The Nation's Pulse: The Desolate City
Neumayr, George
"The Nation's Pulse" GEORGE NEUMAYR The Desolate City THE POLITICAL LEFT CONTROLS the historical account of New Orleans' Great Flood, it will be an outrageously blinkered...
...It has been crooked for so long the FBI decided to open up an office within the school district itself, ac-cording to media reports...
...Governor Kathleen Blanco warned that vouchers would take "money" away from New Orleans' public schools...
...The hurricane signaled to them a target-rich environment...
...She then hired an attorney to sue the school district for not providing her with a basic enough education to pass...
...The school district has been known to send huge amounts of money to people not on staff, in some cases not even alive...
...In 2003, 6,872 vehicles were stolen in New Orleans, according to the FBI...
...CTIVIST AL SHARPTON SAID of the New Orleanians who picked stores clean of guns, stereos, and televisions during the flood, "Looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them...
...In one case that made headlines, Karen Alexander at Alcee Fortier High School had her valedictorian status nixed after she bombed out on the state graduation test...
...University researchers con-ducted an experiment last year in which they had cops fire 700 blank rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood on a random afternoon, and "no one called to report the gunfire," reported the Associated Press...
...from 2000 to 2004 alone, New Orleans lost 22,000 residents...
...The squalor and crime in the Superdome represented nothing more than squalor and crime transferred from New Orleans' legendarily hellish housing complexes, many of which have been threatened with demolition...
...Out of sheer embarrassment at its fecklessness, the police department has a long history of fudging crime statistics...
...When checks are regularly sent to dead people, and they're cashed, you know you have a major problem," school board member Jimmy Farenholtz has said to the Times-Picayune...
...New Orleans is the murder capital of America, a title it has held off and on since the 1980s...
...NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 THE N TON'S PULSE Katrina, pouted that black New Orleanians were "treated like dogs" during the storm...
...The ruling class in New Orleans mirrors the underclass, which is illustrated in the troubles of the city's congressman, William Jefferson: in August, the FBI raided his homes as part of a graft investigation and found money hidden in his freezer, according to the Washington Post...
...This is nonsense...
...Gang warfare is constant in New Orleans—which accounts for the city's booming business of memorial death T-shirts (with inscriptions like "Born a Pimp, Died a Playa") and large population of juvenile quadriplegics—and the warfare continued right through the storm...
...Since the 1970s, New Orleans has lost tens of thou-sands of residents...
...The city's Chamber of Commerce has declared it "a means of achieving social and political goals of creating a police force that is more reflective of the community served...
...Vouchers for New Orleans parents were finally proposed last year, but died in the Louisiana legislature due to leftist pressure...
...Crime in New Orleans is worse than even the stated statistics suggest, because those numbers are unreliably reported...
...But none of it will enter the left's history of New Orleans' destruction...
...it simply exposed and magnified one that had already occurred...
...Incapable of rudimentary resourcefulness and wildly imprudent, inner-city New Orleanians de50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 monstrated another internal cause of the city's col-lapse that liberals carefully omit from their post mortems: the educational vacuum in the city's public schools...
...More recently, New Orleans police superintendent Eddie Compass made news when he let a cop nabbed for looting return to her job the very next day...
...Even if cowardly cops hadn't walked off the job, the NOPD wasn't remotely up to the task of controlling the city during the flood...
...Three out of four murderers get off, according to the New Orleans Police Foundation, and 42 percent of cases involving serious crimes since 2002 have been dropped by prosecutors...
...And these are the least of its problems...
...After campaigning on a platform of aggressive affirmative action, he assumed office and promptly pink-slipped 42 white employees...
...So far the left's dissection of the city's demise has probed every cause save the most obvious and fundamental ones...
...The notion popular with commentators that New Orleanians couldn't leave the city due to lack of cars and only resorted to looting out of desperate privation would be a little more persuasive if inner-city New Orleanians weren't also notorious for auto theft...
...A culture of crime, both high and low, defines the city...
...ONE REASON IS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, manifest in the city's residency requirement for police officers, a policy that means the department can only hire and promote officers who live in the city...
...T H E N A T I O N ' S P U L S E G E O R G E N E U M A Y R The Desolate Ci F THE POLITICAL LEFT CONTROLS the historical account of New Orleans' Great Flood, it will be an outrageously blinkered one...
...Lawsuits have also been brought by parents demanding from the school district the equivalent of a private school tuition for their children...
...District Attorney Eddie Jordan has more important things to do, such as reorganizing his office along racially correct lines...
...Hundreds of New Orleans police officers walked off the job during the flood...
...According to a 2003 Louisiana State University poll cited in the New York Times that gives the lie to the conventional wisdom that people wanted to leave but couldn't, 31 percent of New Orleans residents said they would stay in the city during a Category 4 hurricane...
...External causes—principally a bumbling, indifferent, perhaps even racist federal government—explain it, they argue...
...The chaos after Hurricane Katrina didn't cause a civilizational collapse...
...Is it any surprise, then, that when the "community" began looting during the flood many cops not only didn't stop the crime but joined in it...
...New Orleans Chief District Judge Calvin Johnson has complained to the press: "Where are the robbery cases...
...The residency requirement had widened the door through which dubious New Orleanians could enter the police academy...
...Mayor Ray Nagin sent some of his rattled cops to Las Vegas to play the slot machines while corpses rotted in the streets...
...In 2002, New Orleans' superintendent got nabbed for paying his father $70,000 to be a high school janitor...
...Bubbling over with graft, the New Orleans school district needs less money, not more...
...The few convictions the district attorney's office does get are for nonviolent offenses that don't result in jail time...
...No, the looters were habitual criminals the New Orleans police and courts haven't bothered to pick up or prosecute...
...In surveys, the city's law-abiding residents indicate they prefer safety to political correctness...
...The countless images of stranded women, children, and elderly were explained far more by the absence of fathers than by the tardiness of FEMA...
...Officers in precincts in the worst parts of town are notorious for cooking the books, downgrading violent crimes to "miscellaneous incidents" so that the police chief won't find out that they are not doing their jobs...
...Why that posed a mortal danger wasn't explained...
...They fired upon helicopters and rescue workers not because they came too late but because they came at all and threatened their spoils...
...Then people would have somehow found a way to get out...
...And if New Orleanians do report gunfire, it is an open question whether the cops will respond...
...The Times-Picayune discovered this year that most cops, both black and white, wanted the residency requirement rescinded, and that many of them, recognizing the danger of the city's criminal class to their families, have been moving them out to the suburbs on the sly...
...The fact that we are seeing a lot of repeat people that have been rejected in the past," said a New Or-leans police recruiter to the press, complaining about the residency requirement, is "an indication we don't have a large pool...
...Where are the murders...
...The city fell from without, according to the storyline liberals are spinning...
...As it was, even if Mayor Ray Nagin had been able to mobilize the city's unused buses—he says that he couldn't find anyone to drive them, yet another admission that the local government is chronically craven and indolent—many New Orleanians would have refused to board them...
...W...
...Even though police officers say this requirement threatens public safety—since it guarantees that the pool of applicants will be small and shady—the city G E O R G E N E U M A Y R maintains it for reasons of social engineering...
...George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 Long before Hurricane Katrina, life in New Orleans was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short...
...it fell from within...
...Another novel personnel practice of Jordan's was to place a deadbeat dad in the office investigating delinquent child support payments...
...Yes, by each other...
...The police and district attorney have chalked the anemic conviction rate up to the paucity of "witnesses"—a tacit admission that vengeful criminals rule the city...
...Had local and state Louisiana authorities wanted to guarantee evacuation of the inner city, they should have announced that the distribution of welfare checks in September would be held in Baton Rouge...
...In the 1990s, the department teemed with corruption and even hired a couple of murderers...
...But their abandonment of the city to its criminal class had begun long before the flood...
...What intrepid conservative black leaders have announced for years—that the crisis in inner cities is due not to racism but to the disintegration of the traditional black family—assumed graphic form during the flood...
...Peter Scharf, director of the Center for Society, Law and Justice, has called the NOPD, and departments like it, a "mini-Enron...
...Almost every single school in the New Orleans public school district is below average...
...A substantial number of rapes, burglaries, robberies, assaults, and property crimes occur daily...
...Over 80 percent of the households in New Orleans' housing projects, sociologists estimate, are fatherless...
...During 2003-2004, a mere 5 percent of convictions in New Orleans were for violent crimes...
...New Orleans children receive little meaningful education in their broken homes and even less in their classrooms...
...A strange admixture of upper-class decadence and underclass pathology, New Orleans has long been a stew of disorder and dysfunction, convincing many New Orleans residents, years before Hurricane Katrina, to evacuate what they regarded as an increasingly unlivable city...
...The truth, however, is clear: once nature and human nature ran amok, the city's fall was inevitable...
...Even its valedictorians are illiterate...
...Others were just waiting for their welfare checks at the beginning of September, Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell told the New York Times...
...The Wall Street Journal once dubbed New Orleanians "the fattest people in America, the most likely to contract lung cancer and among the shortest lived, with an average lifespan, roughly equal to the citizens of Mauritius, North Korea, and Uzbekistan...
...The New Orleans Police Department is famously inept at recruiting cops or retaining them...
...New Orleans did not fall from without...
...The downgrading issue is something that has been plaguing the New Orleans Police Department for six or eight years now," said Metropolitan Crime Commission President Rafael Goyeneche in 2003, pointing to incidents such as the time a man was shotduring a mugging and the police marked it down as a "medical incident...
...The catalogue of crime and pathology in New Orleans is staggering...
...By its own admission, the department has been short at least 300 cops for years...
...They're not on my docket...
...Gunfire is to New Orleans what honking horns are to New York City—background noise so commonplace New Orleanians, out of either indifference or fear, don't even call the police when they hear it...
...Criminologists predicted that at least 300 murders, an estimate that now looks tame, would occur this year, a rate of murder ten times that of the rest of the country...
...The NOPD's idea of fighting crime is to redefine it...
...The police department's chief spokesman committed suicide...
...These employees later sued Jordan for racial discrimination and won...
...Much will be written about its dangerous geography...
...But the city's powerful black leadership—composed of Jesse Jackson-style activists who consider the greatest crisis facing the black community the existence of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court—insist that the residency requirement remain in place...
...Where are the burglaries...
...Judges can't sentence New Orleans thugs to prison because their cases rarely come before them...
...Recently a local "witness protection" program was set up, but few New Orleanians participate and those who do have complained to the local paper that the program was too half-baked to be helpful...
...HILE MANY BLAMELESS inner-city New Orleanians couldn't evacuate the city for reasons beyond their control, many others had no intention of leaving...
...Away from the jazz of Bourbon Street, life in New Orleans has been solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short for quite some time...
...California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, inserting herself into the controversies over Hurricane The police department has gotten more ink in Louisiana papers in recent years for hiring criminals than catching them...
...Nothing will be written about its dangerous culture...
...The police department has gotten more ink in Louisiana papers in recent years for hiring criminals than catching them...
Vol. 38 • November 2005 • No. 9
