Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

Although New Orleans has been branded “jazz capital” (rightfully so), in truth, on the eve of Katrina, one would be hard-pressed to hear Wynton Marsalis or Irvin Mayfield CDs blaring out of federally subsidized housing. Jazz had become establishment music except for the brass band phenomenon. Times had changed. Louis Armstrong had fled New Orleans long ago, living his last decades in Queens, New York, where he was buried in July 1971. But hip hop and rap were flourishing, angry lyrics being shouted out of Magnolia and St. Bernard and Iberville. Drum machines and turntables had replaced trumpets and trombones as the instruments of choice. Master P, raised in the Calliope Projects, was a true hip hop hero to African-American youths, admired both for such outrageous hits as “99 Ways to Die” and for being CEO and founder of No Limit Records. Then there was B.G., the Baby Gangsta, who at age eleven signed a major recording deal with Cash Money Records. His first album, "True Story," released in 1993, graphically depicted life in a crime-ridden, racist New Orleans where schools were like prisons. He was accurately depicting his reality, no matter how uncomfortable his lyrics might make some listeners. Terius Gray, a.k.a. Juvenile, was a pure product of the Magnolia Projects — or “Wild Magnolia” as he called it. His first band was UTP, three letters he has tattooed on his stomach. “UTP,” he explained, “was like a coalition of rappers.” His hip hop lyrics lambasted New Orleans’s racism and classism in a searing, no-holds-barred, in-your-face fashion. Growing up in the Hollygrove section of New Orleans, Lil’ Wayne (Dwayne Carter), also known as Weezy F Baby, Birdman Junior, and Raw Tunes, wrote dozens of gangsta rap hits while still in his teens. To understand the African-American youth culture of New Orleans during August 2005, put aside CDs like "The Magic Hour" and "Half Past Autumn Suite" and listen to the bleak, thuggish, violent inner-city lyrics of Lil’ Wayne in such songs as “Shooter,” where he raps: “So many doubt cuz I come from the south / But when I open my mouth, all bullets come out.”¹⁹

Hip hop-infused gang members were frequently arrested in New Orleans. They were usually let go before trial. In August 2005, the Metropolitan Crime Commission completed an extensive analysis of the arrest-to-conviction success between the NOPD and the District Attorney’s office, headed by Eddie Jordan. During the preceding year, 2004, the NOPD had made 114,000 arrests. Only 17,004 of those arrests, however, were for state offenses, and the breakdown of that number was about 60 percent felonies and 40 percent misdemeanors. In any case, only 7 percent of those 17,004 people who were arrested were actually sent to jail. The NOPD, in other words, was arresting a lot of criminals, but very few were being convicted. Most arrestees walked in the front door of the city jail and then, after signing a couple of forms, walked out the back door. “So the reason I think that we have a high crime rate is that police measured success by arrests,” explained Rafael C. Goyeneche III, president of the commission, a watchdog group dedicated to keeping repeat offenders off the streets and the NOPD honest, “and not how many of the arrests resulted in incarceration or incapacitation.”²⁰

On the eve of Katrina, New Orleans was a city of 460,000; the 114,000 arrests made there in 2005 reflected a rate of one for every four adult citizens had been arrested by the NOPD. Quite understandably, many citizens felt the NOPD was overzealous in arrests and underzealous in follow-up. New Orleans’s juries often didn’t trust the arresting NOPD officers’ credibility. Often DA Jordan had to drop cases because the arresting officer simply refused to be a witness. Many bad guys — drug kingpins or child molesters — were let go on technicalities because of sloppy NOPD paperwork. To put it simply, the NOPD was high on street action and low on desk work. In 2005 only 12 percent of the people arrested for homicide were convicted, which meant that 88 percent of those arrested were free to walk the streets. Murderers were wandering around New Orleans as Katrina approached, in large measure because the NOPD didn’t know how to work the judicial system.

But there were able officers in the department on the eve of Katrina, cops who were determined to clean up the corruption. “You have to be by the book,” Warren Riley said late in 2005, after becoming superintendent, explaining the need for a new era of public integrity in the NOPD. “That’s the bottom line. I think that accountability is vital, swift punishment is absolutely necessary. Even within an organization, like the law enforcement organization, the officers need to fear the administration. They need to believe that if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they’re going to suffer the consequences ... termination, prosecution, whatever.”²¹

IV
At forty-six Warren Riley, as husky as a Russian weight lifter, with the facial features of a puffy Hank Aaron, was in many respects an old-fashioned community cop. The youngest of five children, he was the first person in his family to earn a college degree. Combating racism was a reality the Riley family faced head-on. His father, Sam, who hailed from Wilson, Louisiana, never let verbal slights by whites get under his skin. His mother, Selma, however, was a child of a woman raped by a white man. “My mother was half-white,” Riley explained. “Her mother was an African-American female who worked in a grocery store in Plaquemines. The story that my mother told was that the white Irishman store owner, when his wife left, raped her, at least one time. So my mother was a very fair-complexioned lady, long straight hair.”²²

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