Qtec
08-30-2010, 06:44 AM
Remember all those stories about black gangs roaming the streets?
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The West Bank area of the city was spared any flooding, but in the days and weeks after the storm, it was littered with fallen trees and, according to witnesses, with the bodies of several black men — none of whom appeared to have drowned.
“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks,” said Malik Rahim, who lives around the corner from Mr. Bell and came to his aid. “I’m not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I’m talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.
“We’ve been screaming it from the top of our lungs since those first days, but nobody wanted to listen.”
Mr. Bell said that he went to the police not long after the confrontation with the two gun-wielding white men but no report or action was taken. It was not until last year when he was interviewed by a federal grand jury looking into civil rights violations in post-Katrina New Orleans that people seemed to pay attention, he said.
Some of the most serious accusations surfaced after investigations by The Times-Picayune and the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which spotlighted much of the police violence and racially motivated violence around Algiers Point.
One case is that of a former Algiers resident, Roland J. Bourgeois Jr., who is white and was accused of being part of one of the vigilante groups. He was recently indicted by the federal government on civil rights charges in the shooting of three black men who were trying to leave the city. According to the indictment, Mr. Bourgeois, who now lives in Mississippi, warned one neighbor that <u>“anything coming up this street darker than a brown paper bag is getting shot.”</u>
<span style='font-size: 14pt'>The highest-profile case involving the police is the Danziger Bridge shooting in eastern New Orleans, where six days after Katrina, a group of police officers wielding assault rifles and automatic weapons fired on a group of unarmed civilians, wounding a family of four and killing two, including a teenager and a mentally disabled man. The man, Ronald Madison, 40, was shot in the back with a shotgun and then stomped and kicked as he lay dying, according to court papers. </span></div></div>
read it (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27racial.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all)
Q
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The West Bank area of the city was spared any flooding, but in the days and weeks after the storm, it was littered with fallen trees and, according to witnesses, with the bodies of several black men — none of whom appeared to have drowned.
“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks,” said Malik Rahim, who lives around the corner from Mr. Bell and came to his aid. “I’m not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I’m talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.
“We’ve been screaming it from the top of our lungs since those first days, but nobody wanted to listen.”
Mr. Bell said that he went to the police not long after the confrontation with the two gun-wielding white men but no report or action was taken. It was not until last year when he was interviewed by a federal grand jury looking into civil rights violations in post-Katrina New Orleans that people seemed to pay attention, he said.
Some of the most serious accusations surfaced after investigations by The Times-Picayune and the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which spotlighted much of the police violence and racially motivated violence around Algiers Point.
One case is that of a former Algiers resident, Roland J. Bourgeois Jr., who is white and was accused of being part of one of the vigilante groups. He was recently indicted by the federal government on civil rights charges in the shooting of three black men who were trying to leave the city. According to the indictment, Mr. Bourgeois, who now lives in Mississippi, warned one neighbor that <u>“anything coming up this street darker than a brown paper bag is getting shot.”</u>
<span style='font-size: 14pt'>The highest-profile case involving the police is the Danziger Bridge shooting in eastern New Orleans, where six days after Katrina, a group of police officers wielding assault rifles and automatic weapons fired on a group of unarmed civilians, wounding a family of four and killing two, including a teenager and a mentally disabled man. The man, Ronald Madison, 40, was shot in the back with a shotgun and then stomped and kicked as he lay dying, according to court papers. </span></div></div>
read it (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27racial.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all)
Q