Adam's Apple
Senior Member
- Apr 25, 2004
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Excellent article on New Orleans as a city.
A Perfect Storm of Lawlessness
By Nicole Gelanis, City Journal
1 September 2005
New Orleans hasnt even been disarmed yet, but the story of those who looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them. The final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought didnt come.
In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized New Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day before the situation grew truly desperateand it was their increasingly lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed saving.
Lets go back to last Sunday morningsuch a long time ago, it now seems. Most New Orleanians with meansthe most resourceful poor, the middle class, and the affluentleft the city of nearly half-a-million residents that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human capital as well.
Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the government on a good dayimpoverished women, children, and elderly folks who went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their government to take care of them. And those were the smart onesthose who moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of transportation out of the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes in the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trappedstarved and dying of dehydration.
And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good dayand have now taken over the stricken city. Whats happened is the predictable civil deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure cant control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime.
Katrina didnt turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This weeks looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murderscompared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans intractable crime problem, but its necessary, since it explains how this weeks communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect storm for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_09_01_05ng.html
A Perfect Storm of Lawlessness
By Nicole Gelanis, City Journal
1 September 2005
New Orleans hasnt even been disarmed yet, but the story of those who looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them. The final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought didnt come.
In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized New Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day before the situation grew truly desperateand it was their increasingly lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed saving.
Lets go back to last Sunday morningsuch a long time ago, it now seems. Most New Orleanians with meansthe most resourceful poor, the middle class, and the affluentleft the city of nearly half-a-million residents that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human capital as well.
Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the government on a good dayimpoverished women, children, and elderly folks who went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their government to take care of them. And those were the smart onesthose who moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of transportation out of the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes in the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trappedstarved and dying of dehydration.
And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good dayand have now taken over the stricken city. Whats happened is the predictable civil deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure cant control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime.
Katrina didnt turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This weeks looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murderscompared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans intractable crime problem, but its necessary, since it explains how this weeks communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect storm for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_09_01_05ng.html
