Sealing Them In
A couple of days ago I wrote about the "single worst decision" that was made in the wake of the hurricane. I was wrong; there were actually two horrible decisions that created one horrible Catch-22.
The first part of the catch was the decision to keep relief workers with food and water out of the city. Early reports had the Red Cross saying straightforwardly that they were told by Homeland Security that the plan was to keep relief out of the city because they wanted everyone to evacuate and believed survivors might not go if they could eat or drink --- and that security was so bad they feared "feeding stations might get ransacked."
Yesterday, the story changed:
Marsha Evans, the national Red Cross president, first made the request to open its relief effort on Sept. 1, three days after Katrina struck, officials say.
"We had adequate supplies, the people and the vehicles," said Vic Howell, chief executive officer of the agency's Louisiana Capital Area Chapter. "It was the middle of a military rescue operation trying to save lives. We were asked not to go in and we abided by that recommendation."
Col. Jay Mayeaux, the deputy director of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said he had asked the Red Cross to wait 24 hours for conditions to be "set" for the operation. But by then a large scale evacuation was under way.
According to Media Matters, the Red Cross spokespeople have issued some rather strange and contradictory statements recently and point out that the head of the Red Cross is a major GOP bigwig. I don't think anyone knows yet exactly what went on. Whatever the truth of why they held back, nobody disputes the fact that the Red Cross was ready to go in last Thursday and didn't. The question is why.
The second half of the catch was that it now appears that while people were told for days they would be rescued, and were denied aid during that period, they were also shuffled all over the city and not allowed to leave on foot over the bridges. The story of the EMTs (confirmed by the NY Times today) and the reports by Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera on Friday confirm that this was true.
Yesterday UPI was able to get an interview with Arthur Lawson the chief of the Gretna police whom the EMTs accused of blocking the Crescent City connection bridge --- the bridge to which they had been sent by New Orleans police. He said this:
"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."
[...]
He says that his officers did assist about 4000 people who "arrived at the doorstep of (Gretna City)" either by crossing the bridge before it was closed or approaching from another route.
"We commandeered public transit buses and we took them to higher and safer ground" at the junction of Interstate-10 and Causeway Boulevard where "there was food and shelter," he said.
Kevin Drum asks the same question I asked when I read this. If the police could do this for people "approaching from another route" (not New Orleans) why couldn't they have helped others? And when it became clear that the evacuation was terribly late, why couldn't they let people walk out? I asked that question last Thursday night when I saw the report by Smith and Rivera on Fox news.
I was told by commenters at the time that it would be suicide for people to walk out, but that's turned out not to be true. As Kevin points out, it was a 20 mile trip on dry roads to safety. Many people would have gladly made that trek. I know that's exactly what I would have done --- or tried to do anyway.
As Teresa Neilson Hayden points out in this amazing post on the same subject, that's exactly what New Yorkers all did on September 11th. Indeed, New Yorkers expect to walk across bridges to safety in the case of an emergency. There is nothing about letting people walk out of a disaster zone that is in any way unusual. In fact, it's something that people have done forever. But not this time.
The reason they weren't allowed to walk out that night, of course, is simple. The police chief says it right out. They decided that saving their fully evacuated "bedroom community" from what they assumed would be "looting, pillaging and burning" by victims of the hurricane was more important than allowing people to save their own lives by walking through their town to safety up the road.
Picture for a moment young women with their children, old people, families, single people gathered together in a make-shift community in the middle of chaos approaching police officers on a bridge begging for help. Picture them being white. Do you think the police would shoot over their heads and push them back? Even if they did that would they then land a helicopter in thier midst in the middle of the night, not to rescue dying elderly, but to force their somewhat safe, visible make-shift community out into the pitch black anarchy of the city?
I'm pretty sure that the police would have let them walk through their precious bedroom community. They might have guarded their town, but they would have let them walk. And if they were under orders from others not to let them through, they surely would not have dispersed them back into New Orleans in the middle of the night.
Think about how many children we saw during those days. Lots and lots of them. And fragile elderly. Young women with tiny babies. That's who was fleeing that chaos.
Again, I'm sure there were looters and thugs in this mix. I have little doubt that people felt unsafe on the streets. Which is all the more reason that the authorities should have brought in national guard immediately and allowed the red cross to set up some relif centers so that people could feel safe, organize themselves and be evacuated in an orderly fashion. And the fact that everyone was terrified of being on the streets is the reason they should have let them flee the city across the bridge.
As it was, the victims were victimized first by the hurricane, an unpreventable act of nature, and were then frightened half to death by lawlessness, both real and imagined. When they turned to the cops for help, their lives were deemed less valuable than some well insured storefront in Gretna, Louisiana. Police, whom I assume are mostly good people doing difficult jobs, looked at mothers with 6 month old babies and saw a criminal who was going to "loot, pillage and burn" their town.
Kevin asks why the National Guard and other authorities right under the bridge at the convention center did nothing if suburban cops from the other side of the bridge were preventing people from leaving. It's a good question, but it kind of answers itself. The authorities were obviously either in a similar state of mind and obliging each other's civic desire to keep out the "mob" or they were operating under the same orders. We don't know the answer to that yet.
It's possible that FEMA issued a directive to to seal off the city, nobody in nobody out, but it's actually more likely that the second half of the catch is the result of local cops and other authorities making it clear that they weren't going to have a bunch of crazed negroes marauding through the suburbs. (The reports of "we always knew this would happen" from Baton Rouge illustrate that point.)
The New York Times, linked above, reports this:
The lawlessness that erupted in New Orleans soon after the hurricane terrified officials throughout Louisiana, and even a week later, law enforcement officers rarely entered the city without heavy weaponry.
It is becoming clear to me that this is also one of the main reasons for the delayed response. The question is whether it was true that the city had erupted into wild anarchy in the streets that required the deployment of thousands upon thousands of military to quell, or whether it was another example of primal white fear of black revolt.
We don't have the facts yet. It's clear that there were violent young men who intimidated and assaulted people at both the rescue sites, although there are differing accounts of how pervasive they were. There was looting --- but nothing on the scale of what we saw in Bagdad, when people stripped the electical wiring out of buildings and stole the toilets from the bathrooms. We will probably never know how much was stolen, but considering how hard it was to transport anything, it's probably not as bad as some thought. There were certainly reports of shots fired and snipers, but as in earlier examples of civic chaos, it's often difficult to say who is shooting and who is shooting back.
Oddly, the press wasn't able to capture much of it, at least not that they showed or wrote about. There was some footage of looting of TV's (I might have stolen a TV myself, with the thought that I could get to some electricity or a generator and find out what was going on.) There were a couple of broadcasts of men with guns being confronted by police. But, if the city was overrun by criminals, the media failed to capture the full force of the anarchy with pictures and that is curious.
I suspect it was people's imaginations that supplied that.
I may be wrong. It's possible that authorities were wise to hold back food and water for five long days because it was too dangerous to proceed into the city. Perhaps the gangs of thugs were so numerous and so dangerous that police had to keep women and children from leaving the city on foot because some criminals might sneak out with them. This could all turn out to be the case. But my suspicion is that a decision was made somewhere along the line that they were going to contain what they believed to be certain anarchy in New Orleans until they could assemble an overwhelming force of men with guns. (Why it took so long to assemble that force is another question.) Irrational fear of the mob was the reason the Red Cross didn't enter the city. And this was the reason the police didn't allow people to leave the city on foot in large numbers.
The question is if there was a real mob to fear or if the sight of large numbers of displaced black people made people assume there was one. Our history suggests the latter. As I wrote before, that's one of the oldest stories in the book.
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