Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

Riley’s father worked three jobs as a maintenance man to keep the family together. A stern disciplinarian, he made Warren take responsibility for household chores. As a student at Booker T. Washington High School from 1974 to 1978, Warren seldom encountered racism, although he admits white gangs and black gangs sometimes fought on Walmsey Avenue. Ironically, it was a white NOPD officer named Tom Fierce who influenced Riley’s decision to become a cop. A true community officer, Fierce would bring football helmets and pads to give to the poorer African-American kids in the playground. This impressed Riley immensely. The police were the good guys, especially Fierce. Riley’s sports hero was also white: quarterback Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts. “Something about the crew cut,” he later reflected on Unitas, “the clean-cut look he had.” Riley’s favorite subject was history, particularly battlefield heroics ranging in time from the Crusades to World War II, but he also enjoyed TV detective shows. He recognized that men in uniform garnered society’s respect. “My mother was a maid somewhere and my father went to pick her up and it was this big house,” Riley said. “That was the first time I saw a community where I realized there was something really different between these homes and my community. But what drove me was I was just the kind of person who wanted the house and the picket fence and the two kids and the car. So, becoming a police officer, initially for me, it was just a steppingstone. It was a job, an opportunity to get a car, to get an apartment.”

Oddly, Riley would claim that his inaugural encounter with racism came when he joined the NOPD in 1979. “It was clearly an internally segregated system back then,” Riley explained. “You’d go to roll call, blacks would sit on one side of the room, whites would sit on the other side of the room. It was very seldom that blacks and whites rode together in the Sixth District, where I was working .... We merely existed in our own worlds.” Back then, Riley said white officers harbored a death wish for their black colleagues. Over twenty-five years later, he remembered the chilling words he heard from a couple of different white officers: “Don’t call for any help ’cause nobody’s coming.”²³

From 1984 to 1989, the NOPD had Riley working vice in the St. Bernard Housing Development in the Ninth Ward. He became an undercover narcotics agent, staying out of Uptown, where folks might recognize him. It was known as the “teas and blues” circuit — a homemade concoction of the barbiturate Talwin (teas) and antihistamines (blues), which, when injected, hyped abusers up, making them violent. Unlike heroin, which tended to make junkies lethargic and easygoing, or marijuana, which the police largely ignored, crack cocaine was something that vice wanted to get off the streets. Eight balls (eight ounces) of crack cocaine were selling for $400. The NOPD needed somebody young to become an undercover drug dealer, and Riley was in his late twenties. “I was set up in an apartment and I’m selling drugs back to the drug dealers,” Riley recalled.

There was no question that Riley was a tough, uncompromising narc. He believed in swift punishment for drug dealers, whom he deemed scum, just like those who were committing theft, burglarizing homes, and even murdering people. “I was never looking at it in a humanitarian way, so to speak, like ‘these guys need a break,’ ” Riley said. “I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood. The big thing then was sniffing glue .... I had two outstanding parents. That’s what made the difference in my life. So there was no regret. Never did I think about what was going to happen to these guys [once arrested].”

On the eve of Katrina, Riley was living in Algiers. He had run against Marlon Gusman for Orleans Parish criminal sheriff in the previous fall and had lost. He was, however, deputy chief of police of the NOPD. Riley was determined to stick out the storm, to start rescuing people if necessary when it passed. With media training by the FBI, he was, in police jargon, a “command presence.” To his credit, Riley tried to be proactive about preparing the department for the impending storm. But as number two, there was only so much he could do. Worried that the NOPD had antiquated radio communication that would have made Marconi jeer, he put out a search for satellite phones. He contacted the National Guard, requesting that they put five boats in each district station so his men could get around if it flooded. But the Guard nixed the idea, preferring to keep them all at Jackson Barracks, its headquarters. Located on St. Claude Avenue, nestled on 100 acres, Jackson Barracks was created in 1834 to offer logistical assistance to far-flung Mississippi River Valley forts. A campus of fine brick buildings with white columns, the facility had been used earlier in 2005 by film director Steven Zaillian as a set for his remake of All the King’s Men. This was where the Louisiana National Guard was going to make its stand during Katrina. Unfortunately that pre-Katrina weekend, feeling safe from the hurricane, the Guard was bringing rescue equipment like boats and high-water vehicles to the compound, not out of it. As fate would have it, Jackson Barracks got wiped out. Good-bye, trucks. Riley also helped set up an emergency operations center on the ninth floor of City Hall. While it would be headed by Assistant Police Chief Danny Lawless, a whole beehive of representatives — from the state police, harbor police, National Guard, Coast Guard, Air National Guard, Homeland Security, fire department — would be ensconced there. For some reason it never seemed to dawn on any of these official representatives that they were in the bowl, that if City Hall flooded there would be no command center. When asked if this kind of consolidation was smart, Riley stiffened, claiming it made perfect sense. “Every storm we’d been through,” he said, “that command center at City Hall had been sufficient.” For all his street smarts, Riley, like most city officials, ignoring the Pam exercises and the five-part Times-Picayune doomsday series, felt like a man on top of his game. He was going to ride out Katrina at police headquarters on 715 Broad Street with his men — the men who were his brothers of the shield.

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