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Racist police blocked bridge and
forced evacuees back at gunpoint
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by Andrew Buncombe, The Independent [London, UK]
Sept. 12, 2005
A Louisiana police chief has admitted that he ordered his officers to
block a bridge over the Mississippi river and force escaping evacuees
back into the chaos and danger of New Orleans. Witnesses said the
officers fired their guns above the heads of the terrified people to
drive them back and "protect" their own suburbs.
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The Crescent City Connection
The bridge between white and black,
life and death in New Orleans
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Two paramedics who were attending a conference in the city and then stayed to help those affected by the hurricane, said the officers told them they did not want their community "becoming another New Orleans".
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The desperate evacuees were forced to trudge back into the city they had just left. "It was a real eye-opener," Larry Bradshaw, 49, a paramedic from San Francisco, told The Independent on Sunday. "I believe it was racism. It was callousness, it was cruelty."
Mr Bradshaw said the police blocked off the road on the Thursday and Friday after Hurricane Katrina struck on Monday 29 August. He and his wife Lorrie Slonsky, also a paramedic, had sheltered with others in the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter.
When food and water ran out they were forced to head for the city's convention center, but on the way they heard reports of the chaos and violence that was taking place there and inside the Superdome where thousands of people were forced together without running water, toilets, electricity or air conditioning. So Mr Bradshaw spoke with a senior New Orleans police officer who instructed them to cross the Crescent City Connection bridge to Jefferson Parish, where he promised they would find buses waiting to evacuate them.
They were in the middle of a group of up to 800 people -- overwhelmingly black -- walking across the bridge when they heard shots and saw people running. "We had been hearing shooting for days. What was different about this was that it was close by," he said.
Making their way towards the crest of the bridge they saw a chain of armed police officers blocking the route. When they asked about the buses they were told their was no such arrangement and that the route was being blocked to avoid their parish becoming "another New Orleans". They identified the police as officers from the city of Gretna.
The following day Mr Bradshaw said they tried again to cross and directly witnessed police shooting over the heads of a middle-aged white couple who were also turned back. Eventually, late on Friday evening, the couple succeeded in crossing the bridge with the intervention of a contact in the local fire department.
Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna police department, said he had not yet questioned his officers as to whether they fired their guns.
He confirmed that his officers, along with those from Jefferson Parish and the Crescent City Connection police force, sealed the bridge and refused to let people pass. This was despite the fact that local media were informing people that the bridge was one of the few safe evacuation routes from the city.
Gretna is a predominantly white suburban town of around 18,000 inhabitants. In the aftermath of Katrina, three quarters of the inhabitants still had electricity and running water. But, Chief Lawson told UPI news agency: "There was no food, water or shelter in Gretna City. 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."
Mr Bradshaw and his wife were evacuated to Texas and have since returned to California. They condemned the authorities, adding: "This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heartfelt reception given to us by ordinary Texans.
"Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist... Lives were lost that did not need to be lost."
As originally published
Suburban police blocked
evacuees, witnesses say
| | Commentary:
That's the TIMES' headline, reiterated throughout their entire article. Why, it's as if the bridge was blocked to enforce a rift between 'urban' and 'suburban' Louisianians.
No matter how obvious it is, the TIMES can't bear to tell the truth. Does the NEW YORK TIMES think their readers are that stupid?
The truth: The blockade at the bridge was about black and white.
=H&HH = |
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by Gardiner Harris, The New York Times
Sept. 10, 2005
Police agencies to the south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds attempting to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, according to two paramedics who were in the crowd.
The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people, who, instead of complying immediately with orders to leave the bridge, pleaded to be let through, according to the paramedics and two other witnesses. The witnesses said that they had been told by New Orleans police to cross this same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.
Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.
The police kept saying, 'We don't want another Superdome,' and 'This isn't New Orleans,' " said Larry Bradshaw, a San Francisco paramedic who was among those fleeing.
Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., Police Department, confirmed that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge.
"There was no place for them to come on our side," Lawson said.
He said that he had been asked by reporters about officers threatening evacuees with guns or shooting over their heads, but he said that he had not yet asked his officers about that.
"As soon as things calm down, we will do an inquiry," he said.
The lawlessness that erupted in New Orleans soon after the hurricane terrified officials throughout Louisiana, and a week later, law enforcement officers rarely entered the city without weaponry.
Bradshaw and his partner, Lorrie Beth Slonsky, wrote an account about their experiences that has been widely e-mailed and was first printed in the Socialist Worker.
Cathey Golden, a 51-year-old from Boston, and her 13-year-old son, Ramon Golden, on Friday confirmed the account.
Nearly 200 guests at the Hotel Monteleone gathered to make their way to the Convention Center together, the four said. But on the way, they heard that the Convention Center had become a dangerous pit from which no one was being evacuated. So they stopped in front of a police command post near Harrah's casino on Canal Street.
A New Orleans police commander whom none of the four could identify told the crowd that they could not stay there and later told them that buses were being brought to the Crescent City Connection, a nearby bridge to Jefferson Parish, to carry them to safety.
The crowd cheered and began to move. Suspicious, Bradshaw said that he asked the commander if he was sure that buses would be there for them. "We'd had so much misinformation by that point," Bradshaw said.
"He looked all of us in the eye and said, 'I swear to you, there are buses waiting across the bridge,' " Bradshaw said.
But on the bridge there were four police cruisers parked across some lanes. Between six and eight officers stood with shotguns in their hands, the witnesses said. As the crowd approached, the officers shot over the heads of the crowd, most of whom retreated immediately, Bradshaw, Slonsky and Golden and her son said.
As originally published
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Commentary:
This has been reported before, but only in small weblogs like Unknown News. Now the Independent has it for all the world to see.
But what's really bad, is that the Police Chief does not see that his officers did anything wrong -- and quite probably if they had to do it all over again, they would actually shoot at the survivors of the wrong color, instead of over their heads.
=Chris M.=
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Commentary:
As I've already written, this is the horror of New Orleans in a nutshell.
That bridge is where the line was drawn between white and black, between life and death.
The police officers who blocked people from escaping New Orleans should be brought up on charges -- reckless endangerment at the least, police misconduct, whatever charges can be filed under the law, up to and including murder.
Every person who came to that bridge, was forced back, and who later died in the chaos and swamps of New Orleans, was murdered by Police Chief Arthur Lawson, and the Gretna Police Department.
Of course, this is America, so there's next to no chance these police will ever be held to account for the people they condemned to death.
But at least and at last, six days after these survivors first told their story, it's beginning to appear in the mainstream media.
=H&HH=
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