Draconian cuts in the budget for lawyers who represent indigent defendants have come back to haunt the Orleans Parish criminal justice system.

A criminal defendant’s right to an attorney is found in the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires the “assistance of counsel” for the accused “in all criminal prosecutions,” typically from arrest through the first appeal after conviction. If the defendant cannot afford an attorney, in almost all instances the government will appoint one to handle the case, at no cost to the defendant.

The court papers were filed by William Quigley, a constitutional and civil rights attorney who teaches at the Loyola College of Law.

Quigley said that prior to layoffs last year, one division of the Orleans Public Defenders represented over 500 people, all of whom were cut loose from their counselors as the budget ax fell.

“It is not clear what happened to those 500 people,” he wrote.

One judge on the Orleans Parish criminal court bench has responded to the public defender crunch by refusing to let prosecutions go forward in cases involving multiple defendants – to the dismay of Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro.

In February 2012, Orleans Public Defenders was forced to cut about $2.5 million from its $9.5 million budget to close an anticipated fiscal year-end shortfall. That led to layoffs and other cuts – and an attendant spike in caseloads for the remaining group of about 60 defense attorneys.

In addition to layoffs, the caseload crunch has been worsened by prosecutors charging multiple defendants in an increasing number of high-profile, mid-level felony cases.

Last year’s budget bust forced the public defenders organization to close a division of its operations devoted to ensuring defendants’ rights in cases where conflicts between co-defendants may arise. It reopened months later but with less than half its original staffing.

In the meantime, up to 500 defendants were either released on bond or locked up at the Orleans Parish jail, never having been assigned a defense lawyer as they await their day in court.

In today’s court filing, Quigley asserts defendant Christopher Gordon’s constitutional right to a competent defense. Gordon in September was co-charged with another man on felony drug possession charges.

Gordon was arraigned and entered a not-guilty plea last October, and in December, Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter put the brakes on his case based on Quigley’s argument that Gordon could not be prosecuted without first being assigned a criminal defense lawyer.

Quigley is not a criminal defense lawyer.

“At my request, Judge Hunter has stayed the prosecution of a number of these cases,” Quigley said.

Chief public defender Derwyn Bunton said the city’s numerous new anti-violence and anti-crime initiatives are driving the spike in the number of cases involving multiple defendants. He cited a recent racketeering case that involved 10 defendants.

“When that case hit the system, I thought: I hope some of them have private counsel, because this case is not going anywhere,” Bunton said. “There are more and more of these cases coming through the criminal justice system.”

The Orleans Public Defenders’ office fields a unit called the Conflict Division, which is charged with determining how multiple defendants charged on a single bill of information can be defended. Often the defendants are singled out and defended individually.

The Orleans Parish Criminal Courthouse at Tulane and Broad is overloaded with cases involving multiple defendants.

But the 10-person internal Conflict Division office was temporarily shuttered in early 2012, Quigley said. The money for outside contract lawyers dried up, and other Orleans Public Defenders’ attorneys were left holding the bag for the swelling number of indigent defendants entitled to legal representation.

Hunter took matters into his own hands late last summer.

Transcripts provided to The Lens show that he put lawyers from Orleans Parish Defenders’ under oath and forced them to cough up their caseload numbers. One said her caseload was 179.

Hunter then started un-assigning Orleans Parish Defenders lawyers from cases involving multiple defendants. He reached out to lawyers around the city to step into the breach he had created.

Hunter said he could not comment for this story. “This is active litigation,” he said. “It would be more appropriate for (Quigley) to answer your questions than for me to answer them.”

“Hunter’s concern is justice for the people,” Bunton said. “He’s seeing overburdened lawyers in an overburdened office, and defendants – some may be innocent, or they may be over-charged – and he wants them to be able to stand up to the forces of the government to give them a fair trial.”

Enter Quigley.

“When [Hunter] started this process, as far as I know, he’d always appoint Bill Quigley, unappoint our office, and then Quigley would file a motion saying they didn’t have lawyers and he could only participate in a limited capacity,” Bunton said.

But, since Quigley wasn’t handling their criminal cases, some indigent defendants would go back to their cells confident only in the knowledge that their constitutional right to a defense lawyer was being looked after, even if they had no counsel in their criminal defense.

“The judge’s action left a lot of folks without lawyers,” Bunton said.

In an email to The Lens, Quigley said that before he was brought in, Hunter was able to find lawyers to handle several dozen cases involving co-defendants, but that he eventually “ran out of competent lawyers.”

With Quigley on board, Hunter has said he won’t allow prosecutions of un-defended indigents to go forward.

That news did not sit well with a District Attorney’s Office tasked with prosecuting alleged perpetrators. It filed writs of its own in state court arguing against Quigley’s move.

“It is ironic that they have counsel coming in to court, lawyers who are filing briefs on their behalf complaining that they aren’t being represented,” said Chris Bowman, an assistant district attorney and spokesman for District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro.”

Chief Public Defender Derwyn Bunton stands in front of the building that houses his offices on Tulane Avenue. Although his budget is half that of the DA’s office and each Orleans Parish public defender gets only the basics of a desk, chair, telephone, laptop and file cabinet, his team handles more than 50,000 cases a year. – Photo: Cheryl Gerber

“We hit the wall in early 2012,” Bunton said. “At that point we couldn’t handle conflicts at all. We had a restart in July and slowly picked ourselves up from the ashes, but still with the understanding that, as cases were coming in, we’d run out of capacity – and that’s been the case.”

Contacting The Lens after initial publication of this article, Orleans Parish Defenders’ spokesperson Lindsey Hortenstine said the office today is keeping up with demand and that any indigent defendant who needs their services is getting them.

Today’s brief from Quigley follows on a prior writ filed with the state court by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office that rejected Gordon’s claims of indigence.

The district attorney also questioned the legality of Quigley’s “limited representation in this matter” and claims that Quigley didn’t have a consultation with Gordon, a prerequisite to assure that a client “will understand the dangers that may be inherent in contracting for limited legal services.”

The prosecutor’s office further argued that there was no evidence that Gordon qualified for the appointment of a public defender, or that a hearing was ever conducted to determine counsel for him.

“Accordingly, Mr. Quigley’s assertion that his client is being denied effective assistance of counsel is premature,” the district attorney’s office argued.

With Quigley’s brief rejecting Cannizzaro’s assertions, Bowman said his office’s next move would be to file writs of mandamus in state court to order Hunter to appoint counsel.

“It’s the judge’s responsibility to appoint counsel to defendants who can’t afford counsel,” he said.

Tom Gogola covers criminal justice for The Lens, where this story first appeared. A veteran journalist and editor who has written for Newsday, New York, The Nation, Maxim and more, Gogola was a 2011 winner of the Hillman Foundation Sidney Award. He can be reached at (504) 483-1812 and tgogola@thelensnola.org, or follow him on Twitter @tgogolalensnola.

The “storm of our lives,” of course, refers to Katrina. But in my mind it also refers to the storm that WAS some people’s lives even before Katrina. The book that I’m about to review is one of the least likely Katrina outcomes imaginable. Why mince words? The book is an actual miracle.

Pat Denson is a member of ATD Fourth World Movement in New Orleans and a co-author of the book “Not Meant to Live Like This.”

Maria was born (in1961) and raised on Mauritius Island in the Indian Ocean. English is her second (or third?) language. She came to New Orleans as a full time All Together in Dignity (ADT) Fourth World Movement volunteer only months before the storm. As we New Orleaneans are wont to pointedly note: She’s not from here.

The Movement is a network of people in poverty and those of other backgrounds who work in partnership toward overcoming the exclusion and injustice of persistent poverty. In New Orleans before the storm, this had taken the form most prominently of Street Libraries where volunteers and parents spread out sheets or blankets on the sidewalk in poor neighborhoods on which they read books and conducted art projects with any child brave enough to join in. Sometimes that meant gently knocking on doors for weeks, eventually yielding a furtive glance through a curtain.

But gradually, word spread and children who considered themselves failures at school could find a dependable place to shine. Finally, even the drug dealers got behind the endeavor. As they moved their business out of eye and earshot of the blanket on the sidewalk they’d say, “Listen to the book ladies. You don’t want to end up like me.”

When the city flooded in August of 2005, the families who partook of the Street Libraries gave a whole new dimension of meaning to the phrase “lost everything.” All they HAD was family and the cooperative support of neighbors and communal networks nurtured by rituals, celebrations and ceremonies over the years.

Webs of safety and security created by people themselves out of shared hardships were lost overnight. That’s something you can’t file an insurance claim for. Parents lost children. Evacuation, traumatic for all of us, played out for these families often at gunpoint, with no money, no car, no experience of anyplace beyond their neighborhood, in treacherous water, with no ability to swim. They ended up all over the country.

Maria and fellow Movement volunteer Corrina Bain left New Orleans on the Wednesday after the storm, getting their bearings in Baton Rouge and then striking out against great odds to find all of their scattered Street Library families. Maria: “We did not give up on anybody. We diligently tracked them down … We drove first to see Eula Collins and her children in Arkansas. They had struggled the hardest before the storm, and we had been particularly worried about them.”

After the joyously tearful reunion, they got down to the serious discussion of what to do next. Maria was thinking Street Libraries in the Diaspora. Eula, on the other hand, was thinking Book. “About your courage,” Maria added. “It should be a book that would change the hearts of the people who read it, so that your life and the lives of your children will change for the better.”

In the third year of visiting families after the hurricane, Maria recorded the first of 50 oral history interviews. Much of the conversation was about how they would write the book together. The project wasn’t just good therapy for survivors or a way to rebuild community – although it was that. Its goal was to change social policy, to become a tool to overcome poverty.

Stories can educate. What if social policy could be redesigned to accommodate technical expertise AND the knowledge and experience of local residents in a participatory human rights approach? This is the grand vision behind the book.

Warning: Many of the stories will break your heart. Some will make you mad. Nothing is censored to prove a point, create an image, or advance an agenda. The interviews are raw and real, allowing a rare entre into what, for most of us, is an invisible world, the Fourth World, a population group living in extreme poverty.

I was particularly interested in what Cootis had to say. He doesn’t mouth platitudes: “I never growed up with the dreams of being one specific person. I never knew what I was gonna turn out to be. … I don’t have hopes or dreams. I never really hoped for nothing, because I never knowed how I was gonna turn out, so I never planned nothing. . . I just growed up.”

He tells us that the only way you go the right way is if you listen to “your own self” instead of what other people think. He says, “I used to go out and burglarize just because I knew it was gonna put a smile on somebody else’s face. … I wasn’t even thinking about the pain that I was causing to the people whose vehicles I was breaking into. I wasn’t thinking about how hard they worked to earn the things that they have. I wasn’t thinking about what they had to do to finally afford the vehicle that I was breaking into. The stuff that I was doing, I wasn’t thinking about how they felt. I was thinking about me.” He further concludes that the wrong thing always lands people behind the prison wall, a place where nobody wants to be. Cootis is 21.

In 2009, a seminar entitled “Not Meant to Live Like This” was held in New Orleans around the experiences before and after Hurricane Katrina of people who live in poverty and those who have witnessed their courage and their efforts to eradicate extreme poverty every day. The seminar built on the research and testimonies collected for a book of the same title, which was published on Aug. 26, 2012.

Here’s where the quiet revolution comes in: Sister Jane McKinlay, a nun for 60 years in the Society of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, says: “Quietly, for many years, a different message is being given to the world through the Fourth World Movement, the different message being that the traditional way we are dealing with poverty – all this giving and social programs to help people that are poor – that they haven’t worked. That the gulf between those who have and those who have not has only widened.

“And that there will be an end to extreme, chronic poverty only when those who are living in extreme, chronic poverty are partnered by persons who are not in that situation, and all of them working together effect an end of extreme poverty. … [Stopping] the continuation of people living in extreme poverty is a responsibility for every individual in the entire population, and we are all morally responsible to get involved and become partners with the very poor.”

I hear this in the message of all great religions and yet I hear nothing in the platforms of the presidential candidates about a true partnership with the poor. The debate seems to be stuck around the efficacy of this or that handout and may be based on erroneous assumptions.

It’s easy for me to dismiss the chance of a real partnership between the poor and the movers and shakers in politics or policy with a NO WAY. But then that’s exactly how I at first dismissed the possibility of this magnificent book. You’d think, sitting there in the monastery inspired by St. Clare in the 13th century – she was perhaps the most beautiful, privileged, golden-haired damsel ever to become one with the poor – that I would have been more aware of the power of miracles.

Orissa Arend is a mediator and psychotherapist in New Orleans and author of “Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers take a stand in New Orleans.” Learn more about the book, “Not Meant to Live Like This: Weathering the storm of our lives in New Orleans,” and the book tour at http://www.4thworldmovement.org/booklaunch.php.

TriceEdneyWire.com – A federal appeals court in New Orleans has overturned the conviction of former New Orleans police officer David Warren, one of the former cops tried and convicted of an assortment of charges related to the murder of Henry Glover, who was shot by police and later burned in an abandoned car by cops just days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans more than seven years ago. After Glover’s murder and the burning of his remains, his charred skull was removed from the vehicle.

Rebecca Glover, Henry Glover’s aunt, tells the press after the convictions two years ago that all the officers involved in Henry’s murder in the post-Katrina anti-Black violence should have been convicted. Now the convictions of three of them have been overturned. – Photo: New Orleans Times-Picayune

“We hold that because Warren has demonstrated that he suffered specific and compelling prejudice as a consequence of the district court’s refusal to sever his trial from that of the other defendants, the district court abused its discretion in denying Warren’s repeated motions to sever under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 14(a),” the Fifth Circuit Court said in papers filed Monday. “As a result, we VACATE Warren’s convictions and sentences and remand for a new trial.”

The ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which comes two years after the December 2010 convictions, makes Warren the second former police officer in the racially polarizing case to be granted a new trial. Former NOPD officer Travis McCabe, who was convicted of writing a false police report, was granted a new trial this past May by U.S. Judge Lance Africk, the same federal judge who handed down the convictions in 2010.

A third former officer convicted in the case, Greg McRae, had a conviction overturned for denying the Glover family access to the court due to what the three-judge panel deemed insufficient evidence, but was not able to convince the court to throw out other convictions related to him setting fire to the car that held Henry Glover’s remains on a Mississippi River levee.

“We hold that the evidence is insufficient to support McRae’s conviction for denying Glover’s descendants and survivors the right of access to courts, and we therefore REVERSE and VACATE that conviction” the court said Monday. “We AFFIRM McCabe’s other convictions, reject his double jeopardy challenge and REMAND for re-sentencing.”

The ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which comes two years after the December 2010 convictions, makes Warren the second former police officer in the racially polarizing case to be granted a new trial.

In December 2010, a federal jury ruled that David Warren was guilty of shooting down Henry Glover, 31, on Sept. 2, 2005, at a West Bank strip mall being used by the 4th Police District. An acquaintance, William Tanner, assisted the wounded Glover by giving him a ride to an Algiers elementary school being used by New Orleans police in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. After Tanner and Glover turned to the cops for assistance, they were beaten by police and Glover ultimately was killed and left dead on the levee.

Warren testified during the trial that he thought Glover was an armed looter when he fired at him from the roof of the strip mall with a rifle and was not certain Glover had been hit by his shot. He also told jurors that he was unaware that Glover later died and that his remains were set aflame in Tanner’s car.

Two other former officers were acquitted of charges in the case two years ago.

The Louisiana Weekly asked Danatus King, president of the New Orleans Branch of the NAACP, what meaning last week’s overturned convictions have for the civil rights community and the community’s ability to trust the justice system.

These five NOPD officers were tried for murdering Henry Glover: Officer Robert Italiano, Lt. Travis McCabe, Officer Greg McRae, Officer David Warren and Officer Dwayne Scheuermann. Italiano and Scheuermann were acquitted. McCabe was convicted of writing a false police report and lying to federal investigators, McRae of burning Henry Glover's body in a car and Warren for shooting Glover. – Photo: ColorLines

“Right now in the community, we are hearing all different kinds of theories including one that says the judge ruled to refuse severance of the trials because that was part of the setup, to give the defendant an out if things didn’t go the way they wanted,” King added. “There is a lot of concern in the community that what will happen is the officer whose conviction was thrown out will have a chance to be retried outside of New Orleans. That’s of great concern. It has hurt. It has hurt.

“That’s on top of the mental fatigue that a lot of the folks in the community are suffering from now,” King told The Louisiana Weekly. “When I say ‘mental fatigue,’ we’ve had so much to deal with as far as the killing of not only Mr. Glover but also the killings on the Danziger Bridge, all of the different trials we’ve been through and the killing of Mr. Robair. … Some folks in the community are just worn down and thought that we were going to have a little time to catch our breath, and now this has come up. I’m not a mental health expert, but I know that it takes a toll. It really takes a toll.”

“The Black community will have – and continuously has had – no faith in the justice system in light of what has happened in this unfortunate case,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a former congressional candidate and New Orleans businessman, told The Louisiana Weekly.

“Right now in the community, we are hearing all different kinds of theories including one that says the judge ruled to refuse severance of the trials because that was part of the setup, to give the defendant an out if things didn’t go the way they wanted,” King added.

“It’s unfortunate that we have to go through the same treatment, the same unfair, unconstitutional and inhumane treatment that Blacks have been subjected to for the past 400 to 500 years,” W.C. Johnson, a member of Community United for Change and host of local cable-access show “OurStory,” told The Louisiana Weekly Tuesday. “Monday’s ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court basically tells Black folks that they’re not considered citizens of this country and protections granted to us are minimal at best.”

Johnson, who attended Monday’s news conference with the Glover family, says it was evident even before the Henry Glover trial ended two years ago that something underhanded was going on just below the surface. “A lot was said about the mistreatment of the system as well as what the ruling is going to do to the family and Black people in New Orleans,” Johnson said. “None of that was reported by the mainstream media organizations that were represented at the press conference.

“It was mentioned loud and clear at Monday’s press conference that this could have been avoided,” Johnson continued. “In fact, defense attorneys for the cops raised this at trial and the judge (Lance Africk) refused to entertain it at all, which suggests to me that the system works in concert with each level, component and branch. If they want to find a way for police to get off, they give them an escape route, a back door. That’s exactly what they have done – they have given them a back-door escape route.”

Henry Glover, 31, was shot in the chest by a New Orleans police officer in the Algiers section of New Orleans on Sept. 2, 2005. His charred remains were later discovered inside a burned out Chevrolet left on the banks of the Mississippi River. For years, his friends and family attempted to find out who was responsible for his death and the desecration of his body. – Photo: ProPublica

Johnson said he doesn’t think it was a coincidence that the ruling was purposely handed down in the midst of the holiday season.

While a number of public officials weighed in on the investigation of online posting in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s recent resignation, very few have spoken about the latest developments in the Glover case and how this will impact efforts to reform the NOPD or the Black community’s trust in the criminal justice system.

“Elected officials will not comment publicly on high-profile cases such as this so as not to receive any backlash from their major financial supporters who control their behavior and definitely not for the interests of those who classify themselves as Black. He who pays the piper calls the tunes,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha told The Louisiana Weekly.

“That’s why I have a problem with Black folks across the board here in New Orleans who continually allow the powers that be to treat us the way that they treat us,” Johnson told The Weekly. “We have no Black politicians, no Black clergy, we have no Black folks in prominent positions standing up for us to stop this onslaught of what is happening to us on a daily basis.”

Johnson said that he is convinced that someone is going to have to stand up and at least attempt to fill the Black leadership vacuum in New Orleans by demonstrating his or her commitment to securing justice and democracy by any means necessary.

Johnson said the Black Church as an institution today is not immune to criticism about its lackluster role in the liberation struggle in the 21st century. “The Black Church today is nowhere near what it was 100 years ago, or 130 to 140 years ago in terms of activism and standing up for folks,” he said. “It’s not even close.”

Johnson said that while a lack of courage and a sense of purpose are part of the problem, faith-based groups that are more committed to securing 501(c)(3) funding than they are to fighting for justice and democracy is also a major obstacle. “Essentially, these groups become part of the system,” Johnson explained. “Over time, they develop an addition to 501(c)(3) funding and compromise themselves and their historical mission.”

Johnson said that he is convinced that someone is going to have to stand up and at least attempt to fill the Black leadership vacuum in New Orleans by demonstrating his or her commitment to securing justice and democracy by any means necessary. “Unless individual Black folks find the courage to stand up, nothing’s ever going to change here,” he said. “Once they identify themselves, (Black grassroots leadership) is there, we’re with you. But someone has got to stand up and say, ‘That’s it – I’ve had enough.’ We have to be willing to do whatever it takes to be free. We’ve got to do that individually first before we can be successful collectively.”

Warren’s attorneys, Rick Simmons and Julian Murray Jr., are seeking to get him released on bond and plan to file a motion for a change of venue for his new trial.

William Tanner holds a piece of the trunk of his Chevrolet Malibu on the river side of the Mississippi River levee in Algiers in March 2009. After Hurricane Katrina, his car was found burned with Henry Glover's body inside. – Photo: Rusty Costanza, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Danatus King said that while last week’s ruling was a major setback to efforts to secure justice for Henry Glover and reform the NOPD, he added that it also presented Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzarro with a chance to step up and take on David Warren.

“There’s an opportunity now for the district attorney to pursue state charges, including murder,” King said. “I know that previously the district attorney said that he was not going to pursue any charges because it was being conducted by the federal government and he didn’t want to step on any toes and they had asked him to stand down. This is an opportunity now to actually pursue those murder charges. There’s no barrier to the district attorney doing that.”

Asked about how last week’s ruling might impact the proposed NOPD consent decree, King said, “I don’t think the consent decree is worth the paper that it’s written on. This reinforces that. The persons that were in charge of looking out for citizens’ welfare that were representing the city when the consent decree was being crafted are out of office now and have left under questionable circumstances. … Now there are some questions about Mr. Letten’s integrity as well as questions about the integrity of his next in command, Ms. Mann, and questions about the leadership in that office, period.

“Not only do we have questions about the integrity of the people that were advocating on our behalf coming out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, but while this consent decree was being crafted after the Justice Department issued an edict out of Washington about how questionable the practices of the NOPD were and how they violated the constitutional rights of citizens’ rights regarding stops and interrogations – even in the midst of all that, we had emails coming out of the NOPD encouraging officers to continue to violate citizens’ civil rights by illegal stops in spite of the fact that they had been criticized for that.

“If you have a consent decree that has been crafted that allegedly criticizes that practice, if you have any writing coming out of Washington saying that type of practice is wrong but you still have that continually and being upheld, then that says to me, ‘What good is the consent decree?’ If you have this consent decree saying that it’s wrong to do it but you have a police department saying ‘We’re going to continue to do it, we’re going to continue to justify doing it and we’re not going to stop it’ and there’s no mechanism in the consent decree to stop the department from doing it, what good is the consent decree? It’s not worth the paper it’s written on.”

Danatus King said that while last week’s ruling was a major setback to efforts to secure justice for Henry Glover and reform the NOPD, he added that it also presented Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzarro with a chance to step up and take on David Warren.

King said it is important that local civil rights organizations and the community be allowed to offer input before the next U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana is chosen. “That is something we feel very strongly about,” he said. “That’s an opinion that’s been expressed often by members of the community.

“To this point, we have not had any contact with anyone out of Sen. Landrieu’s office or D.C.”

A group of Black New Orleans residents that included activists Carl Galmon and Randolph Scott penned a letter to President Barack Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last week seeking input before Jim Letten’s successor is chosen. “We are requesting that the African-American community in New Orleans have serious input in the selection of the next U.S. attorney for the Eastern District State of La.,” the letter states.

Five other former NOPD officers convicted in the Danziger Bridge killings of two unarmed residents and the wounding of four other people have asked a federal judge to overturn their convictions, arguing that federal prosecutors may have committed prosecutorial misconduct or engaged in other illegal procedures.

Henry Glover’s mother, Edna Glover, holds a memorial picture of her son at the sentencing March 31, 2011, of some of the officers who murdered him. – Photo: Michael DeMocker, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Henry Glover’s loved ones gathered Monday to share their thoughts about Monday’s ruling and what it means for their family and the community. “I thought Judge Africk knew what he was doing,” Edna Glover, Henry’s mother, told reporters.

“I just wish it would come to a close,” she told the Associated Press.

Rebecca Glover said that learning that she and the family would have to endure another grueling murder trial to get a conviction for her slain nephew “knocked the wind out” of her.

“I don’t know how I’m going to hold up,” Rebecca Glover said.

“We thought we could pick up our pieces and go on, but we’ve got to rehear this all over again?’’ Rebecca Glover asked. “It hurts. It really hurts.”

Two years ago, after waiting five years for the case to go to trial, Rebecca Glover vowed to show up to federal court every day until the police officers responsible for her nephew’s death were brought to justice. Now she faces the reality of having to show up again every day and listen to more disturbing stories and testimony about the murder of Henry Glover.

In speaking about the toll such trials can take on the families of murder victims, Danatus King talked about the ordeal the Glover family and others are facing as the cops convicted of killing innocent civilians get new trials.

Rebecca Glover said that learning that she and the family would have to endure another grueling murder trial to get a conviction for her slain nephew “knocked the wind out” of her.

“Family members who thought that they could halfway put this behind them – now they’re going to have to deal with this again and make a decision as to whether or not they’re going to subject themselves to going every day to trial, if it’s kept here in New Orleans,” King told The Louisiana Weekly. “They’re going to have to make a decision as to whether they’re going to subject themselves to going there, hearing testimony again, hearing folks who may be lying.

“They have to go through the ordeal of hearing their murdered loved one’s character assassinated and have to hear and deal with the description of the body that has been recovered but is still missing its skull. The skull still hasn’t been recovered. They’re going to have to go through all of that.

“There may be some family members and others in the community that may say they just can’t go through that anymore and want to just leave it alone.

“That decision (to overturn the convictions) is a blow to the family of Henry Glover and the community.”

Trice Edney News Wire – provocative, empowering, unapologetically Black – provides news stories, investigative reports and opinion columns to more than 1,000 newspapers, radio stations and websites around the nation. This story previously appeared on Politic365.com.

Operation People for Peace has been an advocate for the underserved and underrepresented in the Gulf Coast Region for over two years. On Wednesday, Aug. 26, Hurricane Isaac hit the shores of the states of Mississippi and Louisiana. On Sept. 1, community leaders gave tours to members of Operation People for Peace to show the devastation that Hurricane Isaac had caused in the areas of Pearlington, Miss., and the community of Forrest Heights in Gulfport, Miss.

Some residents there whose homes had up to 4 feet of water in them due to Hurricane Isaac had lost their homes during Katrina.

By Sept. 6, Operation People for Peace was able to take a truckload of supplies donated by Hillcrest Baptist Church on East Nine Mile Road in Pensacola, Fla., to Pearlington and Gulfport. Additionally, we visited Plaquemines Parish and LaPlace, La., where the water had finally receded. In these target areas Operation People for Peace and members of Hillcrest Baptist Church passed out cleaning supplies, food and personal items to those in need.

LaPlace and Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana are both areas that have been greatly affected by Hurricane Isaac, where water in many places was waist high and thousands of families have had to move in with each other because their homes are unlivable.

Operation People for Peace will be visiting the areas affected by Hurricane Isaac for the next six weeks or until they run out of supplies and donations for Isaac victims. If you or any business or church you are a part of would like to donate, please contact us.

For more information on Operation People for Peace, visit www.operationpeopleforpeace.org or contact Jessica Donahue, (404) 840-6764.

Art Rocker, founder and chair of Operation People for Peace and Florida state chair of SCLC, can be reached at kingart43@aol.com, or on Facebook or via Twitter: @OPPeople4Peace.

This photo comes with a sad story. I got the photo from Althea Francois before she died. In 1970, a garment and uniform cleaning company went on strike in New Orleans. They asked for and received support from the BPP chapter in New Orleans. The photo shows members of the New Orleans chapter walking the line and carrying picket signs for support.

The child with the sign is Olga, Althea’s daughter. This picture was taken by the FBI and sent to Althea’s parents. They told her parents that she was putting their grandchild in dangerous situations.

This set off a chain of events that Althea wondered about for many years. Her parents became very protective of Olga and at times kept Olga from her.

It became so bad that Althea had to kidnap her daughter from her parents. The whole situation was very stressful for Althea who for many years wouldn’t talk to her parents. It was very painful for her.

Althea told me this story one day while she was visiting me and Gail in Sacramento with Robert King when he first got out of prison in 2001. She never knew why her parents acted like that.

Her mother died a few years before Althea did. When Al was cleaning up her mother’s house, she found an envelope with this picture in it and the letter from the FBI. A pure example of COINTELPRO.

Black Panther veteran Billy X Jennings administers the website www.itsabouttimebpp.com, serving as archivist and historian for the Black Panther Party. He can be reached at itsabouttime3@juno.com.

New York Muslims outraged about police spying – in New Jersey as well as NYC – rally for the resignation of NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly in a demand for independent community control of the NYPD and a well-funded oversight mechanism with subpoena power.

Compare New Orleans to Newark, New Jersey. When evidence of New York City spying activities was uncovered, it became a major story across New Jersey print and TV. Here in New Orleans, The Louisiana Weekly was the only outlet to cover the story – although the Times-Picayune did reprint the Associated Press story.

In New Jersey, politicians from across the political spectrum were quick to condemn the spying program. New Jersey’s Republican governor, Chris Christie, told reporters that he was angered by the spying. “I don’t know if this NYPD action was born out of arrogance, or out of paranoia, or out of both,” he declared at a press conference. On the Democrat side, Newark mayor Cory Booker called the spying program “offensive,” and his police chief, Samuel DeMaio, assured residents that “this type of activity is not what the Newark PD would ever do.”

When New Orleans Mayor Landrieu and Police Superintendent Serpas were asked for their comment on the actions of the NYPD, both appeared to be completely in the dark and displayed little curiosity. “To be honest with you, I think that’s the first I’m ever hearing that,” said Serpas when asked at a recent press conference. “So I don’t know anything about it one way or another. I might have to catch up.”

“I hadn’t heard about it,” agreed Mayor Landrieu, speaking at the same press event. When asked if he approved of the NYPD actions, Landrieu commented, “I don’t like getting spied on,” but had no further comment.

Mayor Landrieu has made police reform a centerpiece of his administration’s focus. Until we have a mayor and police chief take these issues seriously, reform of our criminal justice system will remain stunted.

Ryan Berni, the mayor’s director of communications, refused all follow-up requests for comment. When asked if the mayor’s office has any comment or opinion on the story, he gave this three-word answer: “We do not.”

In response to follow-up inquiries, NOPD spokesperson Frank Robertson told me, “We have researched this incident and in no way is it documented in our records.” When pressed, via email, for any opinion on the appropriateness of another city’s police department conducting surveillance activities in New Orleans, Robertson added this cryptic phrase: “Surveillance is the epicenter on crime fighting initiatives.”

This cavalier attitude is cause for concern. Mayor Landrieu has made police reform a centerpiece of his administration’s focus. When our mayor and police chief show that they don’t care about their citizens’ civil rights, and when our media and politicians treat these violations less seriously than it would be treated in other cities, it adds to New Orleans’ status as a “second-class” city, and gives all of us, as residents, second-class rights. Until we have a mayor and police chief who take these issues seriously, reform of our criminal justice system will remain stunted.

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans, and the author of “Floodlines: Community and Resistance From Katrina to the Jena Six.” He can be reached at jordan@floodlines.org. This article was originally published in the Aug. 27, 2012, print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper and online with the following editor’s note: “Documents recently uncovered by Associated Press reveal that the New York City Police Department traveled to New Orleans in 2008 to conduct surveillance operations. Louisiana Weekly contributor Jordan Flaherty was among the named targets of the spying.”

Terry Dickson walks through New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward as Hurricane Isaac approaches. – Photo: David J. Phillips

Education, housing, criminal justice, health care, urban planning, even our media; systemic changes have touched every aspect of life in New Orleans, often creating a template now used in other cities. A few examples:

- In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the entire staff of the city’s public school system was fired – more than 7,500 employees lost their jobs, despite the protection of union membership and a contract. Thousands of young teachers, many affiliated with programs like Teach for America, filled the empty slots. As charters took over from traditional public schools, the city became what then-superintendent Paul Vallas called the first 100 percent free market public school system in the U.S.

- Every public housing development has either been partially or entirely torn down. The housing authority now administers more than 17,000 vouchers – nearly double the pre-Katrina amount – a massive privatization of a formerly public system. During this period, rents have risen dramatically across the city.

- The U.S. Department of Justice has spent three years in negotiations with city government over reform of the police department. The historic consent decree that came out of these negotiations mandates vast changes in nearly every aspect of the NOPD and some aspects could serve as a model for departments across the U.S. But organizations that deal with police violence, as well as the city’s independent police monitor, have filed legal challenges to the agreement, stating that they were left out of the negotiations and that, as a result, the final document lacks community oversight.

- As the city loses its daily paper, an influx of funding – including $750,000 just from George Soros’ foundation – has arrived for news websites and other online media projects. In a city that is still majority African-American, the staff of these new media ventures is almost entirely white and often politically conservative. These funders – many of whom consider themselves progressive – rarely notice the city’s Black media, which is continuing a tradition rooted in centuries of local resistance to the dominant narrative. These were the publications that covered police violence and institutional racism when the daily paper was not interested.

Education, housing, criminal justice, health care, urban planning, even our media; systemic changes have touched every aspect of life in New Orleans, often creating a template now used in other cities.

There is wide agreement that most of our government services have long, deep, systemic problems. But in rebuilding New Orleans, the key question is not only how much change is needed but, more crucially, who should dictate that change.

New Orleans has become a destination for a new class of residents drawn by the allure of being able to conduct these experiments. For a while, they self-identified as YURPs (Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals). Now they are frequently known as “social entrepreneurs,” and they have wealthy and powerful allies. Warren Buffet has invested in the redevelopment of public housing. Oprah Winfrey and the Walton family have donated to the charter schools. Attorney General Holder came to town to announce police department reforms. President Obama has visited several times, despite the fact that this state is not remotely in play for Democrats.

Many residents – especially in the Black community – have felt disenfranchised in the new New Orleans. They see the influx of college graduates who have come to start nonprofits and run our schools and redesign our neighborhoods as disaster profiteers, not saviors. “Tuskegee was an experiment. We have reason to be suspicious of experiments,” says civil rights lawyer Tracie Washington, evoking a history of racist experimentation performed on Black bodies without their consent.

You can hear it every day on WBOK, the city’s only Black-owned talk radio station, and read about it in the Louisiana Weekly, Data News and New Orleans Tribune, the city’s Black newspapers. This new rebuilding class is seen as working in alliance with white elites to disenfranchise a shrinking Black majority. Callers and guests on WBOK point to the rapid change in political representation: Among the political offices that have shifted to white after a generation in Black hands are the mayor, police chief, district attorney and majorities on the School Board and City Council.

There is wide agreement that most of our government services have long, deep, systemic problems. But in rebuilding New Orleans, the key question is not only how much change is needed but, more crucially, who should dictate that change.

The population is smaller and whiter and wealthier than it was seven years ago. Even neighborhoods that did not flood have smaller populations, as single college graduates replace families.

In a recent cover story in the Tribune, journalist Lovell Beaulieu compares the new rebuilding class to the genocide of Native Americans: “520 years after the Indians discovered Columbus, a similar story is unfolding,” writes Beaulieu. “New arrivals from around the United States and the world are landing here to get a piece of the action that is lucrative post-Katrina New Orleans … Black people are merely pawns in a game with little clout and few voices. Their primary role is to be the ones who get pushed out, disregarded and forgotten.”

People hear the term “blank slate,” a term often used to describe post-Katrina New Orleans – as a way of erasing the city’s long history of Black-led resistance to white supremacy. As New Orleans poet and educator Kalamu Ya Salaam has said, “It wasn’t a blank slate; it was a cemetery.”

Where some new arrivals see opportunity, many residents see grave robbers. In response, those who find anything to praise in the old ways are often accused of being stuck in the past or embracing corruption.

Hurricane Isaac has demonstrated that New Orleans is still at risk from storms – although the flood protection system around the city seems to be more reliable than it was before the levees failed and 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. But have the systemic problems that were displayed to the world seven years ago been fixed by the radical changes the city has seen? Is reform possible without the consent of those most affected by those changes? These are polarizing questions in the new New Orleans, and it may be years before we have an answer.

Jordan Flaherty is a New Orleans-based journalist, and the author of “Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six.” He can be reached at jordan@floodlines.org. A version of this article previously appeared on the RagBlog.

This scene of little boys hurrying to school from their home in the Iberville development looks much like pre-Katrina New Orleans. But Iberville, like nearly all the rest of the city’s 4,500 public housing apartments in well built, brick buildings surrounded by green space that suffered almost no Katrina-related damage, is about to be torn down. – Photo: Gerald Herbert, AP

1: Rank of New Orleans, Louisiana, in world prison rate. Louisiana imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of the other 50 states. Louisiana rate is five times higher than Iran, 13 times higher than China and 20 times Germany. In Louisiana, one in 86 adults is in prison. In New Orleans, one in 14 Black men is behind bars. In New Orleans, one of every seven Black men is in prison, on parole or on probation. Source: Times-Picayune.

2: Rank of New Orleans in rate of homelessness among U.S. cities. Source: 2012 Report of National Alliance to End Homelessness.

2: Rank of New Orleans in highest income inequality for cities of over 10,000. Source: Census.

3: Days a week is the publishing and delivery schedule the New Orleans daily paper, the Times-Picayune, will initiate this fall, switching to internet only on other days. (See 44 below). Source: The Times-Picayune.

10: Rate that New Orleans murders occur compared to the U.S. average. According to FBI reports, the national average is five murders per 100,000. The Louisiana average is 12 per 100,000. New Orleans reported 175 murders last year or 50 murders per 100,000 residents. Source: WWL TV.

13: Rank of New Orleans in FBI overall crime rate rankings. Source: Congressional Quarterly.

15: Number of police officer-involved shootings in New Orleans so far in 2012. In all of 2011, there were 16. Source: Independent Police Monitor.

21: Percent of all residential addresses in New Orleans that are abandoned or blighted. There are 35,700 abandoned or blighted homes and empty lots in New Orleans (21 percent of all residential addresses), a reduction from 43,755 in 2010 (when it was 34 percent of all addresses). Compare to Detroit (24 percent), Cleveland (19 percent) and Baltimore (14 percent). Source: Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC).

27: Percent of people in New Orleans living in poverty. The national rate is 15 percent. Among African American families the rate is 30 percent and for white families it is 8 percent. Source: Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) and GNOCDC Assets and Opportunity Profile: New Orleans (August 2012).

33: Percent of low income mothers in New Orleans study who were still suffering post traumatic stress symptoms five years after Katrina. Source: Princeton University Study.

34: Bus routes in New Orleans now. There were 89 before Katrina. Source: RTA data.

37: Percent of New Orleans families that are “asset poor” or lack enough assets to survive for three months without income. The rate is 50 percent for Black households, 40 percent for Latino household, 24 percent for Asian household and 22 percent for white households. Source: CFED and GNOCDC Assets and Opportunity Profile: New Orleans (August 2012).

40: Percent of poor adults in New Orleans region who work. One quarter of these people work full time and still remain poor. Source: GNOCDC.

42: Percent of the children in New Orleans who live in poverty. The rate for Black children is 65 percent compared to less than 1 percent for whites. Source: Census.

44: Rank of Louisiana among the 50 states in broadband internet access. New Orleans has 40 to 60 percent access. Source: The Lens.

60: Percent of New Orleans which is African American. Before Katrina the number was 67. Source: GNOCDC.

60: Percent of renters in New Orleans who are paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities, up from 51 percent in 2004. Source: GNOCDC.

68: Percent of public school children in New Orleans who attend schools that pass state standards. In 2003-2004 it was 28 percent. Source: GNOCDC.

75: Percent of public school students in New Orleans who are enrolled in charter schools. Source: Wall Street Journal. This is the highest percentage in the U.S. by far, with District of Columbia coming in second at 39 percent. Sources: Wall Street Journal and National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

76: Number of homes rebuilt by Make It Right Foundation. Source: New York Times.

123,934: Fewer people in New Orleans now than in 2000. The Census reported the 2011 population of New Orleans as 360,740. The 2000 population was 484,674. Source: Census.

Bill Quigley and Davida Finger teach at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. A version of this article with complete sources is available. The authors give special thanks to Allison Plyer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. You can reach Bill at quigley77@gmail.com.

Rethinkers Ashley Triggs, Kamau Johnson, Vernard Carter, Jada Cooper and Jordan Vigne celebrate the premiere of their HBO film, “The Great Cafeteria Takeover.” – Photo: Andy Cook

These thoroughly engaging teens holding forth eloquently and apparently without self-consciousness in their dress suits and evening gowns had grown up, flowered, actually, before my very eyes. I had been watching them and writing about them since shortly after Hurricane Katrina.

Remember how much we’ve all changed since the storm? Well, try going from age 11 to 17! Remember how involved and committed we were around year two or year three to saving our city and changing it for the better? These young people have lost none of that passion and drive – an inspiring steadfastness, given the challenges and diversions of adolescence.

The introduction to their excellent book, “Feet to the Fire” states: “The Rethinkers [short for Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools] are a group of kids from all over New Orleans and from many different schools. We first got together after Hurricane Katrina, which scattered us all over the country. The time away (six months for some of us, a year for others) was scary but eye-opening.

“We went to new schools, and for the first time most of us saw school bathrooms with toilet paper and soap, libraries with books and hallways with lockers. It made us realize what good schools actually look like. When we got back we wanted to make good schools a reality in New Orleans, and with the help of grown-up community organizers, artists, architects, media experts and educators, we are starting to make real changes.”

“How could they not serve us the best food for our brains and our bodies?” the Rethinkers first asked themselves and then asked the powers that be. They surveyed students at schools in their community and issued annual school food report cards to attract media coverage and capture the attention of decision-makers.

“We wanted to make good schools a reality in New Orleans, and with the help of grown-up community organizers, artists, architects, media experts and educators, we are starting to make real changes.”

They met with school officials and corporate executives from ARAMARK, one of the nation’s largest food service providers, to get them thinking about the quality of school meals and how they could be improved. They then negotiated with ARAMARK to provide healthier food choices. But when that didn’t lead to real change, they held school officials’ and the company’s feet to the fire until a specific agreement was publicly signed promising fresh, locally produced food at least two times a week.

“Feet to the Fire” is a practical and inspiring book written by Rethinkers letting other kids know how they can change their schools. The eye-popping illustrations are the contribution of YA/YA, an after-school arts and professional enrichment program with a two-decade track record of setting New Orleans youth on positive and productive paths. The book provides the back story for the dazzling accomplishments that the HBO film documents.

These Rethinkers – Jada Cooper, Lucy Tucker, Victoria Carter and Isaiah Simms – are featured in “The Great Cafeteria Takeover.” – Photo: Rachel Laing

These are not just words on a flip chart. Rethinkers actually lie on the floor and imagine what these values mean to them personally. They play games “that get us active and out of our shyness … Once we feel safe, relaxed and comfortable around each other, we can do great work.”

They also do “circle work,” a sacred space in which to practice “power among” rather than “power over.” They learn how to do research, conduct an interview, hold a press conference. They are adept at expressing themselves. “Some of our favorite forms of creative expression are music, writing, drama, and photography,” their book states.

These kids dream; they document; they take action.

Most importantly, they come with solutions – always plural – and not just problems. Says Jada Carter, 16, a ninth grader at Sci Academy, “We, as Rethinkers know that adults will listen to us if we have great ideas and solutions, instead of just complaining.” Jada confided to her audience at LEH, “I was a little quiet person. People want to change but they don’t know how to change. I want them to know that they can.” Her advice for us grown-ups: “Ask the child. Ask them what they want.”

Their tips for writing recommendations are so practical and effective that I will list them all here: 1) Keep it positive; 2) Keep it realistic; 3) Be short and sweet; 4) Base it on your own experience; 5) Use facts; 6) Have experts to back you up; 7) Do research. Victoria Carter, a pint-sized powerhouse, featured in the HBO film, says of the officials they meet with, “We want someone who’s committed. Who will actually listen and do what they say.”

Says Jada Carter, 16, a ninth grader at Sci Academy, “We, as Rethinkers know that adults will listen to us if we have great ideas and solutions, instead of just complaining.”

No telling where they’ll go from here. Rethinkers number almost a hundred with clubs in six public schools, a summer program, and several citywide interest groups. They have been addressing assemblies of students and teachers around the city and pitching the idea of using restorative practices to deal with problems or disciplinary issues. If all sides of a story can be heard, Jada reasons, “there wouldn’t be so many suspensions for small stuff, and we could learn from our mistakes.”

The mindset of across-the-board zero tolerance is as unpalatable as the half-frozen mystery meat which Rethinkers described at press conferences, and as useless as the spork, a plastic fork/spoon combination banished by Rethinkers from all Recovery School District cafeterias. But the mindset of strict punishment may be even more challenging to change than food and utensils. Rethinkers, keep us all posted, though, on your efforts, because after seeing you in action, at press conferences and on TV, I’m convinced that you can do anything.

Orissa Arend is a mediator, psychotherapist, and author of “Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans.” She can be reached at arendsaxer@bellsouth.net.

Rethinkers’ youth news conference July 27

Rethinkers conduct their 2011 news conference. Their 2012 presentation is set for July 27, 10 a.m., at Samuel Green Charter School. – Photo: ©Colin Lenton

What would it take for schools to produce critical thinkers, creative problem solvers and healthy students? Find out at the Rethinkers’ summer press conference, an annual event that draws city and school leaders as well as local and national media. The Rethinkers will deliver their 2012 school policy recommendations to education officials, principals, charter operators and fellow students. They will also unveil grades from their Third Annual School Food Report Card, ranking food and wellness programs at eight New Orleans public schools.

New Orleans – The New York Times Magazine recently ran a story on my home, the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, a place one of the most powerful newspapers in the world insensitively dubbed a “Jungleland.” Contrary to the article, residents of this community are not reconciled to life in the wilderness and we don’t live in an untamed mess of overgrowth or in a forgotten wasteland. We are not resigned to anything; we are fighting to revive our community.

While the article cites the city government’s futile attempts to improve the neighborhood, it barely mentions the overall lack of government support before and after Hurricane Katrina and the hard work by committed citizens to improve the community. Yes, many parts of the Lower 9th are overgrown and neglected, but what the article missed is that many are not. Moreover, the untold story is how city, state and federal government abandoned this community.

The Times probably had good intentions – document the bad situation so our community can get help. But while writing about broken people, vacant lots and weeds may be sexy journalism, the community needs the outside world to understand how implicit and unconscious bias caused by a history of racism pummeled us.

After Katrina, millions of dollars flowed into New Orleans, and the Lower 9th was declared the glaring example of what needed rehabilitation. Yet, nearly seven years later, the French Quarter and other areas of tourism and affluence are sparkling, while few improvements have been made in the Lower 9th. In fact, most of the decaying properties cited in the article are owned by the City of New Orleans, not the residents.

Each day, a tour bus cruises the neighborhood showing visitors hurricane damage and poor living conditions. So tour companies are making money off our tragedy and lack of support. The people? We have become mere spectacles dehumanized in the process.

We need the media to shine a spotlight on the fact that the city, state and federal governments turned their backs on this community.

We need the media to shine a spotlight on the fact that the city, state and federal governments turned their backs on this community.

We haven’t given up. Many local organizations and churches are working hard to revitalize the Lower 9th. Unfortunately, the Times article mentions only Brad Pitt’s Make It Right organization as the silver lining in the dark cloud that is the Lower 9th. Churches and other groups may not offer the glitter, clout and financial resources of Brad Pitt, but they labor daily to improve the quality of life here. The Times article included more about the varieties of plant and animal life that have moved in than about the people and organizations fighting to rescue this community.

Before the Lower 9th is judged, consider why it has become a vast wasteland. Before Katrina, nearly 15,000 people lived in this community, which had the highest homeownership rate in the city. The overwhelming majority of these owners were African-American. After the destruction, 75 percent of the residents didn’t return because staying where they had fled was easier than the struggle and expense of returning to rebuild.

Those who did return discovered very little government support. Without nonprofits and thousands of volunteers, more of the Lower 9th might actually be “Jungleland.”

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to restoration is that this community had fewer resources before Katrina. Like other poor, African-American communities nationwide, it had suffered the results of structural racism. The color of our skin had an impact on our schools, access to health care, employment opportunities, housing and basic human rights. When resources are scarce to begin with, it’s hard to recover after tragedy.

For instance, many Lower 9th residents had no homeowners and flood insurance. The Road Home program, designed to help people rebuild, provided payments to homeowners based on pre-Katrina property values, not actual repair costs. So whites who owned homes in affluent neighborhoods received payments that allowed them to rebuild, even though many of their homes incurred less damage than those of people in neighborhoods like the Lower 9th.

A 2008 lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) alleged such discriminatory practices and was settled last year. HUD was to pay $62 million to Louisiana homeowners, but disposition of that money is unclear.

In another setback, the city didn’t allow Lower 9th residents to come home and start rebuilding until nine months after other New Orleans citizens returned. Faced with increased uncertainty, chaos and financial burdens, people were forced to find work and resettle in their evacuation locations.

What few services were available also caused concern. The social safety net already had gaps but was completely shattered by Katrina. Elderly residents worried about where they could receive health care, parents didn’t know where they would send their children to school and seven years later, the community has no grocery store. Clearly the government didn’t want us back because the original master rebuilding plan had the Lower 9th slated to become green space.

Rebuilding our community may not be profitable, but it’s right. African-American lives in the Lower 9th are just as valuable as those of whites in the French Quarter or Garden District.

The French Quarter wasn’t saved because it sits nine feet higher than the back section of the Lower 9th but because of racism and classism. Black residents of the Lower 9th were deemed expendable long before Katrina.

Often overlooked is the role that structural racism played in destruction of our community. If the French Quarter had been in the same area as the Lower 9th, the government wouldn’t have allowed anything as potentially destructive as a barge to remain untethered with a storm coming. Levees would have been built to withstand a Category 4 hurricane so major tourist attractions wouldn’t be jeopardized.

The French Quarter wasn’t saved because it sits nine feet higher than the back section of the Lower 9th but because of racism and classism. Black residents of the Lower 9th were deemed expendable long before Katrina.

With a new mayor in office, there is at least hope for the future. We’ve had more street repairs in the Lower 9th, but that’s where it ends for now. I’ve heard promises and seen plans, but the community is naturally skeptical. We have become accustomed to broken promises. So we don’t hold our breath. We don’t get excited. We wait and see.

Jenga Mwendo is an urban agriculture community organizer in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans and founder of the Backyard Gardeners Network, whose mission is to sustain and strengthen the community. America’s Wire is an independent nonprofit news service run by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and funded by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The views expressed by the America’s Wire Writers Group authors are those of the writers and not the Maynard Institute or W .K. Kellogg Foundation. For more information, visit www.americaswire.org or contact Michael K. Frisby at mike@frisbyassociates.com.

Art Rocker, who chairs Operation People for Peace, and Dr. E. Faye Williams, chair of the National Congress of Black Women, lead a march with hundreds of protestors in front of the Washington, D.C., office of BP claims fund czar Ken Feinberg. Rocker’s group represents over 400 churches, 100 pastors and 10,000 underserved and underrepresented claimants. “Finally,” Rocker said, “over $773 million will be paid to these claimants. This group represents over 10 percent of all oil spill claims that have been received by Judge Barbier at the federal district court in New Orleans. After Dick Gregory and I protested and went to jail several times over Ken Feinberg’s hundreds of promises, finally we can see some daylight.”

“People should be aware that the oil is still there,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist who travels widely across the Gulf meeting with fishers and testing seafood and sediment samples for contamination.

Subra says that the reality she is seeing on the ground contrasts sharply with the image painted by BP. “I’m extremely concerned on the impact it’s having on all these sick individuals,” she says. Subra believes we may be just at the beginning of this disaster. In every community she visits, fishers show her shrimp born without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs with holes in their shells. She says tarballs are still washing up on beaches across the region.

While it’s too early to assess the long-term environmental impact, a host of recent studies published by the National Academy of Sciences and other respected institutions have shown troubling results. They describe mass deaths of deepwater coral, dolphins and killifish, a small animal at the base of the Gulf food chain. “If you add them all up, it’s clear the oil is still in the ecosystem; it’s still having an effect,” says Aaron Viles, deputy director of Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental organization active in the region.

The major class action lawsuit on behalf of communities affected by the spill has reached a proposed $7.8 billion settlement, subject to approval by a judge. While this seems to have brought a certain amount of closure to the saga, environmentalists worry that any settlement is premature, saying they fear that the worst is yet to come. Pointing to the 1989 Exxon spill off the coast of Alaska, previously the largest oil spill in U.S. waters, Viles said that it was several years before the full effect of that disaster was felt. “Four seasons after Exxon Valdez is when the herring fisheries collapsed,” says Viles. “The Gulf has been a neglected ecosystem for decades. We need to be monitoring it closely.”

In the aftermath of the spill, BP flooded the Gulf with nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants. While BP says these chemicals broke up the oil, some scientists have said this just made it less visible and sent the poisons deeper into the food chain.

It is widely agreed that environmental problems on the coast date back to long before the well blew open. The massive catastrophe brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state – especially in “cancer alley,” the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge.

“The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it’s been dying the death of a thousand cuts for a long time,” says Viles. “BP is legally obligated to fix what they screwed up. But if you’re only obligated to put the ecosystem back to where it was April 19, 2010, why would we?”

Fishing is a huge part of the economy for the Gulf Coast. Around 40 percent of the seafood caught in the continental U.S. comes from here. Many area fishermen were still recovering from Hurricane Katrina when the spill closed a third of Gulf waters to fishing for months. George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, a group that supports Gulf Coast fishers, says many fishers still had not recovered from Hurricane Katrina when the oil started flowing from the BP spill. Now, he says, many are facing losing their homes. “Production is down at least 70 percent,” compared to the year before the spill, he says. “And prices are still depressed 30, 40, 60 percent.”

In a video statement on BP’s website, Geir Robinson, vice president of Economic Restoration for BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, says that the company believes the legal settlement will resolve most legitimate economic claims. “We do have critics,” adds Robinson. “And we’re working hard every day to show them that we will meet our responsibilities.”

Environmentalists and scientists also complain the Obama administration has let down the Gulf Coast. Viles is critical of the role the U.S. government has played, saying that by inaction they seemed to protect BP more than coastal communities or the environment. “The Coast Guard seems to empower the worst instincts of BP,” Viles says. “I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or what.”

International environmental groups have also joined in the criticism. Oceana, a conservation group with offices in Europe and the Americas, released a report April 17 criticizing the U.S. government’s reforms as being either ineffective or nonexistent, saying “offshore drilling remains as risky and dangerous as it was two years ago, and that the risk of a major spill has not been effectively reduced.”

Theresa Dardar lives in Bayou Pointe-au-Chien, a Native American fishing community on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Dardar and her neighbors have seen their land vanish from under their feet within their lifetimes due to canals built by the oil companies to access wells. The canals brought salt water into freshwater marshes, helping cause the coastal erosion that sees Louisiana lose a football field of land every 45 minutes. The main street that runs through the community now disappears into the swamps, with telephone poles sticking out of the water.

Now, in addition to worries about disappearing land and increasing risk of hurricanes, she fears that her family’s livelihood is gone for good. “It’s not going to be over for years,” she says, expressing a widely held concern among fishers here. “We’re just a small Native American fishing community. That’s all they’ve done their whole lives. Some of them are over 60. What are they going to do? If BP gives them money for the rest of their lives, that’s one thing. But if not, then what can they do?”

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans and author of the book “Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six.” He can be reached at jordan@floodlines.org. This story previously appeared in CounterPunch.

The challenges facing the NOPD have gone from bad to oh-ohhh. The daily risks and perils faced by citizens due to actions of police officers have grown astronomically. With the recent shooting of an unarmed suspected drug dealer and the strange circumstances surrounding the killing of another man after a routine traffic stop, New Orleans may be on the verge of unprecedented violence that may shake the very fibers of the city.

Hundreds marched against injustice in New Orleans Saturday, March 31. We must alert the world and the tourists who partake in New Orleans’ Black culture, they said, that the New Orleans Black community is cruelly oppressed and suffering. They are asking big conventions and tourists not to come to New Orleans until the local ruling class begins to address the issues crushing the life out of the Black community.

The killing of Justin Sipp after an early morning traffic stop raised many concerns, but the hullabaloo was mitigated by the fact that Sipp fired 14 rounds and wounded two officers. Yet the police version of the story – on his way to work, Sipp, a passenger in the stopped car, got out and tried to waylay three police officers – harkened to tales of the invented murderous civilian mob on the Danziger Bridge that police fabricated to hide the murder and mayhem committed by the murderous police mob on the bridge.

Five officers were convicted and five other officers pled guilty to killing two people on the bridge and attempting to cover up their deeds. In that case, police planted evidence and lied on innocent citizens who were victims of a widespread culture of corruption and an apparent hatred for the citizens they swore an oath to serve and protect.

So even though police claim Justin Sipp opened fire and wounded two officers, the citizens of New Orleans have heard NOPD stories before. And though the officers shot will live, Sipp is dead after what allegedly started as a routine traffic stop.

The killing of an unarmed and only partially clothed young man who lived in the home of a suspected marijuana dealer has really stressed the community. The march on City Hall and police headquarters by friends, relatives and other concerned citizens is a glimpse of the level of dissatisfaction with the current political establishment.

New Orleanians parade freely, but clearly expect to be entertained in return for their presence. However, getting New Orleanians out to parade without the requisite trinkets thrown from floats should make the administration take notice.

At a March 31 rally, speakers protested police murders of Black youth and demanded an end to racist mass arrest and incarceration. From the lack of living wage jobs, poor public education, lack of health care, inadequate recreational programs, police harassment, terror and murder, and the lack of affordable housing, they said, the Black community of New Orleans is under an all-around attack. 

The lack of professional policing in New Orleans endangers us all, but especially young African American men, who are the only victims of police killing. In the last 10 years, 100 percent of all citizens killed by police have been African American males.

Some officers have been sentenced to jail terms, but the African American community is beginning to fight back. Let’s hope the good citizens of our city get involved and calmer heads prevail.

As the police have gotten more and more trigger happy, the Sipp shooting might be a harbinger of reactions to come. Young white police fear young African American men. Young African American men have a right to protect themselves. Who will shoot first?

Jeff Thomas can be reached at jeff@sync504.com.

“This auction is illegal and immoral. It is a way to steal homes, redistribute wealth and prevent the right to return. The sale of blighted property is the city’s attempt to remove poor homeowners who have already suffered tremendously from economic and natural disaster. Blight has become an excuse to gentrify. Charging poor homeowners outrageous fees in order to steal their homes is an underhanded way to keep people displaced. Stop capitalizing off of crisis! This process is corrupt! You are stealing homes! STOP NOW!”

We took a stand against stealing people’s property in the name of recovery. We also took a stand to save a space we care enough about to rebuild with our own hands. This is a space that was active before I arrived in New Orleans, but I am determined to work with my family of comrades to get it back in fighting shape.

Survivors Village isn’t just community space; it is a home base for those who understand the radical transformation necessary for us all to achieve liberation. And in this realization and the impending detriment that a loss of this space could be to realizing our vision and bringing it into the everyday reality bit by bit, we knew we had to stand up and shout, “Stop!”

Sometimes a battle is dropped at your front door and demands that you are the one(s) to make change happen, you are called as the one(s) to start, finish or progress this fight. Well, that is what happened when we were told that the City of New Orleans was trying to sell New Day Survivors Village through a sheriff’s sale. Not only was a piece of our livelihood being threatened, but we were also alerted to the injustice that is being illegally perpetrated against homeowners.

Survivors Village was not served notice that it was one of the properties to be auctioned at a forthcoming sheriff’s sale until less than a month before it was to be held. A $575 blight fine that had ballooned to over $9,000 after daily penalties were tacked on was what put the sale into motion – the amount of the daily penalties being greater than half of the initial fine, per day.

Months before the decision to put the property up for auction, the initial blight cited had been remedied and improvements on the rest of the property were constantly being planned and carried out. We had not been notified that there was an ever increasing fee being lobbed against the property, nor were we aware that they decided to sell it.

Does the city really believe this is the best way to deal with blight? It appears to be an easy way to remove property from the hands of those who are poor and limited in their resources and ability to finish the necessary work on their homes. And with the lack of due process in getting a judge’s order – a law has been implemented making this obsolete – or hiring a non-affiliated curator to receive court documents on behalf of the defendant, who never receives them, the city is making it apparent that they are not concerned with reconnecting homeowners and displaced New Orleanians with their homes.

Instead they are satisfied being a huge obstacle for poor and displaced homeowners while placing advantage in the hands of the privileged, who can buy, renovate and make a profit on these homes, further gentrifying New Orleans in the process.

Survivors Village began as a tent city erected in June 2006 by residents of the St. Bernard Public Housing Development who like other public housing residents had been locked out of their homes since the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Since that time and after years of resistance by public housing residents and their allies, over 4,000 units of public housing, including the St. Bernard Development, have been demolished. On the day of this march, Jan. 15, 2007, displaced St. Bernard residents reclaimed the development, cleaned their apartments, which had been minimally damaged, but were soon driven out again.

There was immediacy in the planning due to the impending sale, so we congregated together with a crew of dedicated activists that were willing to sit through long meetings and democratically come up with a strategy to stop this sale. It can be difficult to achieve consensus and a unified vision for how things should be done. We didn’t always agree on what we were hoping to realistically achieve, how confrontational we should be with the bidders or the wording of our message, but in the end consensus was reached, which is necessary reinforcement to further our fight for the reclamation of true democracy and must be practiced as a pinnacle radical value.

As a group we thought that our action to disrupt and possibly prevent the sheriff’s stolen property sale could be disbanded quickly and we would be threatened with arrest, so we prioritized the language that needed to be delivered first. We had decided that this was not the most strategic time to take arrests, so we would get in there, say our piece while holding up the sale for as long as possible and then either be off or stay in a silent protest with signage, depending on the level of police suppression: a guerilla strategy for the initial incitement.

Every time the auctioneer spoke through his microphone to begin the auction, our mic check illuminating and vilifying the process leading up to and including the auction would begin. The auctioneer would try to speak over us, but “the people united will never be defeated.” We mic checked, sang and chanted intermittently and rotating, deciding that if he wasn’t trying to proceed then we could save our voices and just be present in protest.

We also distributed flyers educating the crowd about the realities of the auction. The flyers declared: “This is an auction of stolen properties. When a property in New Orleans is declared ‘blighted’ it is because homeowners are unable to complete the necessary work on their properties to comply with the city’s codes. The city gives the homeowner a fine of $575 and orders the homeowner to finish renovation or demolition of the property within 30 days and pay the fine or face additional fees of up to $500 per day. When poor homeowners are charged thousands of dollars each week – money they would put into their homes if they had it – the city leaves them no choice but to go bankrupt or hand over their properties. This is state sanctioned theft under the guise of ‘recovery.’”

After an hour and a half of this back and forth, start and stop, the police finally gave us a warning. We overestimated how long we would be tolerated and perhaps they overestimated how long we were willing to stay, which was longer than many of the potential bidders did. We gave two collective speeches after the first warning and then remained silent throughout the rest of the auction.

The auction did go on after two hours’ delay, but we felt successful. Our will was felt and our home base was spared, it being virtually unsalable due to taxes placed on it, which are not even applicable to the New Day nonprofit which owns Survivors Village – sometimes not doing paperwork on time is a benefit.

Another success was in connecting with people who are directly affected by this practice and these sales. A man at the auction asked for our help in stopping his house from being sold, so his property was included in the mic check: “Do not bid on property…” was the demand. And even though his house opened at a low price, it too was not bid on.

He was basically in the same position we were in, and the city refused to waive the extra outrageous daily fees and have him just pay the $575 even though he had complied with blight removal. It’s these people who don’t have the resources that we have, limited as they are, to fight the city who are the most vulnerable and need to be represented; it’s for these people that we stand up and shout, “STOP NOW!” It is for them and with all of those struggling with housing injustice that we will continue to fight until it is acknowledged and purported that housing is a human right.

To learn more, go to http://communitiesrising.wordpress.com/, the website for Survivors Village, where this story first appeared.

At Occupy NOLA, as at Occupy encampments all over the U.S., anti-racism activists are finding plenty of work to do.

Here at Occupy NOLA (short for New Orleans, La.), I have been excited about the potential of making these bridges through the project of the anti-racism working group. In less than two weeks, this working group has been developing a collective analysis and strategy that I think has the possibility of contributing towards long-term movement building.

From difficult moments to moments of promise

This is not to say this work has been easy. Many of these conversations are painful and difficult. At the second General Assembly (GA), a debate emerged regarding the use of the livestream at the GA. Since the initial planning meeting, Occupy NOLA had been posting photos and videos on Facebook without the permission of those in attendance. Myself alongside several others from the anti-racism working group raised the concern that having the entire area videotaped led to the space not being safe or secure for a variety of folks: immigrants, trans folks, queer folks etc. and offered the proposal that one third of the space not be included in the livestream.

In response, several white men got up and declared the purpose of the movement was to be recorded and that having folks on video couldn’t possibly have the ramifications that we had explained, such as immigration sweeps or people losing employment or housing. Listening to these responses, I was frustrated by concrete concerns being seemingly disregarded, but even more so at how privilege operates to convince individuals that their experiences within society are universal – how security for some leads to making the lack of safety for others invisible.

Privilege operates to convince individuals that their experiences within society are universal – security for some leads to making the lack of safety for others invisible.

Following the GA’s inability to reach consensus on this subject, those of us on both sides of the debate were tasked with further discussing the issue. Cynically, I found myself assuming the people we had been debating weren’t actually committed enough to the process to enter into further conversation. However, immediately after the meeting, one guy came over to continue the discussion. Within a few moments, a group of a dozen people were talking about how power functions, how Latin@ folks are racially profiled as undocumented immigrants, the policing of trans folks – especially transwomen of color – the precariousness of service industry workers’ employment and so much more. Here we were, mostly strangers, spending our Friday night standing in Duncan Plaza engaged in political debate.

Did we end up agreeing on everything? No. Did we make steps together? Yes.

Making these steps together is why I’m involved in the Occupy movement. I recalled that my political analysis was not developed overnight; rather, it took investment from other activists. I’ve had years of guidance and mentorship within movements for social justice that has gotten me to the place I am today. Now is the time to offer the constructive encouragement to others that was offered to me when I was first becoming politicized.

But I also know about the rapid politicization folks can go through during moments like this – moments that radicalize people’s understanding of power, systems of oppression, the state, global capitalism and empire. These moments can literally transform people’s understandings of not just what we are struggling against but also what we are dreaming about – what collective liberation can potentially be.

Building strategies for collective liberation

For me, this is why it’s so crucial to organize with the anti-racism working group to build a structural analysis within Occupy NOLA of how we got to this period of advanced capitalism. Luckily, I think we have more resources to draw on for this than in previous periods. Even before the first GA to plan Occupy NOLA, white anti-racist folks here were reaching out to one another to discuss how to critically engage this moment.

Occupy NOLA gathered initially in Lafayette Square in New Orleans.

By the second day of Occupy NOLA, a multiracial crew of folks had come together for the first meeting of the anti-racism working group. Gathered together was a group of people with a range of backgrounds: long-term organizers, folks new to activism, people who already knew and trusted one another, and individuals who came knowing no one but believing in the purpose of the group.

Over the course of our first meetings, we strategized together what the purpose and goals of our anti-racism working group would be. Drawing on our collective knowledge gain from previous activism as well as our initial involvement with Occupy NOLA, we solidified together that our goals are based in the belief that this is a moment of possibility and potential.

We committed to working towards Occupy NOLA being accountable to local community organizing and acting in solidarity with their local struggles, fostering an intersectional structural analysis of power through political education projects, encouraging both Occupy NOLA and the broader #Occupy movement to center both the U.S. South and the Global South, deepening our analysis of how U.S. financial power has been built off the ravages of slavery and colonialism, and continuing to build off the momentum of this moment over the next year regardless of the outcome of this occupation.

We have also committed as an anti-racist working group to be actively participating in other working groups and building with others potential allies. Also, by participating in other working groups, we are able to share our skills in areas such as facilitation, media and direct action. For me, this is us moving beyond a critique from the sidelines to a structure that is focusing our efforts towards the success of other working groups

Central to our strategy has also been the ongoing dialogue and discussion with long-time New Orleans organizers of color. Folks from a range of organizations affiliated with the Greater New Orleans Organizers’ Roundtable have generously entered into conversations with the anti-racism working group about how can Occupy NOLA be pushed in a strategic direction that furthers the aims of local economic and social justice movements. This work has the potential to strengthen both Occupy NOLA and the work of already existing organizing by building a united front on the social justice issues in New Orleans.

It’s also been incredible to be organizing collectively with folks who are holding and working with the reality that we need to move quickly since we don’t know how long this occupation will last, while also thinking through how this work can make a long-term impact on movements for justice. Instead of organizing in crisis, we are organizing for the long haul.

Moving forward

We’re still grappling with a lot of questions: How do we actively engage and support other working groups? What are strategies for building an accountable Occupy movement here in New Orleans that supports and strengthens the long-term community organizing in the city around housing, police brutality, the prison industrial complex and immigration? Is our goal to build Occupy NOLA as a multiracial, multiclass movement or is there a benefit in leveraging the white and class privilege of the current formation in solidarity with community organizations? How do we both embrace the spirit of participatory democracy while also recognizing how these processes can be alienating?

These are complicated questions for a complicated moment. While I am sure that both the anti-racism working group and the broader Occupy NOLA will make mistakes along the way, I am just as sure of the necessity in critically engaging in this movement. We’re in the middle of a powerful opening to connect fresh new activists to radical political analysis, to develop their leadership skills, and to introduce them to the ongoing social and economic struggles here in New Orleans, across the U.S. and around the globe. Getting down in this messy process is more than just a commitment to the present Occupy moment; it’s an investment in our future movements for justice.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is a core member and trainer with AORTA (Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance), a collective of trainers devoted to strengthening movements for social justice and a solidarity economy. Her writing has appeared in Left Turn Magazine and the Indypendent. She can be reached at lydia@aortacollective.org. She thanks Evan Casper-Futterman and Drew Christopher Joy for their feedback and guidance on this piece.

To pressure BP to pay the claims of the poor now that the rich have been paid, Dick Gregory, Art Rocker, along with Dr. E. Faye Williams and other prominent advocates are calling for a boycott against BP.

They target Ken Feinberg, the government-appointed administrator of the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund for his alleged failure to fairly compensate the minority victims of last year’s oil spill in the Gulf Coast.

According to Gregory, while big companies and casinos have successfully won compensation, “ordinary people … who have no clout” have largely been ignored in the settlements. “It can’t be all minority people who didn’t have the right claims,” Gregory said. “I would like to look at the claims that the casinos put in.”

“The casinos in Mississippi have to be licensed by the state, so immediately they [BP] went in and paid the casinos for all the damage,” Gregory told the Banner over the phone. “And why? Because the government has the clout.”

Also attending the protest was Art Rocker, chairman of Operation People for Peace. Rocker’s Florida-based organization helps low-income and minority workers seeking compensation for lost livelihoods resulting from the oil spill, and so far it represents more than 10,000 clients.

“There’s probably 10,000 more,” Gregory commented.

According to Rocker, Feinberg agreed to a series of meetings in the past year to discuss settlements for the poor, but negotiations have fizzled and Feinberg has yet to pay out any money to these claimants.

Last week’s protest began outside Feinberg’s office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, just down the street from the White House. The protesters were arrested, however, when they moved inside the building to go to Feinberg’s office. The charges were later dropped.

Outside BP’s administrative headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, just down the street from the White House, Art Rocker and Dick Gregory (in background) are arrested as they picket BP for stalling on its promise to pay poor claimants still suffering from last year’s Gulf oil spill.

“What we’re doing now will have an effect on the stockholders more than anybody because the bad publicity makes the stock go down,” Gregory said. “So that’s what we’re trying to do now, is trying to get them to pay off the folks like they’ve paid off billions of dollars to other folks — the companies.”

“I’ve never understood nothing about shrimp, except the way it tastes,” Gregory continued. “I never put a face on the shrimp, but there’s people that work there. There’s maids that work in hotels that when the hotel goes — and the whole tourist season got wiped out — those maids don’t get paid. And these are the people we’re talking about — these are the ones we’re representing.”

The timing of the Sept. 3 demonstration was also strategic, designed to highlight the connection between the labor struggles decades ago with the struggles of the poor today.

“The reason we picked Labor Day weekend is because the same thing is happening to the poor folks, particularly minorities and women, that happened to labor before they had representation,” Gregory explained.

The next step in their campaign will be to approach the U.S. Department of Justice to request a thorough investigation of discrimination in the claims.

In addition, the group will be formally calling for a boycott of BP this Thanksgiving. Like the protest this weekend, the boycott will be strategically timed — but this time, for the 2012 Olympics in London.

According to Gregory, BP is “trying to be a big player in that,” so stockholders will be more sensitive to any negative publicity.

In the end, however, the simple principle of equality is Gregory’s bottom line — to “make them treat everybody the same as they treat the major companies that lost, the people with power who lost.”

This story first appeared in the Bay State Banner, a Boston-based Black newspaper.

by Jordan Flaherty

New Orleans police arrest a man on the Danziger Bridge Sept. 4, 2005, five days after Katrina, the same day police shot six other people there. – Photo: Alex Brandon, Times-Picayune

Six years after the federal levees failed and 80 percent of the city was flooded, New Orleans has lost 80,000 jobs and 110,000 residents. It is a whiter and wealthier city, with tourist areas well maintained while communities like the Lower 9th Ward remain devastated. Beyond the statistics, it is still a much contested city.

Politics continues to shape how the changes to New Orleans are viewed. For some, the city is a crime scene of corporate profiteering and the mass displacement of African Americans and working poor; but for others it’s an example of bold public sector reforms, taken in the aftermath of a natural disaster, that have led the way for other cities.

In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans saw the rise of a new class of citizens. They self-identify as YURPs – Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals – and they work in architecture, urban planning, education and related fields. While the city was still mostly empty, they spoke of a freedom to experiment, unfettered by the barriers of bureaucratic red tape and public comment. Working with local and national political and business leaders, they made rapid changes in the city’s education system, public housing, health care and nonprofit sector.

Along the way, the face of elected government changed in the city and state. Among the offices that switched from Black to white were mayor, police chief, district attorney and representatives on the school board and city council, which both switched to white majorities for the first time in a generation. Louisiana also transformed from a state with several statewide elected Democrats to having only one: Sen. Mary Landrieu.

While Black community leaders have said that the displacement after the storm has robbed African Americans of their civic representation, another narrative has also taken shape. Many in the media and business elite have said that a new political class – which happens to be mostly white – is reshaping the politics of the city into a post-racial era.

“Our efforts are changing old ways of thinking,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, shortly after he was elected in 2010. After accusing his critics of being stuck in the past, Landrieu – who was the first mayor in modern memory elected with the support of a majority of both Black and white voters – added, “We’re going to rediscipline ourselves in this city.”

The changes in the public sector have been widespread. Shortly after the storm, the entire staff of the public school system was fired. Their union, which had been the largest union in the city, ceased to be recognized. With many parents, students and teachers driven out of the city by Katrina and unable to have a say in the decision, the state took over the city’s schools and began shifting them over to charters.

“The reorganization of the public schools has created a separate but unequal tiered system of schools that steers a minority of students, including virtually all of the city’s white students, into a set of selective, higher-performing schools and most of the city’s students of color into a set of lower-performing schools,” writes lawyer and activist Bill Quigley, in a report prepared with fellow Loyola law professor Davida Finger.

In many ways, the changes in New Orleans school system, initiated almost six years ago, foreshadowed a battle that has played out more conspicuously this year in Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey and other states where teachers and their unions were assailed by both Republican governors and liberal reformers such as the filmmakers behind “Waiting for Superman.” Similarly, the battle of New Orleans public housing – which was torn down and replaced by new units built in public-private partnerships that house a small percentage of the former residents – prefigured national battles over government’s role in solving problems related to poverty.

The anger at the changes in New Orleans’ Black community is palpable. It comes out at City Council meetings, on local Black talk radio station WBOK and in protests. “Since New Orleans was declared a blank slate, we are the social experimental lab of the world,” says Endesha Juakali, a housing rights activist. However, despite the changes, grassroots resistance continues. “For those of us that lived and are still living the disaster, moving on is not an option,” adds Juakali.

W.C. Johnson of the group Community United for Change protests outside federal court in New Orleans in June on the opening day of the trial for five current or former New Orleans police officers charged in deadly shootings of unarmed residents on the Danziger Bridge shortly after the flood. All five defendants were convicted in the case. – Photo: Gerald Herbert, AP

In the aftermath of Katrina, media images famously depicted poor New Orleanians as criminal and dangerous. In fact, at one point it was announced that rescue efforts were put on hold because of the violence. In response, the second-in-charge of the New Orleans Police Department reportedly told officers to shoot looters, and the governor announced that she had given the National Guard orders to shoot to kill.

Over the following days, police shot and killed several civilians. A police sniper wounded a young African American named Henry Glover, and other officers took and burned his body behind a levee. A 45-year-old grandfather named Danny Brumfield Sr. was shot in the back in front of his family outside the New Orleans convention center.

Two Black families – the Madisons and Bartholomews – walking across New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge fell under a hail of gunfire from a group of officers. “We had more incidents of police misconduct than civilian misconduct,” says former District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who pursued charges against officers but had the charges thrown out by a judge. “All these stories of looting, it pales next to what the police did.”

District Attorney Jordan, who angered many in the political establishment when he brought charges against officers and was forced to resign soon after, was not the only one who failed to bring accountability for the post-Katrina violence. In fact, every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed.

For years, family members of the victims pressured the media, the U.S. Attorney’s office and Eddie Jordan’s replacement in the DA’s office, Leon Cannizzaro. “The media didn’t want to give me the time of day,” says William Tanner, who saw officers take away Glover’s body. “They called me a raving idiot.”

Finally after more than three years of protests, press conferences and lobbying, the Justice Department launched aggressive investigations of the Glover, Brumfield and Danziger cases in early 2009. In recent months, three officers were convicted in the Glover killing – although one conviction was overturned – two were convicted in beating a man to death just before the storm, and 10 officers either pled guilty or were convicted in the Danziger killing and cover-up. In the Danziger case, the jury found that officers had not only killed two civilians and wounded four, but also engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy that involved planted evidence, invented witnesses and secret meetings.

The Justice Department has at least seven more open investigations on New Orleans police killings and has indicated their plans for more formal oversight of the NOPD, as well as the city jail. In this area, New Orleans is also leading the way: In a remarkable change from Justice Department policy during the Bush administration, the DOJ is also looking at oversight of police departments in Newark, Denver and Seattle.

In the national struggle against law enforcement violence, there is much to be learned from the victims of New Orleans police violence who led a remarkable struggle against a wall of official silence and now have begun to win justice. “This is an opening,” explains New Orleans police accountability activist Malcolm Suber. “We have to push for a much more democratic system of policing in the city.”

In the closing arguments of the Danziger trial, DOJ prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein fought back against the defense claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.” The jury apparently agreed with her, convicting the officers on all 25 counts.

Jordan Flaherty is a New Orleans-based journalist whose award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including the New York Times, Al Jazeera and Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. The author of “FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six,” he can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about “Floodlines” can be found at floodlines.org. For speaking engagements, see communityandresistance.wordpress.com. This story originally appeared in the The Root.

The residents of St. Bernard public housing, home to 6,500 people before the flood, fought for their right under international law to return to their well-built, minimally damaged homes in every way imaginable, including with a tent city called Survivors Village set up in 2006. Nevertheless, on Dec. 20, 2007, the epic battle culminated with the New Orleans City Council voting unanimously to let HUD destroy all 4,500 of the city’s public housing apartments. Yet still the residents, 95 percent Black, fought and continue to fight for their right to return to the “replacement” housing.

Last year, the prevailing thought was that the fifth annual event was going to be the last chance to really make a statement because after that, the media and others around the country and world would definitely move on to other events and disasters. That is probably true from a media-marketing perspective, but for those of us who lived and are still living the disaster, moving on is not an option.

The storm that brushed by New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, was never the cause of the disaster. The shoddy work of the U.S. government that led to the levee failures and flooded the city was only the beginning of our troubles.

The real disaster began immediately after the storm when the city’s white supremacist economic elite and its “colored” collaborators decided to remake the city in their image, which strongly resembles a 21^st century plantation. These collaborators, who included the mayor, city council, head of HUD and almost every Black elected official, thought that the plan would only affect the poor, who they never represented anyway!

They were not only unprincipled, but pretty misguided in not realizing that the majority of people in New Orleans were working poor and anything that affected them would change all the power relationships in the city.

It started almost immediately with the governor labeling Blacks in New Orleans “looters” and giving the police department and National Guard the power to shoot to kill. This was parroted by the then mayor. We can now see how that worked out.

St. Bernard was demolished in March 2008, part of a total 4,500 apartments destroyed. Ever since public housing residents were locked out after the flood, rent and homelessness in New Orleans have skyrocketed.

Then it was decided that certain areas in the city should not be repopulated. All of these areas, such as New Orleans East, the Lower 9th Ward and all of the traditional public housing developments, were areas that were almost exclusively Black and working class. Then the decision was made not to open the public hospital, which was a critical lifeline for the Black working poor community.

Then the political attacks began – and are still going on! Though the city is only 30 percent white, the white supremacist economic elite has used the weakened state of the Black community – as well as the failure of Blacks, other people of color and progressive whites to forge any kind of united front – to take away any semblance of power by Blacks and people of color in the city.

All of the major power bases in the city that were majority Black are now majority white. This includes the mayor, city council, district attorney, police chief, school superintendent and judges elected since the storm. In fact, any position of power that has been filled since the storm has most likely been filled by a white person or a non-New Orleans native.

This has been accompanied by a sustained war against the poor, the homeless and all other lower working class persons in the city. Since New Orleans was declared a blank slate, we are the social experimental lab of the world. Anyone with money and a new idea come to New Orleans, assuming “they will accept anything.”

Survivors Village held a Right to Return rally and sit-in May 28, 2010, at Columbia Parc, the purported replacement for St. Bernard, to protest the exclusion of former residents. The leaders were persecuted and prosecuted.

All people who believe in social justice should make it a point to march on Aug. 29. We cannot afford to move on because the disaster is not over. It’s an ongoing living event that seems to have gotten worse each year since 2005.

Therefore, we must march each year in order to remind ourselves that we are in a fight and cannot rest! We have lost many battles, but the war is ongoing and we must not quit!

I hope to see you at the levee breach on the 29^th!

And after the march and program at Hunters Field, everyone is invited to join the residents and former residents of the St. Bernard community in their annual “Unity in the Community Celebration of Life” at the Fightback Center, 3820 Alfred St., in the 3800 block of St. Bernard Avenue, from 4 p.m. until.

To learn more, contact Survivors Village and the St. Bernard Fightback Center at communitiesrising@gmail.com and the Katrina Commemoration Committee at katrinacommemoration@email.com or (504) 328-3159.

Note from Sakura Kone

The Aug. 29 march will begin with a healing ceremony 10 a.m. at the Lower 9th Ward levee breach on Jourdan and Galvez. Immediately following the healing ceremony begins the Katrina Commemoration March and Secondline, a combination of traditional New Orleans secondlining, African drummers, New Orleans brass bands, social aid and pleasure clubs, various community organizations and the community-at-large. It travels through the streets of New Orleans down North Claiborne Avenue for about three miles to St. Bernard Avenue. The march/secondline ends at Hunters Field, located on the corner of North Claiborne Avenue and St. Bernard Avenue.

The Fightback Center works to maintain the culture of the St. Bernard community. The property at 3820 Alfred St. has always been the focal point of the St. Bernard community. As the headquarters of the New Day Black Community Development Organization, it provided economic assistance, advocacy against injustice, day care services, job banks, GED programs, a youth club and many other social, political and recreational services. There is not much left of what used to be our community physically, but the spirit, culture and love for St. Bernard still lives. The Fightback center is the perfect place for the yearly Mother’s Day reunions that the Big 7 parade has become. To see some pictures from this year’s parade, go to http://communitiesrising.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/fight-back-center-works-to-maintain-the-culture-of-the-st-bernard-community/.

The suit alleged that the formula used to allocate grants to homeowners through the Road Home program – the single largest housing recovery program in U.S. history – had a discriminatory impact on thousands of African American homeowners. Road Home program data shows that African Americans were more likely than whites to have their Road Home grants based upon the much lower pre-storm market value of their homes rather than the estimated cost to repair damage.

For example, one African American plaintiff whose rebuilding grant was based upon pre-storm value received a $1,400 grant from the state to rebuild her home, but she would have received a grant of $150,000 had her rebuilding grant been based on the estimated cost of damage to the home.

These types of shortfalls played a key role in slowing down the recovery effort. Under the terms of the settlement, HUD and the state of Louisiana will direct additional funds to individuals in heavily affected parishes whose grants were based upon pre-storm value.

The lawsuit was brought by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, the National Fair Housing Alliance and five African American homeowners in New Orleans, representing a potential class of over 20,000 people. All plaintiffs are represented by co-lead counsel: the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, as well as Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dorr.

In response to the plaintiffs’ housing discrimination lawsuit, HUD and the state of Louisiana changed the Road Home program grant formula to provide full relief to more than 13,000 homeowners. All eligible low and moderate income homeowners received supplemental grant awards totaling $473 million based upon the estimated cost of damage to their homes, rather than the original grants based merely upon the much lower pre-storm market value of their homes.

By virtue of the settlement agreement, HUD and the state of Louisiana have agreed to amend the Road Home program to offer additional large supplemental rebuilding grants at an estimated value of over $60 million and a one-year extension of the re-occupancy covenants, giving more money and time to rebuild to several thousand homeowners whose initial Road Home Option 1 grant awards were based on the pre-storm market value of their homes and who have been unable to rebuild their homes.

“I am glad that by standing up against this flawed program we made a difference for so many other people,” said Almarie Ford, one of the individual plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Shanna Smith, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance said, “In addition to providing significant relief for individual homeowners, the Road Home lawsuit will serve as a warning to HUD and state officials nationwide to avoid the future use of pre-storm market value or similar market-driven criteria that have an obvious discriminatory impact on low-income and minority homeowners.”

During the almost six years since the storm hit, countless homeowners struggled to rebuild. Many have not yet succeeded, particularly in Orleans Parish.

“Regrettably, the Road Home program became a road block for many,” said James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. “This settlement is a step in the right direction toward getting more hurricane-affected homeowners back into their homes. HUD and Louisiana must keep America’s promise to build a better New Orleans. And they must do so in a manner that is fair and equitable for all people regardless of their race.”

John Payton, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), said: “People who had similar homes and suffered the same type of damage should not have been treated differently simply because of the neighborhoods in which they live. All New Orleanians, and all Louisianans, deserve a fair chance at rebuilding their homes and communities.”

The coalition of homeowners and organizations that brought the lawsuit has vowed to continue providing assistance to homeowners and working for a fair recovery for all.

This is an abbreviated version of a story that first appeared in Minority News at BlackRadioNetwork.com.

Illustration of the Danziger Bridge tragedy - Photo: Jordan Flaherty

The officers’ conviction on all 25 counts – on two counts, the jury found the men guilty but with partial disagreements on the nature of the crime which could slightly affect sentencing – comes nearly six years after the city was devastated by floodwaters and government inaction. The verdict helps rewrite the history of what happened in the chaotic days after the levees broke. And the story of how these convictions happened is important for anyone around the U.S. seeking to combat law enforcement violence.

The results of this trial also have national implications for those seeking federal support in challenges to police abuses in other cities. New Orleans is one of four major cities in which the Department of Justice has stepped in to look at police departments. Any success here has far reaching implications for federal investigations in Denver, Seattle, Newark and other cities.

The Danziger Bridge case begins with Hurricane Katrina. As images of desperate survivors played on television, people around the world felt sympathy for people waiting for rescue after the storm. But then images of families trapped on rooftops were replaced by stories of armed gangs and criminals roaming the streets.

News reports famously described white people as “finding” food while depicting Black people as “looting.” Then Chief of Police Eddie Compass told Oprah Winfrey that “little babies (are) getting raped” in the Superdome. Then Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced she had sent in troops with orders to shoot to kill; and the second in charge of the police department reportedly told officers to fire at will on looters.

Evidence suggests that the NOPD acted on these instructions. On Sept. 2, just days after the storm, a Black man named Henry Glover was shot by a police sniper as he walked through a parking lot. When a Good Samaritan tried to help Glover get medical help, he was beaten by officers who burnt Glover’s body and left it behind a levee.

New Orleans' citizens take to the streets to march for justice in the Danziger Bridge trial - Photo: Jordan Flaherty

The following morning, two families were crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge, which connects Gentilly and New Orleans East, two mostly middle-to-upper-class African American neighborhoods. Without warning, a Budget Rental truck carrying police officers arrived and cops jumped out. The officers did not identify themselves and began firing before their vehicle had even stopped.

Officers had heard a radio call about shootings in the area; and according to prosecutors, they were seeking revenge. James Brisette, a 17-year-old called “studious” and “nerdy” by his friends, was shot nearly a dozen times and died at the scene. Many of the bullets hit him as he lay on the ground bleeding.

Four other people were wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, a 38-year-old mother who had her arm shot off of her body, and her 17-year-old daughter Lesha, who was shot while crawling on top of her mother’s body trying to shield her from bullets. Lesha’s cousin Jose was shot point-blank in the stomach and nearly died. He needed a colostomy bag for years afterwards.

Further up the bridge, officers chased down Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged man, who was traveling with his brother Lance. Ronald was shot in the back by one officer and then stomped and kicked to death by another. Lance was arrested and charged with firing at officers and spent weeks behind bars.

At the time, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that officers “sent up a cheer” when word came over police radios that suspects had been shot and killed.

Photo: Jordan Flaherty

Eddie Jordan, the city’s first Black district attorney, pursued charges against the officers in late 2006. When the cops went to turn themselves in, they were greeted by a crowd of hundreds of officers who cheered for them and called them heroes. Before the case could make it to trial, it was dismissed by a judge with close ties to the defense lawyers and soon after that Jordan was forced to resign.

After the dismissal of Jordan’s charges, the story of police violence after Katrina remained untold. Jordan believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up. “They were looking for heroes,” he says. “They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police. They were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.”

Other elected officials, like the city coroner, went along with the police version of events. For example, the coroner’s office never flagged Henry Glover’s body, found burned in a car, as a potential homicide.

But the Madisons, the Bartholomews and the Glovers, along with family members of other police violence victims, refused to be silent. They continued to speak out at press conferences, rallies and directly to reporters. They worked with organizations like Safe Streets Strong Communities, which was founded by criminal justice activists in the days after Katrina, and Community United for Change, which was formed in response to police abuses.

NOPD has finally been found culpable for the heinous murder of Ronald Madison on Sept. 4, 2005.

Activists worked to not only raise awareness of specific issues of police violence, but to say that these problems are structural and that any solution must get at the root causes.

“This is about an entire system that was completely broken and in crisis,” says former Safe Streets co-director Rosana Cruz. “Everyone’s job in the criminal justice system depends on there being a lot of crime in the city. The district attorney’s office doesn’t work on getting the city safer; they work on getting convictions at any cost. As long as that’s the case, we’re not going to have safety.”

Former District Attorney Jordan feels that investigators should pursue charges up to the very top of the department, including Warren Riley, who was promoted to police chief shortly after Hurricane Katrina and served in that role until 2010. “Riley, by his own admission, never even read the report on Danziger,” Jordan points out. “It’s so outrageous, it’s unspeakable. It’s one of the worst things that anyone can do. It’s hard to understand why he’s not on trial as well.”

“Fish start rotting at the head,” adds Jordan. “This was all done in the backdrop of police opposition at the very top. It’s not surprising that there was a cover-up. You just have to wonder how far that cover-up went.”

In 2008, journalist A.C. Thompson did what New Orleans media had failed to do and seriously investigated the accusations of police violence. His reporting, published on ProPublica and in The Nation, spelled out the shocking details of Glover’s killing and pointed toward police coordination with white vigilantes in widespread violence. It brought national attention to the stories that had been ignored. Activists took advantage of the exposure and lobbied the Congressional Black Caucus and the Justice Department for an investigation.

Blacks “loot,” while whites “find” food as the levees fall and floodwaters rise.

When FBI agents confronted officers involved in the Danziger case, five officers pleaded guilty and agreed to testify about the conspiracy to cover-up what happened. They revealed that officers had planted evidence, invented witnesses, arrested innocent people and held secret meetings where they worked to line up their stories.

Before last week’s verdict, the Justice Department had already won four previous police violence convictions, including of the officers who shot Glover and burned his body as well as of two officers who killed Raymond Robair – a pre-Katrina case in which officers beat a man to death and claimed, with the support of the city coroner, he had sustained his injuries from falling down.

About half a dozen other investigations are ongoing. The Justice Department is also looking at federal oversight of the NOPD, a process by which they can dictate vast changes from hiring and firing to training and policy writing.

The Danziger trial has been the most high-profile aspect of the federal intervention in New Orleans and this verdict will have far-reaching implications for how the effectiveness of federal intervention is perceived. The convictions and guilty pleas in the case reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy that reaches up to sergeants and lieutenants. Marlon Defillo, the second-in-charge of the NOPD, was recently forced to retire because of his role in helping cover up the Glover killing.

After murdering his mentally impaired brother Ronald, New Orleans police humiliated and jailed Lance Madison. – Photo: Alex Brandon, New Orleans Times-Picayune

The defense team for the Danziger officers was steadfast in describing their clients as heroes. Attorney Paul Fleming described the cops as “proactive,” saying: “They go out and get things done. They go out and get the bad guys.” Police attorneys in the Glover and Danziger trials also sought to use the so-called “Katrina defense,” arguing that the exceptional circumstances following the storm justified extra-legal actions on the part of officers. With these convictions, the juries have definitively refuted this excuse.

During closing statements, lawyers for defense and prosecution directed what often sounded like personal attacks against each other as well as key witnesses while laying out very different versions of what happened on that fateful day.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Theodore Carter said that officers deliberately did not follow procedure, and that if they had done what they were supposed to, no one would have died that day. “It was unreasonable for these officers to fire even one shot,” said Carter, who referred to video footage from that day which he said showed at least “54 seconds of gunfire.”

In a spirited defense that seemed to echo Tea Party themes, police attorney Frank Desalvo told the jury, “We know that the United States is the greatest country on earth; and the only thing wrong with it is the people running it.” Depicting Justice Department attorneys as furthering an anti-cop agenda, he told the jury that the prosecutors in this case do not represent the United States and that they are the true Americans.

Desalvo also accused the prosecution of speaking “meaningless, emotional drivel” and giving ammunition to “a segment of the community that believes police are always brutal.”

In her closing arguments, Bobbi Bernstein, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, fought back against the claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.”

The police officers who came to be known as the “Danziger Bridge 7” and their attorneys walk between lines of hundreds of police supporters to turn themselves in on Jan. 6, 2007, confident they’ll be exonerated. – Photo: Ellis Lucia, New Orleans Times-Picayune

In comments immediately after the verdict, family members of those killed on the bridge expressed gratitude for those who had helped them reach this point, but stressed that their pain continued.

Speaking outside the courthouse after the verdict, Sherrel Johnson, the mother of James Brisette, said that the officers “took the twinkle out of my eye, the song out of my voice and blew out my candle,” when they killed her son.

Jacqueline Madison Brown, the sister of Ronald Madison, told assembled press, “Ronald Madison brought great love to our family. Shooting him down was like shooting an innocent child.” Commenting on officers who had testified for the prosecution in exchange for lesser charges, she added, “We regret that they did not have the courage and strength to come forward sooner.”

Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso and Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences. Sgt. Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge but was convicted of leading the conspiracy, could receive a maximum of 120 years. Sentencing is scheduled for December but will likely be delayed.

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including the New York Times, Al Jazeera and Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. He is the author of FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. For speaking engagements, see communityandresistance.wordpress.com. This story first appeared on ColorLines. Added to it are excerpts from the previous piece in this series; headlined “Deliberations Begin Today in Danziger Trial,” a version of that story first appeared on the New Orleans Tribune/TribuneTalk website.

New Orleanians who have long complained about police terrorism and impunity are seeing NOPD’s crimes laid bare in the Danziger trial.

Lesha Bartholomew, who was 17 at the time of the incident, broke into tears as she described seeing her mother wounded, with her arm nearly shot off. “She was saying Lord help us,” said Lesha, describing how she tried to shield her mother from the gunfire as they both lay behind a concrete barricade.

“I got closer,” she said, “So she wouldn’t get shot again.”

Bartholomew’s testimony punctuated the last days of the prosecution’s case that were spent mostly on the testimony of FBI Agent William Bezak, who has been in charge of the FBI investigation of the case since January 2009.

As a so-called “summary witness,” Bezak laid out the government’s view of the shootings on Danziger Bridge and cover-up from beginning to end. Over the past two years, Agent Bezak interviewed nearly all witnesses associated with the case – including 75 NOPD officers – and reviewed what he said were thousands of pages of documents. As part of his testimony, the government also played an extended video from a television news crew that had been stationed nearby and audio from a three-hour conversation between officers Jeffrey Lehrmann and Robert Gisevius. Officer Lehrmann, who has pleaded guilty to aiding in the cover-up, secretly recorded the conversation as part of his cooperation deal with the government.

On the profanity-filled audiotape, Gisevius repeatedly says that he thinks none of the officers who were on the bridge that day will “break” or “sing.” Lehrmann, tasked by the feds to get Gisevius to admit guilt, continually presses Gisevius on who will talk or not.

When Lehrmann tells Gisevius that the government has shown him the TV news video, Gisevius asks if the tape shows him “shooting people on the ground.” In the taped conversation, Gisevius also expresses scorn for the government, calling prosecuting attorney Bobbi Bernstein a “Jew” and a vulgar word associated with female genitals. On another part of the tape, Gisevius tells Lehrmann that he shouldn’t worry, because Kaufman took a lead in writing the reports. “You were his note-writing bitch,” says Gisevius. Speaking of another officer who hasn’t been charged, he adds, “Waguespack could be in as much trouble as anybody. He signed off on that shit.”

In nearly two days of cross examination, defense attorneys questioned the government policy of not tape-recording interviews, expressing doubt about the testimony Agent Bezak had gathered, most of which was based on his handwritten notes, and questioned his interpretation of the evidence. They also asked questions that implied the prosecution had avoided calling some key witnesses whose testimony would not go along with the state version of events. Among the key witnesses not called were officer Robert Barrios, who has already pleaded guilty, and Leonard Bartholomew III, who was shot several times on the bridge.

Lawyers for the defense began calling witnesses on the afternoon of Thursday, July 21. The trial is expected to last at least three to four more weeks.

Lawyers for police in Danziger shootings offer passionate defense

Whatever the verdict at the end of the Danziger trial, lawyers for the accused have offered a passionate defense of their clients. The five officers on trial for killing Ronald Madison and James Brisette and wounding four others on Sept. 5, 2005, are represented by six lawyers: Lindsay Larson and Paul Fleming, both representing officer Robert Faulcon; Eric Hessler, representing Sgt. Robert Gisevius; Stephen London, representing Sgt. Arthur Kaufman; Timothy Meche, representing officer Anthony Villavaso; and Frank DeSalvo, representing Sgt. Kenneth Bowen.

Danziger Bridge

Meche said that the officers were part of a task force that took on the most dangerous assignments and that they are “proactive and help people and rescue people.” Kaufman attorney Stephen London derided the prosecution for even investigating his client, saying, “For the government to come here six years later and look over his shoulder is inexcusable.”

Former officer Jeffrey Lehrmann, who began his testimony on the morning of July 11, was the subject of a withering cross-examination by Kaufman attorney Stephen London. Much of the defense tactic in questioning officers who have testified for the prosecution involves going over past testimony and asking repeatedly about discrepancies. For example, in questioning Lehrmann, London asked repeatedly about the gun he said Kaufman had planted at the crime scene. In one telling of his story, Lehrmann had said Kaufman handed the gun to him. In other telling, he said Kaufman had handed the gun to officer Gisevius then him. “You’re nitpicking,” said Lehrmann, insisting that the differences were irrelevant and minor. “It is different. Big time different,” replied London.

Bowen attorney Frank DeSalvo also mocked prosecutors in his opening statements, perhaps hoping to appeal to anti-government sentiments on the jury. He said that the government’s case sounded like something out of a “Grisham novel” written by someone who knows a little bit of law. DeSalvo added that many of the government’s witnesses were liars, while others were deluded.

DeSalvo, who in his work with the Police Association of New Orleans has defended countless police officers over the years, has been involved in the Danziger case since the beginning. Some questioned his involvement in the state case against the Danziger officers, which was dismissed by Judge Raymond Bigelow in 2008. DeSalvo’s daughter, Emily DeSalvo Blackburn, was a minute clerk for Judge Bigelow and is the wife of one of DeSalvo’s law partners.

One of the most strident defenders has been Paul Fleming Jr., who appears to have taken a leadership role among the attorneys. Fleming was the first attorney to speak for the defense in opening arguments and he began by forcefully declaring the words, “These men are not guilty.” He has frequently been the first to question witnesses and is often the first to object in court to the government’s line of questioning.

Unlike DeSalvo, Fleming is not known for defending police, but he does have a history that involves some notorious cases – mostly in Jefferson Parish – and often involving the death penalty. He is probably best known as the lawyer for Vince Marinello, the well-known local sportscaster who was convicted of killing his wife. Fleming was also the lawyer for Charles Atwood, a Metairie man who pleaded guilty in 2003 to killing and dismembering at least three women.

Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute, is the author of the book, “Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six.” He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org. This story first appeared in The New Orleans Tribune.