Jordan Flaherty : Post-Katrina New Orleans is a Divided City

In the new New Orleans, privatized, voucher-financed housing, left, has replaced traditional public housing like the deserted Lafitte housing projects on the right. Photo by Gerald Herbert / AP.
A divided city:
Seven years after Katrina

in rebuilding New Orleans, the key question is not only how much change is needed, but more crucially, who should dictate that change.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 28, 2012

Seven years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a national laboratory for government reforms. But the process through which those experiments have been carried out rarely has been transparent or democratic. The results have been divisive, pitting new residents against those who grew up here, rich against poor, and white against Black.

Education, housing, criminal justice, health care, urban planning, even our media; systemic changes have touched every aspect of life in New Orleans, often creating a template now used in other cities. A few examples:

• In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the entire staff of the city’s public school system was fired -- more than 7,500 employees lost their jobs, despite the protection of union membership and a contract. Thousands of young teachers, many affiliated with programs like Teach For America, filled the empty slots. As charters took over from traditional public schools, the city became what then-superintendent Paul Vallas called the first 100% free market public school system in the U.S.


• Every public housing development has either been partially or entirely torn down. The housing authority now administers more than 17,000 vouchers -- nearly double the pre-Katrina amount -- a massive privatization of a formerly public system. During this period, rents have risen dramatically across the city.


• The U.S. Department of Justice has spent three years in negotiations with city government over reform of the police department. The historic consent decree that came out of these negotiations mandates vast changes in nearly every aspect of the NOPD and some aspects could serve as a model for departments across the U.S. But organizations that deal with police violence, as well as the city’s independent police monitor, have filed legal challenges to the agreement, stating that they were left out of the negotiations and that as a result, the final document lacks community oversight.


• As the city loses its daily paper, an influx of funding -- including $750,000 just from George Soros’ foundation -- has arrived for news websites and other online media projects. In a city that is still majority African-American, the staff of these new media ventures is almost entirely white, and often politically conservative. These funders -- many of whom consider themselves progressive -- rarely notice the city’s Black media, which is continuing a tradition rooted in centuries of local resistance to the dominant narrative. These were the publications that covered police violence and institutional racism when the daily paper was not interested.

There is wide agreement that most of our government services have long, deep, systemic problems. But in rebuilding New Orleans, the key question is not only how much change is needed, but more crucially, who should dictate that change.

New Orleans has become a destination for a new class of residents drawn by the allure of being able to conduct these experiments. For a while, they self-identified as YURPs (Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals). Now they are frequently known as “social entrepreneurs,” and they have wealthy and powerful allies.

Warren Buffet has invested in the redevelopment of public housing. Oprah Winfrey and the Walton family have donated to the charter schools. Attorney General Holder came to town to announce police department reforms. President Obama has visited several times, despite the fact that this state is not remotely in play for Democrats.

Many residents -- especially in the Black community -- have felt disenfranchised in the new New Orleans. They see the influx of college graduates who have come to start nonprofits and run our schools and redesign our neighborhoods as disaster profiteers, not saviors. “Tuskegee was an experiment. We have reason to be suspicious of experiments,” says civil rights lawyer Tracie Washington, evoking a history of racist experimentation performed on Black bodies without their consent.

You can hear it every day on WBOK, the city’s only Black-owned talk radio station, and read about it in the Louisiana Weekly, Data News, and New Orleans Tribune, the city’s Black newspapers. This new rebuilding class is seen as working in alliance with white elites to disenfranchise a shrinking Black majority. Callers and guests on WBOK point to the rapid change in political representation: Among the political offices that have shifted to white after a generation in Black hands are the mayor, police chief, district attorney, and majorities on the school board and city council.

The population is smaller and whiter and wealthier than it was seven years ago. Even neighborhoods that did not flood have smaller populations, as single college graduates replace families.

In a recent cover story in the Tribune, journalist Lovell Beaulieu compares the new rebuilding class to the genocide of Native Americans. “520 years after the Indians discovered Columbus, a similar story is unfolding,” writes Beaulieu. “New arrivals from around the United States and the world are landing here to get a piece of the action that is lucrative post-Katrina New Orleans... Black people are merely pawns in a game with little clout and few voices. Their primary role is to be the ones who get pushed out, disregarded and forgotten.”

People hear the term “blank slate,” a term often used to describe post-Katrina New Orleans -- as a way of erasing the city’s long history of Black-led resistance to white supremacy. As New Orleans poet and educator Kalamu Ya Salaam has said , “it wasn’t a blank slate, it was a cemetery.” Where some new arrivals see opportunity, many residents see grave robbers. In response, those who find anything to praise in the old ways are often accused of being stuck in the past or embracing corruption.

Hurricane Isaac has demonstrated that New Orleans is still at risk from storms -- although the flood protection system around the city seems to be more reliable than it was before the levees failed and 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater.

But have the systemic problems that were displayed to the world seven years ago been fixed by the radical changes the city has seen? Is reform possible without the consent of those most affected by those changes?

These are polarizing questions in the new New Orleans, and it may be years before we have an answer.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans and author of the book Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org. A version of this article appeared at MoveOn.org. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Gulf Residents Fear for the Future

Image from GRIID. Two years after the BP drilling disaster,

Gulf residents fear for the future

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / April 23, 2012

“The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it's been dying the death of a thousand cuts...” -- Aaron Viles, Gulf Restoration Network.

On April 20, 2010, a reckless attitude towards the safety of the Gulf Coast by British Petroleum, as well as Transocean and Halliburton, caused a well to blow out 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

As the world watched in horror, underwater cameras showed a seemingly endless flow of oil -- hundreds of millions of gallons -- and a series of failed efforts to stop it, over a period of nearly three months. Two years later, that horror has not ended for many on the Gulf.

“People should be aware that the oil is still there,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist who travels widely across the Gulf meeting with fishers and testing seafood and sediment samples for contamination.

Subra says that the reality she is seeing on the ground contrasts sharply with the image painted by BP. “I’m extremely concerned on the impact it’s having on all these sick individuals,” she says. Subra believes we may be just at the beginning of this disaster. In every community she visits, fishers show her shrimp born without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs with holes in their shells. She says tarballs are still washing up on beaches across the region.

While it's too early to assess the long-term environmental impact, a host of recent studies published by the National Academy of Sciences and other respected institutions have shown troubling results. They describe mass deaths of deepwater coral, dolphins, and killifish, a small animal at the base of the Gulf food chain.

"If you add them all up, it’s clear the oil is still in the ecosystem, it’s still having an effect,” says Aaron Viles, deputy director of Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental organization active in the region.

The major class action lawsuit on behalf of communities affected by the spill has reached a proposed $7.8 billion settlement, subject to approval by a judge. While this seems to have brought a certain amount of closure to the saga, environmentalists worry that any settlement is premature, saying they fear that the worst is yet to come.

Pointing to the 1989 Exxon spill off the coast of Alaska, previously the largest oil spill in U.S. waters, Viles said that it was several years before the full affect of that disaster was felt. “Four seasons after Exxon Valdez is when the herring fisheries collapsed,” says Viles. “The Gulf has been a neglected ecosystem for decades -- we need to be monitoring it closely.”

In the aftermath of the spill, BP flooded the Gulf with nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants. While BP says these chemicals broke up the oil, some scientists have said this just made it less visible, and sent the poisons deeper into the food chain.

It is widely agreed that environmental problems on the coast date back to long before the well blew open. The massive catastrophe brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state -- especially in "cancer alley," the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge.

“The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it's been dying the death of a thousand cuts for a long time,” says Viles. “BP is legally obligated to fix what they screwed up. But if you’re only obligated to put the ecosystem back to where it was April 19, 2010, why would we?”

Fishing is a huge part of the economy for the Gulf Coast. Around 40% of the seafood caught in the continental U.S. comes from here. Many area fishermen were still recovering from Hurricane Katrina when the spill closed a third of Gulf waters to fishing for months.

George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, a group that supports Gulf Coast fishers, says many fishers still had not recovered from Hurricane Katrina when the oil started flowing from the BP spill. Now, he says, many are facing losing their homes. “Production is down at least 70 percent,” compared to the year before the spill, he says. “And prices are still depressed 30, 40, 60 percent.”

In a video statement on BP’s website, Geir Robinson, Vice President of Economic Restoration for BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, says that the company believes the legal settlement will resolve most legitimate economic claims. “We do have critics,” adds Robinson. “And we’re working hard every day to show them that we will meet our responsibilities.”

Environmentalists and scientists also complain that the Obama administration has let down the Gulf Coast. Viles is critical of the role the U.S. government has played, saying that by inaction they seemed to protect BP more than coastal communities or the environment. “The coast guard seems to empower the worst instincts of BP,” Viles says. “I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or what.”

International environmental groups have also joined in the criticism. Oceana, a conservation group with offices in Europe and the Americas, released a report criticizing the U.S. government’s reforms as being either ineffective or nonexistent, saying “offshore drilling remains as risky and dangerous as it was two years ago, and that the risk of a major spill has not been effectively reduced.”

Theresa Dardar lives in Bayou Pointe-au-Chien , a Native American fishing community on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. Dardar and her neighbors have seen their land vanish from under their feet within their lifetimes due to canals built by the oil companies to access wells.

The canals brought salt water into freshwater marshes, helping cause the coastal erosion that sees Louisiana lose a football field of land every 45 minutes. The main street that runs through the community now disappears into the swamps, with telephone poles sticking out of the water.

Now, in addition to worries about disappearing land and increasing risk of hurricanes, she fears that her family’s livelihood is gone for good. “It’s not going to be over for years,” she says, expressing a widely held concern among fishers here. “We’re just a small Native American fishing community."

That’s all they’ve done their whole lives. Some of them are over 60. What are they going to do? If BP gives them money for the rest of their lives, that’s one thing. But if not, then what can they do?

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans and author of the book Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org. This article was also published at CounterPunch. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : The Battle for New Orleans Continues

New Orleans after Katrina. Image from Slate.
Six years after Katrina:
The battle for New Orleans continues

Political power has shifted to whites, but blacks have not given up their struggle for a voice -- and justice.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 29, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- As this weekend’s storm has reminded us, hurricanes can be a threat to U.S. cities on the East Coast as well the Gulf. But the vast changes that have taken place in New Orleans since Katrina have had little to do with weather, and everything to do with political struggles.

Six years after the federal levees failed and 80 percent of the city was flooded, New Orleans has lost 80,000 jobs and 110,000 residents. It is a whiter and wealthier city, with tourist areas well maintained while communities like the Lower Ninth Ward remain devastated. Beyond the statistics, it is still a much contested city.

Politics continues to shape how the changes to New Orleans are viewed. For some, the city is a crime scene of corporate profiteering and the mass displacement of African Americans and working poor; but for others it’s an example of bold public sector reforms, taken in the aftermath of a natural disaster, that have led the way for other cities.

In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans saw the rise of a new class of citizens. They self-identify as YURPs -- Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals -- and they work in architecture, urban planning, education, and related fields.

While the city was still mostly empty, they spoke of a freedom to experiment, unfettered by the barriers of bureaucratic red tape and public comment. Working with local and national political and business leaders, they made rapid changes in the city’s education system, public housing, health care, and nonprofit sector.

Along the way, the face of elected government changed in the city and state. Among the offices that switched from black to white were mayor, police chief, district attorney, and representatives on the school board and city council, which both switched to white majorities for the first time in a generation. Louisiana also transformed from a state with several statewide elected Democrats, to having only one -- Senator Mary Landrieu.

While black community leaders have said that the displacement after the storm has robbed African Americans of their civic representation, another narrative has also taken shape. Many in the media and business elite have said that a new political class -- which happens to be mostly white -- is reshaping the politics of the city into a post-racial era.

“Our efforts are changing old ways of thinking,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, shortly after he was elected in 2010. After accusing his critics of being stuck in the past, Landrieu -- who was the first mayor in modern memory elected with the support of a majority of both black and white voters -- added that "We're going to rediscipline ourselves in this city."

The changes in the public sector have been widespread. Shortly after the storm, the entire staff of the public school system was fired. Their union, which had been the largest union in the city, ceased to be recognized. With many parents, students and teachers driven out of the city by Katrina and unable to have a say in the decision, the state took over the city’s schools and began shifting them over to charters.

“The reorganization of the public schools has created a separate but unequal tiered system of schools that steers a minority of students, including virtually all of the city’s white students, into a set of selective, higher-performing schools and most of the city’s students of color into a set of lower-performing schools,” writes lawyer and activist Bill Quigley, in a report prepared with fellow Loyola law professor Davida Finger.

Photo from Getty Images / The Root.
In many ways, the changes in New Orleans' school system, initiated almost six years ago, foreshadowed a battle that has played out more conspicuously this year in Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey, and other states where teachers and their unions were assailed by both Republican governors and liberal reformers such as the filmmakers behind Waiting for Superman.

Similarly, the battle of New Orleans public housing -- which was torn down and replaced by new units built in public-private partnerships that house a small percentage of the former residents -- prefigured national battles over government’s role in solving problems related to poverty.

The anger at the changes in New Orleans’ black community is palpable. It comes out at city council meetings, on local black talk radio station WBOK , and in protests. “Since New Orleans was declared a blank slate, we are the social experimental lab of the world,” says Endesha Juakali, a housing rights activist. However, despite the changes, grassroots resistance continues. “For those of us that lived and are still living the disaster, moving on is not an option,” adds Juakali.

Resistance to the dominant agenda has also led to reform of the city’s criminal justice system. But this reform is very different from the others, with leadership coming from African-American residents at the grassroots, including those most affected by both crime and policing.

In the aftermath of Katrina, media images famously depicted poor New Orleanians as criminal and dangerous. In fact, at one point it was announced that rescue efforts were put on hold because of the violence. In response, the second-in-charge of the New Orleans Police Department reportedly told officers to shoot looters, and the governor announced that she had given the National Guard orders to shoot to kill.

Over the following days, police shot and killed several civilians. A police sniper wounded a young African American named Henry Glover, and other officers took and burned his body behind a levee. A 45-year-old grandfather named Danny Brumfield, Sr. was shot in the back in front of his family outside the New Orleans convention center. Two black families -- the Madisons and Bartholomews -- walking across New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge fell under a hail of gunfire from a group of officers.

“We had more incidents of police misconduct than civilian misconduct,” says former District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who pursued charges against officers but had the charges thrown out by a judge. “All these stories of looting, it pales next to what the police did.”

District Attorney Jordan, who angered many in the political establishment when he brought charges against officers and was forced to resign soon after, was not the only one who failed to bring accountability for the post-Katrina violence. In fact, every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed.

For years, family members of the victims pressured the media, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and Eddie Jordan’s replacement in the DA’s office, Leon Cannizzaro. “The media didn’t want to give me the time of day,” says William Tanner, who saw officers take away Glover’s body. “They called me a raving idiot.”

Finally after more than three years of protests, press conferences, and lobbying, the Justice Department launched aggressive investigations of the Glover, Brumfield, and Danziger cases in early 2009. In recent months, three officers were convicted in the Glover killing (although one conviction was overturned), two were convicted in beating a man to death just before the storm, and 10 officers either plead guilty or were convicted in the Danziger killing and cover-up.

In the Danziger case, the jury found that officers had not only killed two civilians and wounded four, but also engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy that involved planted evidence, invented witnesses, and secret meetings.

The Justice Department has at least seven more open investigations on New Orleans police killings, and has indicated its plans for more formal oversight of the NOPD, as well as the city jail. In this area, New Orleans is also leading the way -- in a remarkable change from Justice Department policy during the Bush Administration, the DOJ is also looking at oversight of police departments in Newark, Denver, and Seattle.

In the national struggle against law enforcement violence, there is much to be learned from the victims of New Orleans police violence who led a remarkable struggle against a wall of official silence, and now have begun to win justice. “This is an opening,” explains New Orleans police accountability activist Malcolm Suber. “We have to push for a much more democratic system of policing in the city.”

In the closing arguments of the Danziger trial, DOJ prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein fought back against the defense claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.”

The jury apparently agreed with her, convicting the officers on all 25 counts.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was first published at The Root. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

ART / Jordan Flaherty : 'Every Portrait Tells a Story'

Sheila Phipps with some of her work from the exhibit, "Every Portrait Tells a Story." Photo from Loop21.
A mother's art:
Every portrait tells a story

Sheila Phipps does portraits of young men she believes were convicted of crimes they did not commit. Her son, New Orleans rapper 'Mac,' is serving 30 years for manslaughter and her art proclaims his innocence.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- As the date approaches for the 10th anniversary of her son’s conviction, Sheila Phipps is hard at work completing a powerful and moving series of paintings that tell the stories of wrongly-convicted young men in the U.S. prison system.

Phipps, a self-taught artist in New Orleans, has been selling and displaying her work for more than 20 years. Her son is Mckinley “Mac” Phipps, the legendary New Orleans rapper who was convicted of manslaughter in 2001 and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In collaboration with the Innocence Project, Phipps contacted prisoners across the nation and researched their cases. Once she read enough evidence to convince her of their innocence, she communicated with the prisoner and then painted an image of them.

Now, Phipps is unveiling a series of 10 works, for a show called the Injustice Exhibition. Her use of color and framing varies with the inspiration, ranging from muted portraits to bright explosions of color, often capturing small details like focusing on a subject’s feet or hands. In the portrait of her son she highlights the gentle features of his face.

Seeing her son locked away caused Phipps’ to use her art in another way, as both activism and as release.

“To be honest I didn’t know what else to do,” says Phipps. “I’ve had four lawyers. One of the lawyers said she don’t even think the judges read the appeals we’ve written.” The hope is that her art will wake up people to the lives being wasted in prison -- not only her sons’, but all lives.

“Art is a way to express yourself,” she says. “So why not express yourself by raising awareness?” Phipps started painting in the 1980s, using art as a way to relax from the strain of raising her six children. She quickly caught the attention of Sandra Berry who runs the Neighborhood Gallery, a New Orleans arts institution. “Her work is absolutely wonderful,” says Berry. “There is a sensitivity and a mother-like compassion in her work that she brings to every subject.”

The subject for whom Phipps’ compassion is most concentrated, her son “Mac,” started rapping at the age of seven. At 11, his talents won him a contest held at New Orleans’ Superdome, for which he won a record deal. He released his first album, featuring production work by former Cash Money Records artist Mannie Fresh -- who would later develop the sound that made Cash Money Records famous -- at age 12.

Painting by Sheila Phipps from "Every Portrait Tells a Story." Image from Loop21.
By the age of 22, Mac had released two more albums, and was one of New Orleans’ most popular rappers. His collaborations included tracks with Master P, Snoop Dogg, and Mystikal. According to Phipps, Mac stayed grounded, despite his success. “He’s a very humble person,” she says. “He doesn’t even smoke and drink, if you can believe that in this day and time.”

On February 22, 2000, after a concert in Louisiana, a fight broke out and a young man named Barron C. Victor Jr. was shot and killed. Phipps, who helped book her son’s shows, was there that night. According to her, Mac was nowhere near the altercation. “Mac was in the corner signing autographs,” she says. “When the shots we’re fired, he hit the floor like everyone else.”

According to Phipps, Mac ran out of the club, but then came back in with a gun drawn. The reason? Phipps says he was trying to rescue her. “He heard the gunshot and didn’t know what was going on,” she says. “All he knew is, I gotta get my momma out of there.”

Although ballistics tests showed that Mac’s gun (which he had a license to carry) had never been fired, he was charged with second degree murder. Another man came forward and said that he had killed Victor, but prosecutors said they found his story unreliable. Mac was sentenced to 30 years behind bars. It was his first offense.

“Before this happened to my son, I thought when people went to jail that they were supposed to be there,” says Phipps. “Going to trial, I see how these DA's twist stories just to get a conviction. Then they go home and sleep at night while innocent people are just sitting there behind bars.”

Mac’s story continues to inspire outrage. A documentary about his case, called “The Camouflaged Truth,” is currently in post-production, and last year Dee-1, an up-and-coming conscious New Orleans rapper with several videos in rotation on MTV networks, organized a benefit concert to raise awareness about Mac’s case. For Sheila, every day that Mac is locked up is a struggle, but she plans to continue fighting. “I want to travel with the exhibit,” she says. “Just to shine light on the prison system and how they railroad people. I hope that this will open up a lot of people’s eyes."

View photos of Sheila's work here: "Source Every Portrait Tells a Story." For more about Mac and his case, see Source http://www.free-mac.org. You can contact Sheila at sheilaphippsstudio@yahoo.com
.
[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was also published at Loop21. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Historic NOPD Verdict Reveals Post-Katrina Cops Run Amuck

Rev. Raymond Brown pumps his fist outside New Orleans Federal Court Friday in celebration of conviction of cops involved in the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge shootings. Photo by Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune
From heroes to villains:
NOPD verdict reveals post-Katrina
history of police violence, cover-up

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- In an historic verdict with national implications, five New Orleans police officers were convicted on Friday of civil rights violations for killing unarmed African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and could face life in prison when sentenced later this year. The case, involving a grisly encounter on the Danziger Bridge, was the most high profile of a number of prosecutions that seek to hold police accountable for violence in the storm’s wake.

The officers’ conviction on all 25 counts (on two counts, the jury found the men guilty but with partial disagreements on the nature of the crime, which could slightly affect sentencing) comes nearly six years after the city was devastated by floodwaters and government inaction. The verdict helps rewrite the history of what happened in the chaotic days after the levees broke. And the story of how these convictions happened is important for anyone around the U.S. seeking to combat law enforcement violence.

The results of this trial also have national implications for those seeking federal support in challenges to police abuses in other cities. New Orleans is one of four major cities in which the Department of Justice has stepped in to look at police departments. Any success here has far-reaching implications for federal investigations in Denver, Seattle, Newark, and other cities.

The Danziger Bridge case begins with Hurricane Katrina. As images of desperate survivors played on television, people around the world felt sympathy for people waiting for rescue after the storm. But then images of families trapped on rooftops were replaced by stories of armed gangs and criminals roaming the streets.

News reports famously described white people as “finding” food while depicting black people as “looting.” Then-Chief of Police Eddie Compass told Oprah Winfrey that “little babies (are) getting raped” in the Superdome. Then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced she had sent in troops with orders to shoot to kill, and the second in charge of the police department reportedly told officers to fire at will on looters.

Evidence suggests that the NOPD acted on these instructions. On Sept. 2, just days after the storm, a black man named Henry Glover was shot by a police sniper as he walked through a parking lot. When a good Samaritan tried to help Glover get medical help, he was beaten by officers, who burned Glover’s body and left it behind a levee.

The next day, a 45-year-old named Danny Brumfield, Sr., was killed by officers in front of scores of witnesses outside the New Orleans convention center when he ran after a police car to demand that they stop and provide aid.

The following morning, two families were crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge, which connects Gentilly and New Orleans East, two mostly middle-to-upper-class African American neighborhoods. Without warning, a Budget rental truck carrying police officers arrived and cops jumped out. The officers did not identify themselves, and began firing before their vehicle had even stopped.

Officers had heard a radio call about shootings in the area, and according to prosecutors, they were seeking revenge. James Brisette, a 17-year-old called studious and nerdy by his friends, was shot nearly a dozen times and died at the scene. Many of the bullets hit him as he lay on the ground bleeding.

Four other people were wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, a 38-year-old mother who had her arm shot off of her body, and her 17-year old daughter Lesha, who was shot while crawling on top of her mother’s body, trying to shield her from bullets. Lesha’s cousin Jose was shot point-blank in the stomach and nearly died. He needed a colostomy bag for years afterwards.

Lance Madison, left, whose brother, Ronald, was shot and killed on the Danziger bridge by New Orleans Police Sept. 5, 2005, gets a hug from prosecutor Cindy Chung outside the Federal Court building Friday. Lead prosecutor Barbara "Bobbi" Bernstein is on the right. Photo by Matthew Hinton / The Times-Picayune.
Further up the bridge, officers chased down Ronald Madison, a mentally-challenged man, who was traveling with his brother Lance. Ronald was shot in the back by one officer and then stomped and kicked to death by another. Lance was arrested and charged with firing at officers, and spent weeks behind bars.

At the time, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that officers “sent up a cheer” when word came over police radios that suspects had been shot and killed.

A cursory investigation by the NOPD justified the shooting, and it appeared that the matter was closed. In fact, for years every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed to find any fault in this or other officer-involved shootings from the days after the storm.

Eddie Jordan, the city’s first black district attorney, pursued charges against the officers in late 2006. When the cops went to turn themselves in, they were greeted by a crowd of hundreds of officers who cheered for them and called them heroes. Before the case could make it to trial, it was dismissed by a judge with close ties to the defense lawyers, and soon after that Jordan was forced to resign.

After the dismissal of Jordan’s charges, the story of police violence after Katrina remained untold. Jordan believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up.

"They were looking for heroes,” he says.

They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police; they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.

Other elected officials, like the city coroner, went along with the police version of events. For example, the coroner’s office never flagged Henry Glover’s body, found burned in a car, as a potential homicide.

But the Madisons, the Bartholomews, and the Glovers, along with family members of other police violence victims, refused to be silent. They continued to speak out at press conferences, rallies, and directly to reporters. They worked with organizations like Safe Streets Strong Communities, which was founded by criminal justice activists in the days after Katrina, and Community United for Change, which was formed in response to police abuses.

Monique Harden, a community activist and co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, helped to bring testimony about these issues to the United Nations. Another post-Katrina organization, People's Hurricane Relief Fund, presented the charges to an international tribunal.

Activists worked to not only raise awareness of specific issues of police violence, but to say that these problems are structural and that any solution must get at the root causes.

“This is about an entire system that was completely broken and in crisis,” says former Safe Streets co-director Rosana Cruz.

Everyone’s job in the criminal justice system depends on there being a lot of crime in the city. The district attorney’s office doesn’t work on getting the city safer, they work on getting convictions at any cost. As long as that’s the case, we’re not going to have safety.

Former District Attorney Jordan feels that investigators should pursue charges up to the very top of the department, including Warren Riley, who was promoted to police chief shortly after Hurricane Katrina and served in that role until 2010.

“Riley, by his own admission, never even read the report on Danziger,” Jordan points out. “It’s so outrageous, it’s unspeakable. It’s one of the worst things that anyone can do. It’s hard to understand why he’s not on trial as well.”

“Fish starts rotting at the head,” adds Jordan. “This was all done in the backdrop of police opposition at the very top. It’s not surprising that there was a cover-up. You just have to wonder how far that cover-up went.”

In 2008, journalist A.C. Thompson did what New Orleans media had failed to do, and seriously investigated the accusations of police violence. His reporting, published on ProPublica and in The Nation, spelled out the shocking details of Glover’s killing and pointed toward police coordination with white vigilantes in widespread violence. It brought national attention to the stories that had been ignored. Activists took advantage of the exposure and lobbied the Congressional Black Caucus and the Justice Department for an investigation.

Demonstrators protest Danziger Bridge killings in 2010 New Orleans march. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
In early 2009, a newly empowered civil rights division of the Justice Department decided to look into the cases. Federal agents interviewed witnesses who had never been talked to, reconstructed crime scenes, and even confiscated NOPD computers. They found evidence that the Danziger officers had radically rewritten their version of what happened on the bridge that day.

When FBI agents confronted officers involved in the Danziger case, five officers pleaded guilty and agreed to testify about the conspiracy to cover up what happened. They revealed that officers had planted evidence, invented witnesses, arrested innocent people, and held secret meetings where they worked to line up their stories.

Before last week’s verdict, the Justice Department had already won four previous police violence convictions, including of the officers who shot Glover and burned his body, as well as of two officers who killed Raymond Robair, a pre-Katrina case in which officers beat a man to death and claimed (with the support of the city coroner) he had sustained his injuries from falling down. About half a dozen other investigations are ongoing.

The Justice Department is also looking at federal oversight of the NOPD, a process by which they can dictate vast changes from hiring and firing to training and policy writing.

The Danziger trial has been the most high-profile aspect of the federal intervention in New Orleans, and this verdict will have far-reaching implications for how the effectiveness of federal intervention is perceived. The convictions and guilty pleas in the case reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy that reaches up to sergeants and lieutenants. Marlon Defillo, the second-in-charge of the NOPD, was recently forced to retire because of his role in helping cover up the Glover killing.

Most important, the verdict has helped shift the narrative of what happened in those days after Katrina.

The defense team for the Danziger officers was steadfast in describing their clients as heroes. Attorney Paul Fleming described the cops as “proactive,” saying, “They go out and get things done. They go out and get the bad guys.”

Police attorneys in the Glover and Danziger trials also sought to use the so-called “Katrina defense,” arguing that the exceptional circumstances following the storm justified extra-legal actions on the part of officers. With these convictions, the juries have definitively refuted this excuse.

In her closing arguments, Bobbi Bernstein, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, fought back against the claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.”

Officers went out with a mission to deliver “their own kind of post-apocalyptic justice,” she added. “The law is what it is because this is not a police state.”

In comments immediately after the verdict, family members of those killed on the bridge expressed gratitude for those who had helped them reach this point, but stressed that their pain continued.

Speaking outside the courthouse after the verdict, Sherrel Johnson, the mother of James Brisette, said that the officers, “took the twinkle out of my eye, the song out of my voice, and blew out my candle,” when they killed her son.

Jacqueline Madison Brown, the sister of Ronald Madison, told assembled press, “Ronald Madison brought great love to our family. Shooting him down was like shooting an innocent child.” Commenting on officers who had testified for the prosecution in exchange for lesser charges, she added, “We regret that they did not have the courage and strength to come forward sooner.”

Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, but was convicted of leading the conspiracy, could receive a maximum of 120 years. Sentencing is scheduled for December, but will likely be delayed.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times ,Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was first published at ColorLines. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog, including previous reporting on the Danziger Bridge incident and post-Katrina police violence.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Cop Corruption on Trial in New Orleans

Trial of cops connected to the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge killings has gripped New Orleans.
New Orleans cops:
Danziger bridge trial
brings corruption front and center

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- In New Orleans’ federal courthouse, five police officers are currently facing charges of killing unarmed Black civilians and conspiring for more than four years to cover-up their crime. The trial, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, has gripped the city, and daily coverage in local media has focused attention on a deeply troubled department that still has a long way to go before it can regain the trust of residents.

The charges stem from an incident on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina. Police officers, who apparently had misheard a distress call on their radios, piled into a Budget rental truck and sped to the scene. When they arrived, they came out shooting.

James Brisette, a 17-year-old described by friends as nerdy and studious, and Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old man with the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, were killed. Four others were seriously wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, 38, who had her arm shot off of her body, and Jose Holmes, 19, who was shot point blank in his stomach. Susan’s son, Leonard Bartholomew, 14, was shot at by officers, badly beaten, and arrested. Ronald Madison’s brother, Lance, was arrested by officers under false charges that were later dropped.

Witnesses for the government include survivors of the harrowing ordeal on the bridge, as well as several officers who have plead guilty to lesser offenses in exchange for their testimony. They have described shocking scenes of violence -- one officer is accused of kicking and stomping Madison to death after he had already been shot seven times -- and a wide ranging cover-up. “When the shooting stopped, these men realized they had a problem,” said federal prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein during opening arguments. “They lied because they knew they had committed a crime.”

The New Orleans police department has developed a reputation as one of the most violent and corrupt in the nation, and the revelations in this case have stoked anger and outrage, especially in New Orleans’ African-American community.

“This case shows the total dysfunction of the New Orleans Police Department,” says Malcolm Suber, a longtime activist against police brutality and project director with the New Orleans chapter of the American Friends Service Committee. “It shows they were just going wild after the storm.”

Suber and other activists have called for the DOJ to launch a wide-ranging investigation into a pattern of abuse they say goes back decades. “What Danziger represents is for the first time there’s been acknowledgment that this police department is rotten to the core,” says Suber.

Lance Madison is surrounded by State Police and New Orleans police SWAT members on Sept. 4, 2005 at the Danziger Bridge. Madison was accused of shooting at police but charges were later dropped. Photo by Alex Brandon / Times-Picayune.
A department with a troubled history

Like most southern police departments, NOPD was explicitly segregationist for much of the 20th century. The first Black New Orleans police officer was not hired until 1950 and it was several more years before Black officers were allowed to carry a gun or arrest whites.

In 1980, the city was rocked by protests when Sherry Singleton, a 26-year old African-American mother, was shot by police while she was naked in a bathtub, in front of her four year old child. Police said she was armed, but a neighbor testified that she heard her pleading, “please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.”

The issue of police violence continued to dominate in the 1990s. Revelations of corruption in the force inspired both mass protest and Department of Justice investigations. Federal involvement combined with aggressive actions on the part of a new mayor and police chief led to 200 officers fired and criminal charges brought against more than 60 cops.

Two NOPD officers received the death penalty for killing civilians. One of those officers, Len Davis, was caught on a federal wiretap ordering the assassination of a woman who had complained about police brutality. As officers were being fired and disciplined, the city’s murder and violent crime rates dropped dramatically, and the prosecution of corrupt officers was widely seen as making the city safer.

Advocates say that the changes begun in the 90s were cut short when Mayor C. Ray Nagin became mayor, at around the same time that the Clinton presidency ended and the Bush administration began. Both Bush and Nagin seemed uninterested in continuing to prosecute police, and New Orleans slipped back into being the nation’s murder capital, as well as the capital of police violence.


New Orleans Dentist Romell Madison -- referred to in the sign -- has served as a spokesperson for the Danziger Bridge victims and their families. His brother Ronald Madison, who suffered from mental disabilities, was killed by police, and his brother Lance was cleared of charges of attempted murder. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
Renewed outrage brings energy for change

The revelations of post-Katrina police violence have brought in a new era of outrage. Political and civic leaders, across boundaries of color and class, have called for systemic change in the NOPD. “The public has a right to know what really happened,” says Anthony Radosti, vice president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, which plays the role of an unofficial watchdog over the NOPD. “The police department failed in their mission,” adds Radosti, a 23-year veteran of the NOPD.

Ronal Serpas, who was hired by Mayor Landrieu to run the department in 2010, admits that the department has a long way to go. “Chief Serpas has always acknowledged that he inherited a fundamentally flawed department,” explains NOPD spokesperson Remi Braden. “He has done a lot, but there is much more to be done.”

Federal agents are looking into at least nine cases of police killings from the past several years, but that is just one aspect of their involvement. In March, the DOJ released a 58-page report that describes a department facing problems that “are serious, systemic, wide-ranging, and deeply rooted.” The report highlighted a range of areas in which it found “patterns or practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law.”

The bad news keeps coming out of the NOPD. In just the past two weeks, since the Danziger trial began, scandal has reached the very top of the department. The NOPD’s second in charge, Marlon Defillo, was found in an investigation overseen by the state police to have neglected his duty to investigate police violence, in effect helping to hinder official investigations.

Three police commanders -- the position under Defillo, and third in the overall NOPD hierarchy -- have also been the subject of internal investigation. One commander was accused of directing officers to specifically target young Black men for questioning during the city’s Essence Festival, one of the nation’s largest Black tourism events.

Criminal justice activists have demanded more federal investigations and a wider scope. “This represents a real opportunity for New Orleans to raise some fundamental questions about the nature of police and what they do,” says organizer Malcolm Suber. “But unless we talk about the entire system, this will repeat again.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This is an expanded version of an article originally published by theLoop21.com. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog, including previous reporting on the Danziger Bridge incident and post-Katrina police violence.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Murder Trial Begins for Danziger Bridge Cops

Crime scene: New Orleans' Danziger Bridge was the site of police shootings. Photo by Lucas Jackson / Reuters.
New Orleans cops go on trial:
Shot unarmed African-Americans in cold blood

Did New Orleans media contribute to police violence after hurricane Katrina?

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- Opening arguments begin today in what observers have called the most important trial New Orleans has seen in a generation. It is a shocking case of police brutality that has already redefined this city’s relationship to its police department, and radically rewritten the official narrative of what happened in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.

Five police officers are facing charges of shooting unarmed African-Americans in cold blood, killing two and wounding four, and then conspiring to hide evidence. Five officers who participated in the conspiracy have already pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against their fellow officers.

The shootings occurred on September 4, 2005, as two families were fleeing Katrina’s floodwaters, crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge to get to dry land. Officers, who apparently heard a radio report about shootings in the area, drove up, leapt out of their vehicle, and began firing.

Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged man, was shot in the back at least five times, then reportedly stomped and kicked by an officer until he was dead. His brother Lance Madison was arrested on false charges. James Brissette, a high school student, was shot seven times, and died at the scene. Susan Bartholomew, 38, was wounded so badly her arm was shot off of her body. Jose Holmes Jr. was shot several times, then as he lay bleeding an officer stood over him and fired point blank at his stomach. Two other relatives of Bartholomew were also badly wounded.

Danziger is one of at least nine recent incidents involving the NOPD being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, several of which happened in the days after the city was flooded. Officers have recently been convicted by federal prosecutors in two other high-profile trials.

In April, two officers were found guilty in the beating death of Raymond Robair, a handyman from the Treme neighborhood. In December, a jury convicted three officers and acquitted two in killing Henry Glover, a 31-year-old from New Orleans’ West Bank neighborhood, and burning his body.

New Orleans police arrest a man after Sept. 4, 2005, police shootings on the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans. Photo by Alex Brandon / The Times Picayune.

From survivors to looters

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people around the world felt sympathy for New Orleans. They saw images of residents trapped on rooftops by floodwaters, needing rescue by boat and helicopter. But then stories began to come out about looters and gangs among the survivors, and the official response shifted from humanitarian aid to military operation.

Then-Governor Kathleen Blanco sent in National Guard troops, announcing. “They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.” Warren Riley, at that time the second in charge of the police department, reportedly ordered officers to “take the city back and shoot looters.”

In the following days, several civilians -- almost all of them African American -- were killed under suspicious circumstances in incidents involving police and white vigilantes. For years, family members and advocates called for official investigations and were rebuffed.

“Right after the hurricane there were individuals and organizations trying to talk about what happened on Danziger,” says Dana Kaplan, executive director of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), a legal and advocacy organization based in New Orleans. “But their voices were marginalized.”

There is evidence that local media could have done a better job. Alex Brandon, a photographer for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper who later went on to work for Associated Press, testified in the Henry Glover trial that he knew details about the police killings that he didn’t reveal. “He saw things and heard things that proved to be useful in a criminal investigation. He didn't report them as news," wrote Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry after the Glover trial concluded.

Former Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who led an initial investigation of the Danziger officers, believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up. “They were looking for heroes,” he says. “They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police, they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.”

Family members and advocates tried to get the stories of police violence out through protests, press conferences, and other means. Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, an organization dedicated to justice in reconstruction, held a tribunal in 2006 where they presented accusations of police violence -- among other charges -- to a panel of international judges, including members of parliament from seven countries. Activists even brought charges to the United Nations, filing a shadow report in February 2008 with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva.

But it was not until late 2008 that a journalist named AC Thompson did what the local media failed to do, and investigated these stories in detail. “It’s unfortunate that it took a national publication to really dig to the root,” says Kaplan, referring to Thompson’s work. “In New Orleans the criminal justice system has been so corrupt for so long that things that should be shocking didn’t seem to be raising the kind of broad community outrage that they should have.”

In 2009, after years of pressure from activists and the national attention brought on by AC Thompson’s reporting, the U.S. Justice Department decided to look into the accusations of police violence. This has led to one of the most wide-ranging investigations of a police department in recent U.S. history. Dozens of officers are facing lengthy prison terms, and corruption charges have reached to the very top of the department.

The Danziger trial is expected to last two months. Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Robert Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences if convicted. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, is charged only in the conspiracy and could receive a maximum of 120 years. Justice Department investigations of other incidents are continuing, and it is likely that some form of federal oversight of the department will be announced in coming months.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was originally published by Truthout. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Louisiana Civil Rights Activist Gets 15 Years on Drug Charge

Catrina Wallace (right), pictured with Caseptla Baily, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for distribution of a controlled substance. Wallace and Baily were both active in the campaign to support the Jena 6. Their door was broken down by police in a drug raid while they slept. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
'Jena Six' aftermath:
Louisiana civil rights activist
sentenced to 15 years in prison

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / June 13, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- On June 1, a week past her 31st birthday, civil rights activist Catrina Wallace was sentenced to 15 years in prison. This was the first arrest for Wallace, a single mother who became politically active when her brother was arrested in the case that later became known as the "Jena Six."

Wallace was part of a small group of family members and friends who built a movement that eventually brought 50,000 people to a September 2007 march in the small northern Louisiana town of Jena. The mass movement eventually led to freedom for the six young men, who have since gone on to college.

On March 31, a 12-person jury with one Black member convicted Wallace of three counts of distribution of a controlled substance. At her June 1 sentencing, Wallace received 5 years for each count, to be served consecutively. Even in Louisiana, the incarceration capital of the U.S., 15 years for a first offense is somewhat exceptional, as is the stacking of consecutive sentences.

"I've never seen a judge run anything consecutive, certainly not for drugs or a first offender," says Miles Swanson, an attorney in private practice who used to work for the public defenders office in Orleans Parish. "In New Orleans, a case like this probably wouldn't even go to trial -- they'd likely get offered probation."

However, vast discrepancies exist across parishes. For example, an Orleans Parish man recently received probation for selling pot. Then, when arrested for the same offense a few miles away in St. Tammany Parish, he was sentenced to life in prison.

"Unfortunately, I'm not shocked by the sentence," commented Jasmine Tyler, deputy director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance. "We used to use prisons for the people who really caused problems, and made us concerned about public safety. Now we use them for the people we're mad at."

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty, including coverage of the Jena 6 and issues of criminal justice in Louisiana, on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Rising Anxiety on the Gulf Coast

Many residents have been forced from their homes as a spillway is opened to protect major cities from the flood. Photo by Gallo / Getty / Al Jazeera.
One disaster after another:
Mississippi flood renews Gulf Coast anxieties

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- Byron Encalade grew up in the swamps of southeast Louisiana, a place where day-to-day life hasn’t changed much in generations. “I grew up tying my Pirogue to the front porch when the tide would come up,” he says. “For a lot of us born and raised fishing and trapping and hunting, it’s a way of life.”

That way of life is now in danger.

First there was Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, two storms in 2005 that famously devastated the Gulf Coast, and literally changed the map of southern Louisiana, quickening already-rapid coastal erosion while destroying homes and communities. Just as coastal residents had begun to recover from those storms, last year's BP Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster had a catastrophic effect on the economy and health of the region and its people.

Now, the waters of the Mississippi River have reached historic heights, and Encalade is worried. “For the small fishers, it’s a very thin line between losing money and making a profit,” he explains.

The Mississippi is central to economic life here on the Gulf, and it’s rising waters have wide-ranging effects, from disrupting shipping and causing rising prices for gas, food, and other necessities, to a loss of tourism dollars and the destruction of an estimated 100,000 acres of crops, as well as oyster fisheries, in the now-flooded Atchafalaya Basin.

A third generation oyster fisherman, Encalade serves as president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, which represents minority fishers, including African-American, Vietnamese and Cambodian and Native Americans. “This flooding is going to have a enormous economic effect in the fisheries,” he explains.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency charged with maintaining the levees and overseeing the flood controls, has acted to preserve the safety of Baton Rouge and New Orleans; two cities perched along the Mississippi. To reduce the stress on the levees around the urban areas, the Corps has let water flow through the Morganza Spillway, flooding farmland and rural communities upriver from Baton Rouge, including thousands of houses, farms and oyster fisheries.

The Morganza, a flood control structure designed and built in the aftermath of a devastating 1927 flood of the Mississippi, has only been opened once before, in 1973.

While no one can say for sure the lasting effects of this flooding, optimism is rare. “The oyster people, they’re screwed again,” says George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association. “The oysters that survived the BP spill, they’re going to die now.”

Barisich, a fisherman who lives and works in southern Louisiana, says that across the Gulf Coast fishing industry, people have been hit hard, both economically and personally. “A lot of people, this is wearing down on them,” he says. “For the people with the small boats, it’s going to wipe them out. People have heart attacks over this.”

The high waters in the Mississippi have brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state -- especially in “cancer alley,” the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge.

Matt Rota, science and water policy director for the Gulf Restoration Network, says that pollution carried by the Mississippi will create a massive “dead zone,” a lifeless stretch of water that he says will further harm the Gulf ecosystem and impact fishers.

According to Rota, the combination of oil company exploration with the construction of levees that have cut off the natural delta-building processes of the river has resulted in a massive loss of coastal land. The state loses a football field-sized area of its coast every 45 minutes, he says. Since 1930, Louisiana has lost over a million acres of land, an area the size of a small state.

While plans have been drafted to stop the erosion and replace the coast, the federal government has never found the money to actually follow through. “I’m seeing this as a squandered opportunity,” he says. “We need to build our wetlands and build our coast instead of losing it.”


Residents don’t trust the levees

Even with the Morganza open, high water levels continue to alarm residents of New Orleans, who are suspicious of the Army Corps of Engineers. “We can’t trust the levees, and we cant trust the Corps,” says Monique Harden, the co-director Advocates for Environmental Human Rights.

Harden, as with many Gulf residents, lost trust in the Corps after faulty construction and maintenance allowed the levees to fail in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Her organization has worked to bring accountability to the U.S. government, even bringing charges of environmental injustice on the part of the U.S. to the United Nations. “This whole thing is going to be weeks, not days,” she says. “And no one’s giving any guarantees.”

Matt Rota of Gulf Restoration Network thinks the whole system of flood control needs to be rethought. “We’re still stuck in this opinion that we can control the Mississippi River,” he says. “We need to shift our thinking and let the river have more room. We’ve walled off the Mississippi from the vast majority of its floodplain.”

While freeing the river in these areas would carry great costs, it would also help restore the coast, and ease pressure on other levees, such as those protecting New Orleans, explains Rota.

“Right now, we’re very confident in the system we have,” responds Mike Petersen, public affairs officer for the Corps, when asked about the concerns expressed by Harden and Rota. However, says Petersen, there are still risks. “There’s no such thing as a flood-proof levee,” he acknowledges. “Although the system works beautifully now, it’s taking a beating like it never has before.”

First Sergeant Jimmy Hankins, with the New Orleans office of the Army Corps of Engineers, says he understands people’s fears. “People in New Orleans are always concerned about their levees. Were under sea level.” But he says New Orleans is safe. “Of course, we always recommend to be safe and concerned,” he added. “But the best levees there are, are the ones on the Mississippi because they’re tested every day.”

Byron Encalade doesn’t want to talk too much about the Army Corps or other federal agencies. “It gets to the point when you’re tired of saying who’s at fault,” he says. “Lets move forward with a solution.”

For Encalade, this means a comprehensive approach that repairs the Gulf, restores the coast, and maintains the freshwater, brackish water, and saltwater marshes so important to fisher communities and local ecosystems. “To do a plan that leaves out a part of it is to ruin it,” he says. For Encalade, whose family has been fishing here for generations, there is no other choice. “I just don’t know where else to go. I can’t live anywhere else. Louisiana is me.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was also published at Al Jazeera. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Lewis Wallace : Jordan Flaherty Chronicles Post-Katrina Resistance

Jordan Flaherty's Floodlines:
Community and resistance in New Orleans

By Lewis Wallace / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011

See 'Jena Six activist convicted, faces decades in prison' by Jordan Flaherty, Below.

[Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six by Jordan Flaherty (Haymarket Books, 2010); 292 pp.; $16.]

Parts of the story are familiar. In late August, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Floodwaters broke the levees in New Orleans and the city was devastated -- first by floods, then by a shamefully underwhelming response on the part of the federal, state, and local governments.

While tourists were picked up and shipped out, poor people of color and prisoners were left with no food, shelter, or support in the aftermath. Some sat in Orleans Parish Prison, still in lockdown, as the waters rose inside their cells. In the years to follow, the situation worsened for many and improved only for those who could afford to pay their own way through the so-called “recovery.”

Parts of the story are less familiar. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, groups ranging from young public school students to Palestinian and Vietnamese communities organized for the right to play a part in rebuilding the city. New projects arose, providing services ranging from women’s healthcare to expunging criminal records, fighting for public housing, defending New Orleans’ historic black culture, and creating alternatives to the brutal and racist criminal legal system in New Orleans Parish.

Although the long-term demands of these organizations were too often quashed, the stories of those who fought back after Katrina are as precious as they are little-known.

Luckily for us, writer and activist Jordan Flaherty was there. And Flaherty was not in New Orleans to observe or cover a story -- he was there, in 2005 and in the years that followed, because he lives there. He was one of the people who did not evacuate during the storm, and literally watched from a rooftop as New Orleanians were abandoned by the government and smeared by the media as “looters” and criminals.

He was one of the people to seek out and record the stories of those trapped in prisons with no charges and no trial for weeks, months, and even years after Katrina. He was one of the rare people to expose the continuing torture of political prisoners at Angola Penitentiary, the targeting of transgender women as sex criminals, and the outrageously lousy defense lawyers who did little to help poor New Orleanians after the storm, sometimes sleeping through their own court appearances.

He was also the first journalist to report nationally on the story of the group of young men from rural Louisiana who came to be known as the Jena 6. These young African-American men were arrested for attempted murder after a fight erupted at school in response to white students hanging nooses from a tree in the schoolyard; they have since had their charges dropped or reduced, largely due to a surge of national attention.

Floodlines begins with a firsthand account of Flaherty’s experience directly after Hurricane Katrina, and proceeds to weave together personal accounts, cultural history, detailed records of activist work, and reflective analysis. The chapters cover education, immigration, prisoner organizing, housing rights, cultural activism, and the workings behind the displacement and disillusionment of so many New Orleanians.

As he shares these stories, he is clear about his own privilege as both a white person and as a journalist. While Flaherty is not afraid to editorialize and criticize, a tone of both humility and commitment permeates Floodlines.

In his chapter on prisons, Flaherty is characteristically straightforward about his view: “Prison makes us all less free -- by breaking up families and communities, by dehumanizing the imprisoned both during and after their sentences, by perpetuating a cycle of poverty, and by making all citizens complicit in the incarceration of their fellow human beings.”

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the United States, and the threat of incarceration is a constant part of life for many black New Orleanians. Flaherty paints a vivid picture of the “cradle-to-prison pipeline,” the process by which impoverished young people of color are funneled towards a life in prison virtually from the time of birth. As organizer Robert Goodman puts it, “Every time a black child is born in Louisiana, there’s already a bed waiting for him at Angola State Prison.”

Goodman is part of a new organization called Safe Streets/Strong Communities. Founded in 2006, the group interviewed over a hundred people who had been locked up prior to Katrina. Flaherty says that when he heard some of their stories, he “felt a chill.”

The stories included children abandoned in lock-down during and after the storm; the warehousing of massive groups of people in open yards with no food, shelter, or space to defecate; and a public defender’s office so inept that even a Criminal District Court Judge called it “unbelievable, unconstitutional, totally lacking the basic professional standards of legal representation, and a mockery of what a criminal justice system should be in a western civilized nation.”

Katrina opened up space for increased policing and militarization even as the city slashed funds for indigent defense and social services.

While exposing injustice is a part of Flaherty’s thrust, Floodlines does not come across as a shocking exposé, the kind of thing that flashes across television screens for a day or two and then disappears, leaving a sense of powerlessness in its trail. Instead, the book reveals how the events we see unfolding in the news are part of a complex history of black cultures of resistance dating all the way back to the beginnings of slavery in the south.

Taken all together, Floodlines is a hopeful, revealing account of five years of hardship and displacement. Outsiders and insiders alike will benefit from Flaherty’s uniquely personal and unabashedly political account of some of the most important untold stories of our time.

[Lewis Wallace is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to Left Turn and make/shift magazines. He also writes about music for an educational website called Shmoop.com and works as an anti-prison activist. This review was also published by Prison Legal News.]

Caseptla Bailey (left) and Catrina Wallace were active in the campaign to support the Jena 6. Their door was broken down by police while they slept. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
Jena Six activist convicted,
faces decades in prison

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog /April 1, 2011

Civil rights activist Catrina Wallace, who received national acclaim for her central role in organizing protests around the Jena Six case, was convicted March 31 of three counts of distribution of a controlled substance. She was taken from the courtroom straight to jail after the verdict was read, and given a $1 million bail. Her sentencing is expected to come next month.

Wallace, who is 30, became an activist after her teenage brother, Robert Bailey, was arrested and charged with attempted murder after a fight in Jena High School. Bailey and five others later became known as the Jena Six, and their cause became a civil rights rallying cry that was called the first struggle of a 21st century Civil Rights Movement.

Their case eventually brought 50,000 people on a march through the town of Jena, and as a result of the public pressure the young men were eventually freed. The six are all now in college or -- in the case of the youngest -- on their way. Wallace and her mother, Caseptla Bailey, stayed in Jena and founded Organizing in the Trenches, a community organization dedicated to working with youth.

Catrina Wallace was represented by Krystal Todd of the Lasalle Parish Public Defenders Office. The case was prosecuted by Lasalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, who also prosecuted the Jena Six case, and famously told a room full of students, "I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen."

The case was presided over by 28th District Judge J. Christopher Peters, a former Assistant District Attorney under Reed Walters. Peters is the son of Judge Jimmie C. Peters, who held the same seat until 1994. The 12-person jury had one Black member.

Wallace was arrested as part of "Operation Third Option," which saw more than 150 officers, including a SWAT team and helicopters, storm into Jena's Black community on July 9, 2009. Although no drugs were seized, a dozen people were arrested, based on testimony and video evidence provided by a police informant, 23-year-old convicted drug dealer Evan Brown.

So far, most of those arrested on that day have plead guilty and faced long sentences. Devin Lofton, who pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute, received 10 years. Adrian Richardson, 34, who pled guilty to two counts of distribution, received 25 years. Termaine Lee, a twenty-two-year-old who had no previous record but faced six counts of distribution, received 20 years.

Community members responded to the verdict with sadness and outrage. "We don't have any help here," said Marcus Jones, the father of Mychal Bell, another of the Jena Six youths. "Catrina tried to keep in high spirits leading up to the trial, but when a bomb like this is dropped on you, what can you do?"

Jones and others are calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate.

Wallace, a single mother, has three small children, aged 3, 5, and 10. The youngest child has frequent seizures.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times and Mother Jones. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org.

Please see:

• Jena, Louisiana: Drug Bust or Racist Revenge? by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2011
• And more writing by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...