Police run wild in New Orleans

The state repression in New Orleans, especially against African-American people, continues to intensify in the aftermath of the Katrina catastrophe. For instance, reminiscent of the videotaping of the 1992 brutal beating of Rodney King at the hands of four white Los Angeles cops, a similar incident has now occurred in New Orleans.

Robert Davis beaten by the cops.

On Oct. 9, an Associated Press television producer captured on videotape two white cops beating 64-year-old Black retired school teacher, Robert Davis. A third cop shoved the producer and tried to seize the tape from him. The tape has been made available for the whole world to see. Davis was arrested for public intoxication, assault and resisting arrest. Davis stated that all the charges against him were false and that he will be seeking compensation.

The racist cops who attacked him have been put on leave without pay. The police have announced an “investigation” into the incident, which will most likely amount to a slap on the wrist for the cops.

Even though the big business media could not ignore what the tape showed, they are clearly trying to whip up sympathy for these cops in general to offset the terror that the police have unleashed on the Black and poor population. The media are excusing police brutality by dwelling on the alleged post-traumatic stress they are suffering. But what about the real post-traumatic stress that the survivors of Katrina have had to endure, including the on-going demonization by the New Orleans Police Department and the mainstream media?

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, as the misery of the tens of thousands of New Orleanians who were left to bear the brunt of the devastating storm began to compound, salt was heaped on the wounds of the residents of the city and the poor and people of color that went beyond the borders of the Gulf Coast.

The corporate media began to paint horrific pictures of a New Orleans descending into chaos, where the inhabitants of the city were killing, raping and torturing one another. This false, racist coverage was broadcast everywhere, all to divert ire away from the true criminals and the gross criminal neglect that led to close to a thousand reported deaths, with more left unaccounted for.

Recently, the superintendent of the racist police department resigned, amid reports of these gross exaggerations by local officials and the media. It had come out that only six people out of the nearly 1,000 bodies found were thought to have died under questionable circumstances. Out of 10 bodies at the Superdome, two are thought to have been killed by other persons and brought to the Superdome. Almost all the others died while waiting for help; one person committed suicide.

Wherever these reports came from, local officials worsened the situation by using them to depict Black people and the poor of New Orleans as subhuman. State and national officials followed suit, and the media ran the reports hourly, often embellishing, but with no actual footage to substantiate the rumors.

Chaos of the unnatural kind

There was chaos. But the chaos was of a capitalist nature. The only emergency planning consisted of ordering those who “have the means” to evacuate, quartering thousands more in facilities with no food or water, and asking millions of others to “pray down the hurricane,” as Governor Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana suggested.

Further injustice came as the horrors of New Orleans revealed that the levees began to fail and millions of gallons of water poured into the city. The media denigrated the poor, overwhelmingly Black inhabitants of the city, labeling people searching for food as “looters.”

There was at least one caption that depicted two sets of people differently, one Black, the other white. One caption showed a Black couple with food and labeled them “looters.” Another caption from the same news source showed a white couple with food and described them as “finding” food.

Whatever footage existed of so-called “looters” showed people taking food and clothes, not fighting over the items, but helping one another. Yet none of this was widely shown. There are images that exist of great individual heroism, like strangers pulling next-door neighbors on inflatable mattresses, and of a young man who was able to confiscate a bus, fill it with evacuees and drive them to Houston.

Over 15,000 people waited at the New Orleans Convention Center, starving and thirsty, withering in the blistering heat and humidity, even as fetid water was permeating the New Orleans atmosphere. This was broadcast all over the world, but the head of FEMA at the time, Michael Brown, claimed to not be aware. Yet he was not above relating fictional stories of mass rapes, murders and “looters.”

The National Guard was let loose, along with local police who have a history of brutality and corruption, and they were given the go-ahead to shoot to kill. One television interviewer was able to capture the sentiments of so many. The reporter, wading in waist-deep water, ran into a group of three young Black men. When the young men heard that police and the National Guard were allowed to kill, they lifted their bare feet out of the water and said, “Why would they shoot us when we don’t have shoes? People lost everything and we don’t have shoes, so we went to get us some shoes.”

It was people like these young men who were being targeted, who were left behind and being hunted for trying to meet basic needs. The stores would be declared a total loss and recoup their losses from insurance companies. Not to mention that these very stores had robbed the people of New Orleans of their labor, paying meager wages and little to no benefits.

This is to be expected, as the media is hardly anything else other than the bullhorn for the rulers and their aims. It is not to be expected that the media would report on killings that could be attributed to the police and National Guard, as they rolled into the city prepared to protect property and shore up the French Quarter. In fact, in the days after the hurricane hit, New Orleans looked more like a militarily occupied zone than an area devastated by a powerful storm.

Instead of resembling an area organized to help the people, New Orleans looked like an occupied area in Iraq.

One thing that the media could never gloss over is the great outrage at the racist coverage, and that outrage will grow this fall with the Black-led Millions More Movement and the Dec. 1 strike to shut down the war, racism and poverty. No amount of praying, or obfuscation coming from the corporate media, will pray down this coming storm of righteous anger.