Some Reports of N.O. Violence Exaggerated
I'll add right away that I find this headline to be itself a vast understatement.
On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."
Five days later, he told Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped. On the same show, Mayor Ray Nagin warned: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
The ugliest reports - children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement - soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.
The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations, including The Associated Press, carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements, and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.
But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.
Many? How about most. How about nearly all.
They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are believed to have been murdered.
One of those victims - found at the Superdome - appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.
"It was a chaotic time for the city. Now that we've had a chance to reflect back on that situation, we're able to say right now that things were not the way they appeared," said police Capt. Marlon Defillo.
Well I, for one, am not sure it was a matter of how it "appeared" as much as how it was "portrayed" by the media. The media created this myth of barbarism out of whole cloth. I say it that boldly because they were there. No one on earth was in a better position to get this right and they got it exactly wrong. And they got it wrong on purpose. Rape and murder sells, evidently. Brian Williams fleeing for his life from "hell on earth" New Orleans, sells.
Now, I'm not saying that reporters didn't get bad information, but it is their job to fact check all the time. You don't get to skip it if it would interfere with really good copy.
A week after the floodwaters poured into the city, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans quoted an Arkansas National Guardsman as saying that soldiers had discovered 30 to 40 bodies inside a freezer in the convention center's food area. Guardsman Mikel Brooks told the newspaper that some of the dead appeared to have met violent ends, including "a 7-year-old with her throat cut."
When the convention center was swept, however, no such pile of bodies was found.
Lt. Col. John Edwards, the staff judge advocate for the 39th Infantry Brigade of the Arkansas National Guard, said Tuesday that Brooks told the Times-Picayune reporter only that he had heard rumors of bodies in the freezer, not that he had actually seen them.
"We have never found anybody who has any first-hand knowledge of dozens of bodies in the refrigerator," Edwards said.
Frankly, the whole thing smacks of racism. The media all to readily accepted as fact that poor African Americans would descend into a violent, brutish, Hobbesian state at the drop of a hat. Lots of Americans bought that story too, hook, line and sinker. It helps the bottom line better than hearing that,
"For the amount of the people in the situation, it was a very stable environment."
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