined a group of people who had been turned out by the hotels that they were staying in on Wednesday. When the group attempted to get to the Superdome -- designated by city authorities as a shelter for those unable to evacuate -- they were turned away by the National Guard.
"Quite naturally, we asked ... 'What was our alternative?' The guards told us that that was our problem, and no, they did not have extra water to give to us.
"This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile law enforcement."
As they made their way to the bridge in order to leave the city "armed Gretna sheriffs (sic) formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads."
Members of the group nonetheless approached the police lines, and "questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge ... They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City.
"These were code words," the paramedics wrote, "for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans."
The authors say that during the course of that day, they saw "other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated."
Lawson says that his officers "acted in the manner they were instructed to" and defends the order to close the bridge as "the right decision."

A couple of things to note:

According to the police chief, the city was essentially empty... so who were they protecting exactly (assuming they had to protect anyone from this group, which I doubt)?

The word to leave the city by way of this bridge got out on Tuesday morning - WAY before the worst of the social unrest was going on in New Orleans. I don't see how these people had any logical reason to believe that their city would be "looted, burned and pillaged" - unless they were making off the cuff character judgements that they had no business making.

I think these parametics (and they are legit, they were interviewed on MSNBC as weel, though I forget their names) made a good assessment of the message these officers were sending, and it disgusts me.

http://washtimes.com/upi/20050908-112433-4907r.htm