THE DIRTY SECRETS OF THE DANZIGER BRIDGE

Headlines coast to coast screamed “Blagojevich Guilty” after a Chicago jury deliberated for nine days and found former Governor Rod Blagojevich guilty on 17 corruption counts. In Florida, the seemingly endless Casey Anthony child murder trial also made headlines after the defendant’s mother tried to explain away her computer searches for “chloroform,” with a straight face. But in New Orleans, all eyes were on the Federal courthouse as a jury was seated for the Danziger Bridge trial. What, no Nancy Grace, Joy Behar, Wolf Blitzer or even Dr. Drew Pinsky reports? Nothing. A quick search of the NY Times turns up nada. The Washington Post? Well, if by chance you clicked on “National” news at the top of the home page, and the once you got there, scrolled way down and clicked on “More National News,” and then once you got to that page, scrolled down to the 27th headline, you’d find an AP wire story about the Danziger Bridge story.

You get the idea. Danziger is not a term in the national consciousness. But here in New Orleans, the courthouse was packed on day one of the trial that has become so iconic to the Hurricane Katrina event, that people actually drive to the bridge just to see where it all happened. So, if you’re reading this from Salt Lake City, or Poughkeepsie, or Greensboro, maybe I should briefly recount for you what happened. At least as much as we know. What is known is that on Sept. 4, 2005, just days after the storm, two men were killed by gunfire on the bridge and four others were wounded. One of the dead was a 40-year-old disabled man who was shot in the back. To hear the accused cops (above, left) tell it, there was a distress call from the bridge area suggesting cops were fired upon. Nine other cops piled in a rented truck and rushed to the scene. What happened after that is unclear, except we know the two men were killed and four others wounded.

Now five police officers are on trial for civil rights violations, unjustified shootings and for covering up their activities. Five former cops have already entered guilty pleas to the cover up and will testify against their one-time colleagues. A detective goes on trial later in the summer. Anybody who lives in New Orleans knows something very bad happened on the bridge that day, and just about everybody believes the cops are guilty – except other cops, who never believe their brethren are guilty. Federal prosecutors allege the attacks on the bridge were unprovoked. In fact, this case may have simply faded away had the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI not become involved in the investigation. But they did. It’s a complex series of events that led to this trial. Listen to two Times-Picayune crime reporters explain the order of what happened:

New Orleans is often aptly referred to as “The city that care forgot.” So true. The story just isn’t as “sexy” as say a Rodney King police abuse case out of L.A. back in 1991. It doesn’t have the staying power of the 1997 NYC case of citizen Abner Louima, who was sexually brutalized with a plunger handle by two cops. This is New Orleans. We made it on the media map in 2005 because of the largest natural disaster in the history of the United States. But attention spans are short and news has very little longevity in our new tech world culture. So Katrina is over. Way over. And stories like the Danziger Bridge case don’t really get much CNN/MSNBC/Huffington Post/CBS/NBC/ABC/FOX attention. Almost none, you might say.

It’s tough to compete with Blagojevich, who’s still rocking those 1970’s junior high school bangs. And Casey Anthony, the innocent-looking white girl who may have killed her baby and then gone out partying? Well, that’s ratings gold for networks like HLN. They’ve even got Dr. Drew Pinsky covering it – he’s an addiction specialist and nobody in this case is claiming addiction problems. Go figure. In his new book about Katrina, former Mayor Ray Nagin (above, right) is all hot and bothered about police corruption during and after the storm. But oddly enough, while he was mayor, the words “Danziger Bridge” scarcely crossed his lips. Although the cops in question are both black and white, the victims were all black. Where is Jesse Jackson? Where is Al Sharpton? Where’s the NAACP? Where is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? The ACLU?

Where is the public outrage? I believe it is stuck back in 2005. “Katrina fatigue” is not just an expression. In New Orleans we can barely look back. Around the rest of the country, Katrina is a historical term now. In some ways we in New Orleans still see the storm in present tense, although certainly it fades as time moves on. But really, if you are in New Mexico, or Connecticut, or Maine or Montana, do you care about Katrina now? No. To you, the Danziger Bridge could just as easily be a place in a fiction novel as it could a real blood-soaked crossing in Louisiana. I do not anticipate a high profile for the trial outside of Louisiana, but at the same time, I know that if the accused cops walk free, the racial implications for the whole country could be dire. Stay tuned.

NEW ORLEANS: 1,183 Days Later

For those of us who came back to New Orleans after the giant wave of 2005 tried to consume us, the news this week about New Orleans was heartbreaking. Post–hurricane Katrina life has been all about challenge, hope and walking a crooked path toward an increasingly-elusive “normalcy.” Now, to find out that our city has been ranked the most dangerous place in America by the annual Congressional Quarterly Crime Rankings report almost negates the hard-earned progress we have made in these past three years and three months.

The CQ Press studies the number of murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and car thefts to rank cities across the country. You can study the figures for yourself, but the numbers that jump aggressively off the page at people who love this city are these: Of 215 cities with populations of 100,000 to 499,000, CQ Reports New Orleans has the highest crime rate ranking.

That is why every time we get out of our cars we look out of all of our windows and over our shoulder before we unlock the door. It is why we leave our houses at night less than we used to. The seemingly random crime that happens everywhere from tony Uptown to scary “Pigeontown” is the reason many of us carry pepper spray and handguns. The streets are mean, the perpetrators young and uneducated, and the motivation desperate. Our beloved New Orleans is the urban battlefield we so hoped it would never become after we collectively muddled our way through the worst national disaster in the history of the U.S.

If this sounds like whining to you, hear this: It is not. It is reporting. But one cannot live in New Orleans and dispassionately report on its current state. Our emotions, when not blatantly splashed across our faces, are just under the surface, simmering. Our discomfort is unprecedented among other urban centers. Our fear, at its least, is nerve-wracking, and at its peak, panic-inducing. Still, if passion clouds your absorption of the facts, here is some straight reporting about the city of New Orleans lo these 1,183 days after Katrina:

•The rumblings about potentially dangerous health effects of formaldehyde in FEMA trailers started just months after thousands of families were installed in their cramped quarters. The threat was not acted upon until much later. Last week a Children’s Health Fund study revealed 42 percent of children who lived in Louisiana’s largest FEMA trailer park after Katrina now show symptoms of respiratory ailments possibly caused by exposure to formaldehyde, a colorless, odorless gas that families did not know about in their trailers. They were puzzled by their children’s’ watery eyes, skin rashes, coughing, wheezing and tightness in the chest. The upshot? The trailer manufacturers knew there were dangerously high levels of formaldehyde in their units.

•The Children’s Health Fund study also revealed that 41 percent of children living in that same trailer park now are anemic, which is twice the number of children similarly affected who live in homeless shelters in New York City. Families have been moved out of the trailers, with a promise from the government that FEMA would provide them with contact information for medical help. FEMA has not provided that information to any of the families. The last of those families were not moved out until May, 2008, 17 months after concerns were first expressed about the dangers of formaldehyde.

• Some neighborhoods hit hardest by Katrina flood waters today look much like they looked just days after the storm. Gentilly, Eastern New Orleans and the lower ninth ward are shells of their former communities. In some cases there are blocks and blocks of empty houses, and perhaps one or two families who have moved back in. No wonder then, that ESRI, a leading market research firm, reports that New Orleans stands to gain only about 15,000 new residents in the next five years. Census bureau figures would indicate New Orleans has about 290,000 residents now. Local analysts put the figure at something closer to 330,000. By comparison, in the early 1960s New Orleans had a population of about 627,000. Diminishing populations generally translate to less industry, fewer healthcare facilities and workers, college grads who move away and less incentive for new businesses to consider locating in the city. Do the math.

• Once again we are having policing problems. At the forefront of our concerns now is that fact that the New Orleans District Attorney’s office revealed it has refused 529 cases since August 1, including crimes dating to 2006. The cases will not be prosecuted because the New Orleans Police Department did not provide the proper reports needed to proceed. Included: drug possession and attempted murder. 443 of these crimes were felonies.

• There’s more: Recently, New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley tried to blame former Captain Danny Lawless for $19,000 that was missing from the police property and evidence room. Lawless subsequently produced copies of memos he sent to Riley warning him of lax security and staffing shortages in the evidence room. Riley reportedly never followed up.

• And more: Two years ago, after a brutal murder in the Fauburg Marigny neighborhood, citizens took to the streets to protest the city’s lax crime-fighting record. Mayor Ray Nagin staged an outdoor press conference surrounded by police officials and the City Council members. He promised there would be 1,000 crime cameras installed in the city to monitor the mean streets. To date about 240 have been installed and currently most of them do not work. By some estimates, the city has spent $7 million on the cameras, not including the $1.6 million Nagin has requested in his 2009 budget for camera maintenance.

Add it up: The most violent criminal center in the entire United States; poisonous gas in government mandated trailers; nutritional deficiency among FEMA trailer park children that causes anemia; empty, deserted neighborhoods that never saw a dime of the reported billions of Federally-provided post-storm funding; a dwindling population and grim prospects for repopulating the city; a Keystone Cop approach to reporting felonious criminal activity and a D.A.’s office with limited abilities to prosecute undocumented incidents; an evidence room that cannot even police itself, much less the criminal element from which the evidence was gathered; a Police Chief who first seeks an alibi and a scapegoat, before owning up to what may be his own lackluster job performance; a Mayor who is clearly dis-engaged from the populous and who talks the talk without walking the walk.

This is the true post-Katrina New Orleans. This is the state of the city in the eye of a storm that will not pass. This is the real New Orleans, as seen through the eyes of a reporter who has been here before, during and after the storm.
Katrina did not lift us up – it flooded us out and then brought the worst of our local culture to the surface for the whole world to see.

Maybe that is why the one word we almost never heard from the lips of John McCain, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama or Joe Biden during the 2008 Presidential race was the one word that has more meaning to us than any other – Katrina.