Posted on 09/03/2005 8:04:59 AM PDT by Carl/NewsMax
New Orleans Police Chief Edwin Compass said Friday that hurricane rescue efforts were hampered when relief workers came under attack by the city's criminal element, prompting conditions that resembled "urban warfare."
"We have never had an urban warfare battle like this on any front in the history of our nation," Compass told NBC's "Dateline."
"You're fighting in buildings that are pitch black with darkness. These individuals have root - the criminal element have looted all the gun shops and gun stores in this city, so they're armed, they're dangerous."
Federal Emergency Management Agency Chief Michael Brown, under fire for his agency's slow response, echoed Chief Compass's complaint, telling CNN: "We are working under conditions of urban warfare."
Though the city's crime rate is ten times the national average, U.S. news outlets downplayed the connection between New Orleans' outsized criminal element and delays in rescue efforts.
Saturday's London Times, however, painted a bleak picture of the challenges faced by local police as they tried to restore order.
"One New Orleans police officer wept as he described seeing bodies riddled with bullets, and the top of one man's head shot off. He said some looters were armed with AK-47 rifles, and compared the situation with Somalia, with police outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks . . .
"An effort to remove patients and staff from Charity Hospital, in the city centre, was suspended after it came under sniper fire . . .
"'It's a war-zone, and they're not treating it like one,' he said, referring to the federal government . . . Gunmen continued to fire on troops and rescue helicopters, and police officials said that many officers had stopped reporting for duty, cutting manpower by 20 per cent."
The ironic part was there was a high end furniture store located in downtown Richmond where it was a well publicized fact that Willy Mays and other black athletes of the era bought their furniture to outfit their homes. It seemed to be the focus of at least three of the riots and after three attempts they succeeded in burning it down.
In this case, the Mayor was incompetent - a political novice who probably had no idea about what goes into governing a city - and the Governor, next in command, was also incompetent. She is another political idiot (teachers' union background, no command experience) and obviously is not up to the job.
Chief Moose was also a loser who had already been fired by one extremely liberal PD after gross failures there, and was hired because nobody expected anything serious to ever happen there and they wanted a black police chief. He kept warding off the FBI and other agencies, even state agencies, and was essentially able to project his political biases in such a way that he prevented a serious investigation. And this was known to many people.
We have a system of subsidiarity which, in principle, is a good thing. But when things go wrong, we don't really have a way for anybody at the next level to take over, and the ones who suffer, as usual, are the ordinary citizens. Heck, Moose got a book deal out of his incompetence, and I imagine that Nagin will, too.
I don't know if you are being sarcastic in your first 2 comments:
"It seems that in a population that is prone to riot, couldn't they get it right just this once and riot against their own criminal element especially when they are raping and murdering their own children?
I guess the paid instigators weren't there to direct them?"
If you lived through the race riots in CA then you know the truth. The thugs take advantage of situations. That this was not predicted or expected is negligence on the part of the local and state officials. They know the area the best.
The race riots I was familiar with were not filled with thugs, just the general population living in that area going around breaking and burning things. No one ever really could figure out the reason. They just seemed to spontaneously start.
Seems like they could harness that energy for good too if needed.
"I wonder how much airtime this will get played in the MSM in contrast to what Jessy, Al Sharpton, and Elijah Cummings have said ? Does anyone want to guess?"
..OK, here's my guess...none of these a$$holes will show up in N.O. until after the National Guard is able to bring in enough lumber to construct a "grand stand" for them to speak from. ...my two cents...
We have watched. We have seen: The guy w/o a weapon and ammo is screwed. And probably robbed and murdered as well.
Was this guy alive during the Watts riots in Los Angeles???
I was. I was working there. But maybe there couldn't be so many burned building in NOLA is because of the depth of the water. Some buildings burned in the Watts riots of 1965 STILL are NOT rebuilt.
"Seems like they could harness that energy for good too if needed."
Agreed.
Right! Detroit's mayor was so gracious and welcoming with his 'y'all come to stay'.
There will be interesting fallout indeed.
ROTFLMAO,,,,, I have to admit, that's a good one, and so true.
If you think that the criminal element did not already have guns, I have some nice real estate in NO to sell...
This talk of "looted gun shops" is just another excuse to blame the problems on the 2nd amendment. How many crimes were committed in NO because the ordinary citizen was *not* armed?
I'll bet that there are a lot more gun shops per capita in Mississippi than in NO, and far less violence.
We have no idea how many firearms were looted in NO at this time, just some political types trying to throw the responsibility and blame someone else.
I heard the other day that the reason there are so many blacks in detroit was because they went there after a huge flood in mississippi and never left...
I wonder if Bush told the mayor, the looters were domestic terrorists,..you're either for us or against us...?
One thing we don't hear about is the status quo out in the bayou communities affected by the hurricane.
Bayou life always had been a bit funky. Smelt sortof like NO smells today, more guns and ammo per person than the city, and plenty of gators, snakes and other critters.
I guess one could use the same liberal justifications and rationalizations for the criminal behavior in NO by appealing to the "You don't know how you would act unless you were in that situation" mentality. Somehow I don't think they would be so easily swayed if that same rational were used to defend David Duke. Then again, we don't hear of people like David Duke having any problems with looters and rapists in their midst.
Of course, one doesn't hear about a lot of things that happen down in the bayou.
Sortof makes you wonder how things might get played out in the end.
About an hour I imagine, if the owners had any employees there to help. Most gun shops lock up their entire inventory every single night. And not just in an ordinary room either. They know they are prime targets for thieves, and have to take pretty extrordinary measures to protect their inventory.
Even your local WalMart keeps most of it's gun back in a vault, save the dozen or so that are on display. In stores that aren't 24hrs, or where the sports department is not 24 hours, they lock those up every night too.
Lets not blame the victims here. I sorta doubt there are all that many gun shops in the affected area to begin with, folks like that can't pay the going rate. Pawn shops yes, gun stores, not many. Pawn shops have the same requirements to protect their guns as do gun shops.
Even if they did "load them up", the guns would be more vulnerable while being transported than in the safe. Many owners would have done that anyway, to protect them from damage due to flooding, even if they didn't expect his magnitude of it.
The shop owners are victims here, not perpetrators. That said, I doubt that what guns were stolen after the hurricane hit contributed much to the numbers of guns possessed by the gang bangers. WalMart doesn't carry AK-47s, not even the semi-auto variants.
"Granbury firefighters fear for their safety; back home from Gulf Coast chaos
Four Granbury firefighters helped hurricane-striken victims along the Gulf Coast, but have returned home early after hearing shots fired at fellow rescuers." from Hood County News in Texas......why do we not hear about this and I don't blame them for going home.
Funny, the National Guard was there from day 2, but mostly unarmed. When they came in Friday with guns, things changed. It's not the number of guns so much as who has them and who doesn't.
Only because there are so many Wal-Marts. WalMart doesn't sell handguns, not even .22s. They don't sell what were once termed "Assault Weapons". They don't even stock shotguns designed for serious social purposes. They sell hunting rifles, bird guns, and .22 rifles suitable for squirrels or plinking. Of course any deer rifle can be used as a sniper rifle, and except for the ever popular 30-30 lever action, will be more powerful and have longer range than an SKS or the semi-auto variants of the AK-47 or AR-15 (M-16).
That's why the blue states stay blue.
He is pandering for votes
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