Violent Crime in New Orleans: some verified, some exaggerated, some fictional

One of the biggest horror stories coming from New Orleans was the reports of terrible crimes committed by gangs of thugs, including robbery, assaults, car-jackings and rapes. Some of this has been verified, as you can see at the end of this entry.

But some of it has been exaggerated and some reports are false, as reported by DailyKos diarist Badtux:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/6/213759/1319

"It turns out that the Convention Center was NOT overrun by armed gangs. It turns out that a 7 year old child was NOT raped and had her throat cut. Turns out that most of the rumor and innuendo about the Superdome and Convention Center descending into savagery was just that -- rumor and innuendo, apparently intended to demonize the victims of this national disaster, who were poor and black and you know that those big buck negros just wanna rape and kill 7 year old children, right?

Similarly, there were NOT riots at the Baton Rouge shelter. And the worst threat that the National Guard faced when they approached the Convention Center was a nurse wearing an "I Love New Orleans" t-shirt, who approached them while saying "I have children who need help in here!" Nurses of mass destruction are all terrorists, I suppose, eh?

Of course, any viewer of Fox News who saw Geraldo at the Convention Center on Friday night would have already known this, as Geraldo, sans armed guards, freely roamed around the Convention Center talking to people. But hey, what's a little fact when we know, know I say, that those big buck negros are just savages who want to rape and kill our womens! Racism? In America? Gosh, who woulda thunk it!
-Badtux the Disgusted Penguin "

One of Badtux's sources was this article from The Guardian, which states:
"New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said last night: "We don't have any substantiated rapes. We will investigate if the individuals come forward."
And while many claim they happened, no witnesses, survivors or survivors' relatives have come forward.Nor has the source for the story of the murdered babies, or indeed their bodies, been found. And while the floor of the convention centre toilets were indeed covered in excrement, the Guardian found no corpses.
During a week when communications were difficult, rumours have acquired a particular currency. They acquired through repetition the status of established facts.
One French journalist from the daily newspaper Libération was given precise information that 1,200 people had drowned at Marion Abramson school on 5552 Read Boulevard. Nobody at the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the New Orleans police force has been able to verify that.
But then Fema could not confirm there were thousands of people at the convention centre until they were told by the press for the simple reason that they did not know.
"Katrina's winds have left behind an information vacuum. And that vacuum has been filled by rumour.
"There is nothing to correct wild reports that armed gangs have taken over the convention centre," wrote Associated Press writer, Allen Breed.
"You can report them but you at least have to say they are unsubstantiated and not pass them off as fact," said one Baltimore-based journalist.
"But nobody is doing that."
Either way these rumours have had an effect.
Reports of the complete degradation and violent criminals running rampant in the Superdome suggested a crisis that both hastened the relief effort and demonised those who were stranded.
By the end of last week the media in Baton Rouge reported that evacuees from New Orleans were carjacking and that guns and knives were being seized in local shelters where riots were erupting.
The local mayor responded accordingly.
"We do not want to inherit the looting and all the other foolishness that went on in New Orleans," Kip Holden was told the Baton Rouge Advocate.
"We do not want to inherit that breed that seeks to prey on other people."
The trouble, wrote Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune is that "scarcely any of it was true - the police confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter".
"There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes."
Similarly when the first convoy of national guardsmen went into New Orleans approached the convention centre they were ordered to "lock and load".
But when they arrived they were confronted not by armed mobs but a nurse wearing a T-shirt that read "I love New Orleans".
"She ran down a broken escalator, then held her hands in the air when she saw the guns," wrote the LA Times.
"We have sick kids up here!" she shouted.
"We have dehydrated kids! One kid with sickle cell!" "

Of course, there was some crime, as reported here:


http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050906/ts_nm/notebook_dc

"Reuters' Denver-based photographer Rick Wilking arrived in New Orleans two days before Hurricane Katrina hit and stayed in the greater New Orleans area for six days. The following is his personal account of the storm and its violent aftermath.


By Rick Wilking
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - It was dawn when he showed up out of nowhere. "Hey man, there's a ton of media up here and they have a lot of stuff. I don't see any cops. There's no security."
The man in ragged clothes summoned his friends to attempt a "hit" on a convoy of a dozen media cars parked on the highway overpass near the New Orleans Superdome, three days after Hurricane Katrina hit.
Fortunately for us the conversation was overheard. As soon as we saw a mob making its way toward us and just as a network anchor was about to go live for a morning show, the word went down the line.
Before you knew it, the lights were struck, the wires tossed into trucks, the satellite dishes stowed, and photographers and reporters were speeding the wrong way down the interstate to the relative safety of a police checkpoint.
When we got there the police told us there had been nearly 80 carjackings in the last few days, many of them media vehicles surrounded by mobs and stripped clean or stolen outright, sometimes at gunpoint. They also told us a policeman had been shot in the head (he lived) and so they had a new "shoot to kill" policy in place.
I've covered dozens of natural disasters around the globe, from mudslides and floods in Europe to hurricanes and tornadoes in the United States. I always considered the assignments somewhat dangerous but not extremely so, because if you know what you are doing you can easily minimize the danger -- actually control your situation.
Not so in New Orleans, where after one day of covering a storm and its aftermath I found myself covering a human tragedy of enormous proportions, compounded by a blatant criminal element bent on taking advantage of a very bad situation.
Looting is almost always found in the initial hours after a storm -- particularly if the area hit is a poorer neighborhood. But armed gangs riding in pick-up trucks, shots being fired from the ground at military rescue helicopters overhead and media vehicles being hijacked are not things you expect.
Covering flooded New Orleans was hard enough with many major roads under water, no power and no phones, not even cellular, without having to watch your back at every turn."