Women With A Vision and BreakOUT! Respond to Times-Picayune’s “Uneasy Street”

The Times-Picayune/nola.com’s six articles and one video (and counting) about Tulane Avenue, dubbed “Uneasy Street,” are an unfortunate example of glorified and sensationalized media reporting that leads to increased criminalization of marginalized communities, rather than solutions.

As staff of Women With a Vision and BreakOUT!, two organizations that work to promote safer, healthier communities in New Orleans for women and LGBTQ communities, including youth and transgender women, we hope that the Times-Picayune will consider releasing another video with a more humane approach to people involved in (or assumed to be involved in) street economies along Tulane Avenue.

The video we are referencing claims that once sun sets along Tulane Avenue, “An even darker world emerges.” We agree. There is a darker side to Tulane Avenue. But it’s not the one shown.

It’s the stories of mothers, daughters, friends, and wives struggling to survive in a city that has offered them little resources. It’s women dealing with substance abuse or addiction. It’s women who cannot be hired by traditional employers simply because they are transgender. It’s the women who have been too busy struggling to be able to get a formal education to make them employable. It’s the stories of human beings, worthy of dignity, respect, and far more than this series of articles has afforded them.

This kind of sensationalized reporting has put these women at even greater risk for harm. Did you ever consider what might happen to the women whose faces you showed? Did it ever occur to you that one might be working 2 or more jobs, and still have to turn to the streets just to provide for their families? Did it ever occur to you that some may have children at home? Did it ever occur to you that others may be fleeing a violent relationship or have been kicked out of the home at a young age for being transgender? We ask these questions not so that you feel sorry for these women, but that you might recognize and see their humanity.

Rather than blaming the women struggling to survive in our city, we want the businesses along Tulane Avenue to afford our communities the same respect and decency they are asking for. To do so requires that we imagine more creative and restorative solutions to this “darker world.” The Director ofBreakOUT! attended a meeting of the Mid-City Business Association just recently, where store owners were discussing the problems they see along Tulane Avenue. During the question and answer period he asked, “Has anyone considered offering any of these women a job or any sort of job training at your business?” Not one person in the room could tell us the thought had ever crossed their minds. When media articles like this continue to give voice to the mischaracterization of transgender women as “men in dresses,” it should come as no surprise that transgender people feel marginalized and unwelcome in their own city.

To be clear: this problem is not unique to New Orleans. Nationally, transgender people have double the rate of unemployment and poverty, while also being disproportionately represented among homeless populations and those without access to healthcare (National Center for Transgender Equality, National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce.) Similarly, for black women, underemployment and employment discrimination remain core structural issue that contribute to systemic poverty, homelessness, and an array of health disparities, including HIV to cervical cancer. Nationally, women of color earn just 70 cents for every dollar paid to men and just 64 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men (US Census Bureau).

The articles admit that many of those who stay in the motels along Tulane Avenue call them home. At Women With a Vision and BreakOUT! we understand that many of these individuals are young people who have left their homes and now live, the best they are able, in motels with up to 10 other girls at a time. Not all are engaged in the sex trade, however. Many have found a sense of community with one another, formed their own tightly-knit chosen families, and are doing more with their lives.

For the past two years, BreakOUT! has been working to stop discriminatory policing practices, particularly among LGBTQ youth of color and transgender young women, that prevents many of our young people from doing just that. We have made great strides in our campaign, called “We Deserve Better” and recently celebrated a victory in our campaign when the NOPD adopted a LGBTQ policy just last month. The policy states, among other things, that police officers cannot use gender identity or gender expression as probable cause or reasonable suspicion for a police stop or arrest. And yet in this video, we see our neighbors doing the exact same kind of profiling familiar to the NOPD when a young woman crosses the street in the middle of the afternoon.

And for the past five years, Women With a Vision has been working hard on the NO Justice! Campaign to combat the criminalization of women who have engaged in street-based survival sex work and, because of a Solicitation for Crimes Against Nature conviction, were required to register as sex offenders for periods of fifteen years to life. This campaign emerged from our more than twenty-year commitment to advancing the wellbeing of New Orleans’ most marginalized women and their families by challenging the policies and structures that make women have to choose between their daily survival and their long-term health. We made great strides – getting the law declared unconstitutional, removing women from the registry, and ensuring that the public understood how women’s lives had been destroyed by disproportionate sentencing. And yet, with this video and these articles, you have turned back the clock once again.

Increased criminalization of women, including transgender women, increased policing, increased use of surveillance equipment and security cameras, and increased demonification of women in the street economies will not make our City any safer. And it is putting our most vulnerable citizens at even greater risk. We continue to need increased access to employment, housing, education, and healthcare, including substance abuse treatment.

Even the NOPD recognizes the limitations of criminalization as Officer Ricky Jackson is quoted in the article, “You can’t arrest your way out of this situation.” Finally, the NOPD gets something right.

Women With a Vision and BreakOUT! are providing much-needed services and organizing for a better City. What then, is your role in this, nola.com? Will you now leverage your resources to help solve this problem in our city by reporting on novel community-led solutions for fostering economic justice, or will you continue to exasperate it by running sensationalist stories like this?

Deon Haywood, Women With a Vision 504.301.0428
Wesley Ware, BreakOUT! 504.473.2651

Katrina Pain Index 2012: 7 Years After, By Bill Quigley and Davida Finger

1          Rank of New Orleans in fastest growing US cities between 2010 and 2011.  Source: Census Bureau.

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 US 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 the New Orleans daily paper, the Times-Picayune, will start publishing and delivering the paper this fall and switch to internet only on other days.  (See 44 below).  Source: The Times-Picayune.

10        Rate that New Orleans murders occur compared to US average.  According to FBI reports, the national average is 5 murders per 100,000.  The Louisiana average is 12 per 100,000.  The 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 were 35,700 abandoned or blighted homes and empty lots in New Orleans (21% of all residential addresses), a reduction from 43,755 in 2010 (when it was 34% of all addresses).  Compare to Detroit (24%), Cleveland (19%), and Baltimore (14%).  Source: Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC).  

27        Percent of people in New Orleans live in poverty.  The national rate is 15%.  Among African American families the rate is 30% and for white families it is 8%.  Source: Corporation for Enterprise Development (CEFD) and Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) Assets & 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% for black households, 40% for Latino household, 24% for Asian household and 22% for white households.  Source: Corporation for Enterprise Development (CEFD) and Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) Assets & Opportunity Profile: New Orleans (August 2012

40        Percent of poor adults in New Orleans region that 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 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 US 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 source as 360,740.  The 2000 population was 484,674.  Source: Census.

Bill and Davida 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.

Critics Say Times-Picayune Website Amplifies Discourse of Violence and Hate

New Orleans-based writer and attorney Billy Sothern started a blog last month called NO Comment that highlights the often offensive comments found on nola.com, the online home of the Times-Picayune. NO Comment's mission says,

This is a blog to highlight and discuss offensive, irresponsible, and inappropriate comments on NOLA.com's Times Picayune website. The blog is not an exhaustive daily monitor of offensive content on NOLA.com but instead the few comments posted and discussed here are exemplary of thousands of similar comments posted on the website.

For anyone who has ever read the Picayune online, much of this will come as nothing new. But Sothern makes some important points, asking why comments on the society page seem to be forbidden, while also pointing out the more aggressive moderation policies of other websites. He also points out that - unlike many sites - nola.com comments are given equal weight with the news articles.

One of my concerns with the lack of moderation of NOLA.com's comments is that I know, from personal experience, that the people involved in news stories, including crime victims, read the comments, which appear immediately after the story and get almost equal footing with the journalist's work.

As Sothern points out on his blog, he's not the first person to raise this issue. Sothern quotes a piece from blogger Deborah Cotton, which lays out the problem in detail:

Discriminatory practices exist that demonstrate a racial bias at the Times. The monitoring of the comments section is a prime example. The TP’s website nola.com has a notorious reputation for allowing racially charged comments that malign Black residents to fester without restraint, as in the case of the two college students who were kidnapped in ’09 and later found murdered. On the day that these kidnappings hit the press, a colleague of mine and I spent the better part of the day emailing and calling the nola.com office, pleading with them to either monitor the escalating hate speech or close the comment section altogether out of respect for the devastated families of the missing students. They all but ignored our requests - you can read the story and comments for yourself here. Meanwhile, Nell Nolan’s society column which chronicles high brow fetes of the White elite in New Orleans doesn’t endure such hostile defamation of its subjects because the comments section in the column are, as a rule, always closed (see here). This double standard creates an environment where the paper de facto condones readers attacking Blacks but goes great lengths to protect the wealthy White community from the same loathsome violations.

Kevin Allman at the Gambit has also written powerful commentary on the subject.

You've got to feel sorry for the T-P writers and editors who bust their asses to produce good work, only to see it undermined, hour after hour, day after day, by blithering racist knuckledraggers who can only see anything through the prism of race (even when it doesn't have any application to the story involved) and who, in a righteous world, would be tossed off the most insane, fringe moonbat radio call-in shows. Or maybe it's all a clever plan designed to staunch the bleeding in the print media, a way to get eyeballs off the Internet and back on the printed page. Whatever it is, it's bull, I'm tired of it, I've given up wondering if nola.com will ever take an interest in getting a handle on it, and I'm embarrassed to send out-of-town friends to the online Times-Picayune to read a story for fear they'll think we're an entire city of troglodytes.

Sothern's blog also quotes coverage of an exchange at a panel on the media sponsored by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, where Louisiana Justice Institute co-directors Tracie Washington and Jacques Morial offered criticism of the nola.com comments. Jacques Morial is quoted as asking, “Has there ever been a discussion about the ethics of profiteering off racial strife and bigotry, especially given that the Times-Picayune does promote the most commented story, so that people click through, and it rings their cash register?”

In the same discussion, former Picayune city editor Jed Horne adds to the critique.

“The commentary that trails news articles, in many ways is deeply repugnant, much of it racist in pretty overt ways,” Horne said. “I’m left to wonder if it hasn’t besmirched the whole enterprise.”

Sothern does quote a nola.com staffer who says (via twitter) that they have gotten better at deleting offensive comment. However, since Sothern continues to find racist and offensive comments - including several posted in the past 24-hours - the remedy clearly hasn't worked. Even when the comments are removed, Sothern calls it an "insufficient remedy," saying,

Removing offensive content may limit the number of people exposed to it but it does little for people who read it - like family members of victims of crime or tragedy - before it was taken down.

Somehow countless other news sites have managed to solve this problem, whether through allowing commentators on their site less anonymity, taking commenting privileges away from those who are consistently offensive, or through moderating comments before they appear. Times-Picayune readers - and journalists on staff, who are forced to have this hate-speech attached to their work - have a right to ask why nola.com does not to the same.

Did the Media Fail to Report What They Knew About Police Violence After Katrina?

On December 10, journalist AC Thompson wrote:

Nobody within the New Orleans Police Department ever tried to bring Warren, McRae and the rest to justice. Nobody went to the chief. Nobody went to internal affairs. Nobody went to the local district attorney or the state attorney general or the U.S. Department of Justice. Every single officer who knew about the circumstances of Glover's demise, and there were easily a dozen of them, was content to simply let him disappear.

He's right. The problems at the NOPD go beyond those officers brought on trial. As Thompson says, "the issues with the New Orleans police go far beyond the misconduct by a few rogue cops." The problems in the NOPD are systemic, and demand a systemic change, including a shifting of priorities towards valuing the lives of the city's African-American majority.

However, there is one topic that Thompson has failed to address, and that's the role of our local media - very much including the Times-Picayune - which also may have failed to report what they knew, or at the very least placed a lower value on stories that contradicted the official narrative of police heroism.

In an important article in Sunday's Picayune, Jarvis DeBerry reports that Alex Brandon, who at the time of the Hurricane and it's aftermath had worked as a photographer for the Times-Picayune, "saw things and heard things that proved to be useful in a criminal investigation. He didn't report them as news." DeBerry says that Brandon "let down his profession and the people who pick up this newspaper in a search for the truth."

During the recent trial of the officers who are accused of killing Henry Glover and covering up the crime, Brandon - who was also on Danziger Bridge in the aftermath of police killings there - testified that he saw officers beating Glover's brother Ed King and good samaritan William Tanner, and later heard his "good friend" Officer David Warren admit that he had shot Glover. He stayed silent, even when directly asked about the cases by photo editor Doug Parker.

DeBerry asks the question, "Glover's family had to wait more than five years for justice. Would it have been that long if Brandon, who now works for The Associated Press, had been the courageous journalist he was believed to be and had told the world what he knew?"

The question now becomes, what other reporters didn't report all that they knew, either because they were participating in a cover up, or - more likely - just because they didn't prioritize the stories of police violence, deferred to official reports, and didn't want to make waves.

Pictured above: Former Times-Picayune Photographer Alex Brandon.

Happy New Orleans? Kaiser Report Reveals Two Cities Five Years After The Storm

By Lance Hill, Ph.D., Executive Director, Southern Institute for Education and Research

Today the Times-Picayune published an editorial “New Orleans Is A Happy Place to Be,” drawing on the recent Kaiser Foundation survey. The Kaiser survey did reflect increased optimism but it is a frank overview of the problems and racial disparities that bedevil the recover. Moreover, the survey did not interview any of the 100,000 people that the Census Bureau estimates remain displaced from the city. A 2008 Louisiana Family Recovery Corps survey indicated that 75% of displaced African Americans want to return but could not afford moving costs, housing, and had no employment prospects.

Kaiser plans to release the total datasets which would allow us to see the racial breakouts of all the responses, but they have released some additional data that pertains to the need for affordable housing: for example, 42 percent of African American respondents said they were renting their residence, nearly double the 24 percent of whites who rent.

Here is the link to the new Kaiser Foundation report: New Orleans Five Years After The Storm. Much of the local media has spun this as a feel-good report in which New Orleanians are more concerned with the Horizon Oil Spill than with the lingering effects of Katrina. In fact, a slight majority of respondents simply said they thought the oil spill “will cause more damage” than Katrina, which could be taken as an assessment of the larger Gulf-Coast impact of the spill. Indeed, seventy percent of the respondents think that America has forgotten the challenges facing New Orleans.

Some of the responses were broken out by race and they provide some useful insights into the difference of opinions between black and white storm victims and the different ways they continue to experience the impact of the storm.

From the report:

Compared to whites, African Americans in Orleans Parish…

--are more likely to say that both their own lives (42% vs. 16%) and the city in general (66% vs. 49%) have not yet recovered from Hurricane Katrina;

--are more than twice as likely to be living in a low-income household (61% compared to 24%);

--are more likely to report having had trouble paying for food or housing over the past year (both 31% vs. 8%);

--are more likely to report being uninsured (25% vs. 10%) and to have had problems paying medical bills (29% vs. 13%);

--are substantially more likely to report worries, such as the 64% who say they are very worried their children won’t be able to get a good education, compared to 18% of whites, and 59% who say they are worried health care services might not be available when needed (vs. 21% for whites);

--are more likely to see the city as a bad place to raise children (51% vs. 35%).

The Pressure Mounts on the NOPD

The Times-Picayune, working with ProPublica and Frontline, have been running a powerful, devastating, series of articles this week. They have mounted what appears to be exhaustive investigations of shootings by the New Orleans Police Department in the days after Katrina. According to the reporters, "At least ten people were shot by New Orleans police in the week after Hurricane Katrina. This series focuses on four incidents that have never been fully examined."

As we've written in this space before, the Times-Picayune is about four years late on this story. Of course, the Picayune also waited until after hundreds of other newspapers from around the world had covered the Jena Six before they felt the need to send a reporter there, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

Still, this is a vital story, and very well done. Our hope is that this media focus combined with investigations from the Department of Justice will create the public pressure for the real, systemic, changes the NOPD needs. It is hard to rebuild and recover if you don't have a foundation of justice to build on.

A Wide Spectrum of Voices Speaks up Against Racial Discrimination in St. Bernard Parish

Pressure is heating up on St. Bernard Parish.

An editorial in Saturday's Times Picayune says it all: "St. Bernard Parish's housing restrictions are legally and morally wrong."

On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Ginger Berrigan once again found St. Bernard's government in contempt of court. Further, as the Picayune noted, "She gave the parish until 5 p.m. Monday to produce the respective paperwork. If parish officials delay without cause, St. Bernard faces fines of $5,000 the first day and $10,000 every day thereafter." A Sunday column by Jarvis Deberry asks, "At what point will residents decide that it's just too damned expensive to be racist?"

This week, two open letters were released that further heightens the pressure on the parish. Both were signed by a broad spectrum of organizations, from national human rights groups like National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, US Human Rights Network, and Advancement Project; to regional organizations like Moving Forward Gulf Coast and Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children; to an ever-increasing range of local groups, such as the Zion Travelers Cooperative Center and Survivors Village; as well as individuals like historian Douglas Brinkley and blogger Karen Gadbois.

The first letter, directed towards St. Bernard Parish, is called an Advocates Letter to St. Bernard Parish, in response to Housing Discrimination. The second is called the Pledge in Support of a Just Rebuilding of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana and the U.S. Gulf Coast: A Sign-On Letter for Local and National Relief Organizations and Volunteer Groups. Both letters can be seen on the Louisiana Justice Institute blog.

Another article about the campaign for justice in St. Bernard can be found at this link, and a legal background from Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center can be found here.