RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : October Interviews with Poppy Northcutt, Maneesha James, Seth Holmes, and Thomas Zigal

Frances "Poppy" Northcutt with Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer in the studios of KPFT-FM in Houston, Friday, October 25, 2013. Photo by Guy Schwartz / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcasts:
Thorne Dreyer interviews Poppy Northcutt,
Maneesha James, Seth Holmes, and Tom Zigal

Our October guests address Texas feminist history, issues involved with death and dying, the plight of migrant farmworkers, and the post-Katrina craziness.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2013

Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio in October 2013 included pioneering Houston feminist Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, president of both the Houston and Texas chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a historic figure in the women's movement; psychotherapist, meditation facilitator, and death and dying counselor Maneesha James; anthropologist Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies about the plight of migrant farmworkers; and novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.


Frances "Poppy" Northcutt

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with Houston feminist Frances "Poppy" Northcutt here:


Houston attorney Frances "Poppy" Northcutt is president of the Houston and Texas chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Northcutt, who has played a central role in the women’s movement since the mid-Sixties, was the City of Houston’s first Women’s Advocate in 1974-75 under Mayor Fred Hofheinz. In that role she initiated legislative and executive proposals to eliminate sex discrimination in the police and fire departments and elsewhere in city government.

She was also the founding chair in 1974 of the Harris County Women’s Political Caucus. Northcutt was on-site coordinator for the historic National Womens Conference, sponsored by the U.S. State Department and held in Houston in November 1977, drawing 20,000 participants.

Northcutt first gained national attention during the Apollo missions in the mid-Sixties when, as a mathematician and engineer, she was the first woman to work in flight support at NASA’s Mission Control. In a September 1970 Life magazine cover story titled “Women Arise,” Northcutt was one of eight women profiled as "succeeding in a man’s world.”

She was singled out in a 1969 AP story about women playing key roles in the space program and was also featured in Mademoiselle, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. Northcutt won a number of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom Team Award for work in the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew.

This episode of Rag Radio was produced in the studios of KPFT-FM in Houston with the assistance of KPFT news anchor Marlo Blue.


Maneesha James

Maneesha James with Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer (left) and Tracey Schulz at the KOOP studios, October 18, 2013.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with death and dying counselor Maneesha James here:


Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, in 1947, Maneesha James offers "psycho-spiritual support in living and dying." She has a background in nursing (general, midwifery, and psychiatric) and is a psychotherapist and meditation facilitator. Maneesha, who lives in London, is co-founder and co-director of the Sammasati Project, which offers a vision of living and dying based on awareness and celebration.

Through her years of meditation and living in the meditation resort of the contemporary mystic, Osho (she was his chief editor), Maneesha has developed and facilitated workshops worldwide on a meditative way of living. She works with people who wish to go through the process of dying with as much awareness as possible -- working on an individual basis with those who are facing imminent death and in workshops with those who want to explore their issues with dying while they are still relatively healthy.


Seth Holmes

Anthropologist Seth Holmes in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, October 11, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with anthropologist Seth Holmes here:


Seth M. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley where he is Martin Sisters Endowed Chair Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology. Holmes is the author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. The book, which “weds the theoretical analysis of the anthropologist with the intimacy of the journalist,” is an “ethnographic witness to the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants.”

The book is based on five years of field research during which time Seth lived with indigenous Mexican families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals, participated in healing rituals, and mourned at funerals for friends.

Holmes traveled with migrants through the desert border into Arizona, where they were apprehended and jailed by the Border Patrol. After he was released from jail, and his companions were deported, Holmes interviewed Border Patrol agents, local residents, and armed vigilantes.

Tom Philpott wrote in Mother Jones about Holmes' book: “Here in the U.S., we both utterly rely on immigrants from south of the border to feed us, and erect walls and employ militias to keep them out. In this groundbreaking new book, Holmes goes underground to explore what this bizarre duality means for the people who live it. A brilliant combination of academic rigor and journalistic daring.”


Thomas Zigal

Novelist Thomas Zigal in the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, October 4, 2013. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with novelist Thomas Zigal here:


According to Kirkus Reviews, Novelist Thomas Zigal writes “page-turners with a conscience.” His latest book, Many Rivers to Cross, is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. The White League was also set in New Orleans, as will be a third novel to come. His three popular crime novels, featuring hippie Sheriff Kurt Muller, take place in Aspen. Author Jan Reid wrote that Many Rivers to Cross "is awe-inspiring. Thomas Zigal has entered New Orleans' heart of darkness after Katrina. His story is brave, frightening, and so dramatic that at times you have to get up and walk around the room."

Zigal was born in Galveston and grew up in Texas City where his father worked in an oil refinery. He graduated from the University of Texas -- where he was “an anti-war hippie and an avid reader of The Rag.” He got his masters in creative writing at Stanford and “hung out with writers like Raymond Carver, James Crumley, and Scott Turow.”

He published a literary magazine, The Pawn Review, and was an editor at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Zigal has served as a speech writer for one UT-Austin chancellor and four of the university’s presidents. He is a member of the Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters (of which he is a former vice president), and the Writers League of Texas.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Dreyer was a founding editor of the original Rag, published in Austin from 1966-1977. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CDT).

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, November 15, 2013: Staffers from the original Rag in '60s Austin: Doyle Niemann, now a leader in the Maryland House of Delegates, and poet/activist Mariann Wizard.
Friday, November 22, 2013: Empowerment activist Sam Daley-Harris, author of Reclaiming our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Post-Katrina New Orleans is a Divided City

In the new New Orleans, privatized, voucher-financed housing, left, has replaced traditional public housing like the deserted Lafitte housing projects on the right. Photo by Gerald Herbert / AP.
A divided city:
Seven years after Katrina

in rebuilding New Orleans, the key question is not only how much change is needed, but more crucially, who should dictate that change.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 28, 2012

Seven years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a national laboratory for government reforms. But the process through which those experiments have been carried out rarely has been transparent or democratic. The results have been divisive, pitting new residents against those who grew up here, rich against poor, and white against Black.

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% 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.

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.

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 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 neworleans@leftturn.org. A version of this article appeared at MoveOn.org. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : scott crow's 'Black Flags and Windmills'

Black Flags and Windmills:
Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective

scott crow's book tells of the abandonment of a great American city by the powerful, the refusal of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens to lay down and die, and the necessity for community self-reliance that is Katrina's great lesson.

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2011

[Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective by scott crow; foreword by Kathleen Cleaver (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011); Paperback; 223 pp.; $20.00.]

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm, the sixth strongest recorded to date, scored a direct hit on the City of New Orleans. Over the next days and weeks, as neglected levees failed and federal and state governments and aid agencies floundered, Katrina became the costliest natural disaster, and fifth deadliest, in U.S. history.

Katrina affected millions, changed the lives of hundreds of thousands forever, and called some to rise above all personal considerations and give themselves to the Herculean task of saving the Gulf Coast and its people.

Among the latter was a Texas anarchist, a lanky East Dallas white guy who looks like he's from way over in East Texas, easy-going but hard-bitten. And while the person he was before Katrina may still be, he was forever changed by what he witnessed and achieved in Louisiana.

scott crow, like the poets raul r. salinas and e.e. cummings, doesn't capitalize his name. This is one of those odd contradictions, wherein a desire to de-emphasize an individual's importance to, say, an international movement for compassionate autonomy, births the need to explain that this particular person doesn't do something most everyone does, thus making it necessary to consider her or him individually.

Well, humility can't help but call attention to itself, if only by its contrast with the egocentric world-at-large. As I told scott recently, I've been wanting to read his autobiography since I met him.

I knew his name before we met because a nonprofit foundation that I serve as a board member gave money to hurricane relief work, beginning, I think, in 2006. But I didn't know he and his life partner, Ann Harkness, were living in Austin until they came to my book release party that fall with former Louisiana political prisoner Robert King and a couple of his other friends.

Both Ann and scott have been valuable change-makers in Austin since moving here shortly before Katrina. scott is Director of Ecology Action, the grassroots community organization that pioneered recycling in Austin while he was in grade school. Ann is a gifted, witty photographer. Both are active in many community groups and the core of a lively social scene that also embraces King, antiglobalization worker Lisa Fithian, and other activists who date their lives in Austin from Katrina's floods.

Our community has also seen them undergo the very public trauma of having a former friend and sometime-colleague exposed as an FBI informer, in this reviewer's opinion responsible for inciting two younger activist friends to plan violence at the 2007 Republican National Convention.

Black Flags and Windmills, crow's first book, focuses on Common Ground Collective, an anarchist-based relief organization he helped found when official disaster relief efforts not only failed to meet the needs of affected residents along the Gulf Coast, but seemed intent upon criminalizing them.

But that wasn't what he set out to do. While millions sat stunned, weeping at televised images of a drowned metropolis, as mythic to the American psyche as Atlantis to the Greeks', scott crow drove from Austin, Texas, to New Orleans to look for a stranded friend.

Black Panther Party matriarch Kathleen Cleaver's insightful introduction sees this as the fulcrum, asking, "What deep motivation drives anyone to travel by boat across an unfamiliar flooded city looking for a friend under life-threatening circumstances?"

The answer comes from another BPP icon, Geronimo ji Jaga: "Revolutionaries are motivated by great love for another world."

It is that love that most illuminates scott's character and the pages of this work. From details of organizational process-building among a shifting cast of residents, volunteers, and core activists, to gritty descriptions of clearing long-clogged storm sewers and scraping dead animals from the streets, the bottom line is that he doesn't leave anyone behind.

It almost doesn't matter that the friend he went to find was Robert King, former BPP activist who served 29 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious Angola Prison. scott and Ann Harkness met King shortly after his 2001 release. scott may not see it this way, but I think he would have done the same thing for any number of other friends and comrades.

King's particular circumstances and his exemplary humility and dedication -- he continues to work for the release of his Angola comrades, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace -- certainly helped draw crow back to New Orleans after a first failed, frightening, surreal sortie.

The courage of NOLA residents who were also there at the beginning, Common Ground co-founders Malik Rahim and Sharon Johnson, kept him there for months under incredibly demanding circumstances. But the initial determination to help a friend underlies all of scott's work, pre- and post-Katrina, and has made him something of an icon, if a reluctant one, to antiglobalization activists around the world.

As an autobiography, Black Flags and Windmills is unconventional; one must look to the "About the author" addendum to discover scott's age. He spends 15 pages on his childhood and youth. A small, loving section on his Mom, Emily, shows the origins of his empathetic nature. It reminds me of cousins and classmates, perhaps a couple of years younger and drawn to the 1960s subculture in which I participated. Emily came to womanhood before the words "women's" and "liberation" ever met, when racial segregation had but recently fallen, and "race mixing" was still rare.

Scott was born in 1967; the Vietnam war was still escalating. Emily, a single mom, wasn't an activist -- but she surely knew people who were. She wanted a better world for her son. I knew young parents in Austin then who sent their children to the "hippie school" in the country, or helped in a free breakfast for schoolchildren program inspired by those of the BPP. Emily sent scott to an East Dallas preschool run by former BPP activists. While the preschool was not overtly political, the BPP's 10-Point Program is in his book and is a cornerstone of his activism.

Between East Dallas and New Orleans, scott recounts his evolution as a "libertarian anarchist," a phrase I applaud in theory but find somewhat wanting in rigor. Despite having been influenced by socialists and socialist-influenced activists, he expresses more anti-communist views here than anti-capitalist ones, although it may be that a critique of corporate capital is implicit in the work as a whole.

He seems to view communism and/or socialism solely as political systems -- authoritarian, anti-democratic ones at that -- rather than economic ones. This leads him, IMHO, into the error of rejecting a priori tools that could serve a libertarian anarchist society rather well, and this is a topic I plan to pursue with him and with Ann in time.

Most of the narrative of Black Flags and Windmills, however, is not analytical but tells one man's story -- a man careful to "leave room for other stories" -- of the abandonment of a great American city by the powerful, the refusal of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens to lay down and die, and the necessity for community self-reliance that is Katrina's great lesson.

Government cannot help you. Government seeks to control you. In any disaster or emergency, help yourself and those around you. Many tasks cannot be performed by one person, thus, make principled alliances, work cooperatively, share decision-making and resources. Ask what people need; don't assume. Express your own needs clearly.

Starting with three people and $50, Common Ground helped thousands of individuals and families, saved and rebuilt entire communities, and raised over a million dollars in small contributions in two years, an astonishing feat in the nonprofit world.

scott's ruminations on privilege -- his privileges of being white, male, able-bodied, etc. -- illuminate an ongoing contradiction of radical organizing: a person on the edge of starvation has little time for considering organizational culture, yet such consideration is vital for long-term success. His solution is to use whatever social privilege he has for the benefit of those who have none.

Stretched to his physical and emotional limits, sleeping on the ground in sticky Louisiana heat, eating bad food, surrounded 24-7 by the stench of decay, death, and constant crisis, scott's "privilege," one may argue, is what kept him up late writing and rewriting the organizational principles, procedures, and other expressions of self-determination necessary for group cohesion.

Expecting certain rights also motivates one to demand them. scott's experiences in New Orleans, a white outsider in a black community rightfully skeptical of offers to "help," made me recall a personal white-girl introduction to in-your-face racism: I was furious because a friend of mine was insulted, my anger not for his humiliation, but mine. That was an expression of privilege, you betcha! -- but also a time-release capsule of truth, exposing just how limited such privilege was and its unacceptable costs.

Racism continues to fester beneath public civility and political correctness today, finding sustenance in toxic, chaotic situations. The privilege of opposing it remains with the white moiety from whom it springs and whose deception is among its aims. The illusion that white skin, male gender, a college diploma, or other privileges are proof against oppression and exploitation remains a primary obstacle to social change.

crow's frank, no-nonsense discussion of armed self-defense is also a valuable contribution; recommended. As a young man, he feared guns and had to overcome the phobia to become a good marksman when the need became clear. The East Texas in him seems to have won out here; his attitude is more that of a farmer who would resolutely drop a wild hog ripping up his crops than of a poseur power-tripping on fancy weaponry.

Again BPP principles are seen, not only in Common Ground's acceptance of self-defense as legitimate but in the determination to keep resources gathered for the community from being stolen or destroyed.

scott is as frank in discussing Common Ground's internal issues as its external challenges, and while his desire not to personalize problems can be frustrating to the nosy reader, the conclusions he draws are surely of more long-term value.

We don't need to know who wanted to, "Damn everything but the circus!" to recognize the "type" scott describes in a section so subtitled: the loudmouth who shows up to "volunteer" with their own, most often self-serving agenda. Sometimes, after due consideration and an often numbing amount of talk, you just have to show them the door.

In this regard, the book is also notable for what is doesn't include: long explanations of why scott was right and other people wrong, or details of endless debates over points that later were seen to be pointless. Through principled, shared decision-making, Common Ground has been able to grow through its occasional and inevitable disagreements relatively unscathed. It apparently furthers one to have someplace to go!

In sharp contrast to this overall amicability, crow's brief criticism of the racist, sectarian New Black Panther Party is well-founded and pulls no punches. Two so-called "socialist" sects also come in for a well-deserved basting; a disaster area is not a place to sell your newspaper! Leaders have to speak against bullshit even when it wears a revolutionary cloak.

Yes, I said the "L" word, and so does scott: "Leadership happens when someone is given permission by the rest of the group to lead." Accountable, anti-authoritarian leadership must be demanded, and taught. The notion that leadership is always to be avoided, a major dilettante cop-out of the 1960s, has hopefully been relegated to the dustbin of history!

Black Flags and Windmills is chock-full of juicy quotes from rebels, poets, and rockers, and has whetted my appetite to hear a bunch of bands I somehow missed, perhaps during my deeply reggae years, such as Ministry, Skinny Puppy, the Replacements, the Coup, and more.

But I was most struck by this quote from the early Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose chords are echoed today by Occupation troubador Makana:

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few."
-- from "The Mask of Anarchy"

Another contribution of crow's book is its Appendices, including notes, memoranda, and both internal and external Common Ground communiqués. Here are appeals to the world outside for money and materiel, desperate descriptions of need, calm accounts of the unresponsiveness and outright hostility of government and other "official" disaster personnel to the agile, popularly-based, collaborative self-help afforded by and through Common Ground.

These documents may not only be useful to historians of the future who seek to understand the impact of Katrina, or the failures of the G.W. Bush administration, but to today's activists who seek to build new institutions, new processes, and a new culture.

No matter how dire the circumstances, it seems, this process is not easy nor always harmonious. A great deal of sweat and inconvenience is involved. Troublesome details must be constantly addressed. The more you bite off, the more you must chew. This book will help you sharpen your teeth.

Black Flags and Windmills combines hands-on information about what it really takes to change this world, one big mess at a time, and a seeker's vision of a better world. Well done!

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a contributing editor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles and poetry by Mariann G. Wizard at The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's August 5, 2011, Rag Radio interview with anarchist and author scott crow.
• Read "White Vigilantes and the Battle of Algiers," by scott crow, in The Rag Blog, September 8, 2010 (adapted from a draft of Black Flags and Windmills).

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : The Battle for New Orleans Continues

New Orleans after Katrina. Image from Slate.
Six years after Katrina:
The battle for New Orleans continues

Political power has shifted to whites, but blacks have not given up their struggle for a voice -- and justice.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 29, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- As this weekend’s storm has reminded us, hurricanes can be a threat to U.S. cities on the East Coast as well the Gulf. But the vast changes that have taken place in New Orleans since Katrina have had little to do with weather, and everything to do with political struggles.

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 Ninth 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 -- Senator 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 that "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.

Photo from Getty Images / The Root.
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.

Resistance to the dominant agenda has also led to reform of the city’s criminal justice system. But this reform is very different from the others, with leadership coming from African-American residents at the grassroots, including those most affected by both crime and policing.

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 plead 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 its 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 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. His new book is 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. This article was first published at The Root. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

VIDEO / Jeff Zavala and Thorne Dreyer : Anarchist Organizer and Author Scott Crow on Rag Radio

Anarchist, community organizer,
and author Scott Crow on Rag Radio

Video by Jeff Zavala / Interview by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / August 24, 2011

Scott Crow, an Austin-based anarchist, community organizer, political activist, and writer, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio on August 5, 2011, and Austin documentary videographer Jeff Zavala produced a lively video of the show.

Crow, who has been labeled a "domestic terrorist" by the FBI, was the subject of a May 29 New York Times front page article about FBI surveillance of political activists in this country.

Scott's organizing projects include the post-Katrina Common Ground Collective in New Orleans, which has been called the largest anarchist-influenced organization in modern U.S. history, and his book about that experience, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective, will be published by PM Press in September, 2011.

Scott has worked with groups like Greenpeace, ACORN, and the Rainforest Action Network, and currently works at an anarchist recycling center cooperative in Austin

The Rag Blog has posted videos by Jeff Zavala of two earlier Rag Radio interviews -- with journalism professor and widely-published author Robert Jensen on July 8, 2011, and with Texas shrimper, environmental activist, and "Eco-Outlaw" Diane Wilson on June 24, 2011. Zavala is the creator of ZGraphix Productions and posts videos at zgraphix.blip.tv and at Austin Indymedia. Zavala is also the founder of the Austin Activist Archive, a virtual collective dedicated to broadcasting citizen journalism.

Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. The show, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Historic NOPD Verdict Reveals Post-Katrina Cops Run Amuck

Rev. Raymond Brown pumps his fist outside New Orleans Federal Court Friday in celebration of conviction of cops involved in the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge shootings. Photo by Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune
From heroes to villains:
NOPD verdict reveals post-Katrina
history of police violence, cover-up

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- In an historic verdict with national implications, five New Orleans police officers were convicted on Friday of civil rights violations for killing unarmed African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and could face life in prison when sentenced later this year. The case, involving a grisly encounter on the Danziger Bridge, was the most high profile of a number of prosecutions that seek to hold police accountable for violence in the storm’s wake.

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 burned Glover’s body and left it behind a levee.

The next day, a 45-year-old named Danny Brumfield, Sr., was killed by officers in front of scores of witnesses outside the New Orleans convention center when he ran after a police car to demand that they stop and provide aid.

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.

Lance Madison, left, whose brother, Ronald, was shot and killed on the Danziger bridge by New Orleans Police Sept. 5, 2005, gets a hug from prosecutor Cindy Chung outside the Federal Court building Friday. Lead prosecutor Barbara "Bobbi" Bernstein is on the right. Photo by Matthew Hinton / The Times-Picayune.
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.

A cursory investigation by the NOPD justified the shooting, and it appeared that the matter was closed. In fact, for years every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed to find any fault in this or other officer-involved shootings from the days after the storm.

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.

Monique Harden, a community activist and co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, helped to bring testimony about these issues to the United Nations. Another post-Katrina organization, People's Hurricane Relief Fund, presented the charges to an international tribunal.

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 starts 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.

Demonstrators protest Danziger Bridge killings in 2010 New Orleans march. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
In early 2009, a newly empowered civil rights division of the Justice Department decided to look into the cases. Federal agents interviewed witnesses who had never been talked to, reconstructed crime scenes, and even confiscated NOPD computers. They found evidence that the Danziger officers had radically rewritten their version of what happened on the bridge that day.

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.

Most important, the verdict has helped shift the narrative of what happened in those days after Katrina.

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.

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.”

Officers went out with a mission to deliver “their own kind of post-apocalyptic justice,” she added. “The law is what it is because this is not a police state.”

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. Sergeant 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. His new book is 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. This article was first published at ColorLines. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog, including previous reporting on the Danziger Bridge incident and post-Katrina police violence.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Cop Corruption on Trial in New Orleans

Trial of cops connected to the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge killings has gripped New Orleans.
New Orleans cops:
Danziger bridge trial
brings corruption front and center

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- In New Orleans’ federal courthouse, five police officers are currently facing charges of killing unarmed Black civilians and conspiring for more than four years to cover-up their crime. The trial, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, has gripped the city, and daily coverage in local media has focused attention on a deeply troubled department that still has a long way to go before it can regain the trust of residents.

The charges stem from an incident on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina. Police officers, who apparently had misheard a distress call on their radios, piled into a Budget rental truck and sped to the scene. When they arrived, they came out shooting.

James Brisette, a 17-year-old described by friends as nerdy and studious, and Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old man with the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, were killed. Four others were seriously wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, 38, who had her arm shot off of her body, and Jose Holmes, 19, who was shot point blank in his stomach. Susan’s son, Leonard Bartholomew, 14, was shot at by officers, badly beaten, and arrested. Ronald Madison’s brother, Lance, was arrested by officers under false charges that were later dropped.

Witnesses for the government include survivors of the harrowing ordeal on the bridge, as well as several officers who have plead guilty to lesser offenses in exchange for their testimony. They have described shocking scenes of violence -- one officer is accused of kicking and stomping Madison to death after he had already been shot seven times -- and a wide ranging cover-up. “When the shooting stopped, these men realized they had a problem,” said federal prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein during opening arguments. “They lied because they knew they had committed a crime.”

The New Orleans police department has developed a reputation as one of the most violent and corrupt in the nation, and the revelations in this case have stoked anger and outrage, especially in New Orleans’ African-American community.

“This case shows the total dysfunction of the New Orleans Police Department,” says Malcolm Suber, a longtime activist against police brutality and project director with the New Orleans chapter of the American Friends Service Committee. “It shows they were just going wild after the storm.”

Suber and other activists have called for the DOJ to launch a wide-ranging investigation into a pattern of abuse they say goes back decades. “What Danziger represents is for the first time there’s been acknowledgment that this police department is rotten to the core,” says Suber.

Lance Madison is surrounded by State Police and New Orleans police SWAT members on Sept. 4, 2005 at the Danziger Bridge. Madison was accused of shooting at police but charges were later dropped. Photo by Alex Brandon / Times-Picayune.
A department with a troubled history

Like most southern police departments, NOPD was explicitly segregationist for much of the 20th century. The first Black New Orleans police officer was not hired until 1950 and it was several more years before Black officers were allowed to carry a gun or arrest whites.

In 1980, the city was rocked by protests when Sherry Singleton, a 26-year old African-American mother, was shot by police while she was naked in a bathtub, in front of her four year old child. Police said she was armed, but a neighbor testified that she heard her pleading, “please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.”

The issue of police violence continued to dominate in the 1990s. Revelations of corruption in the force inspired both mass protest and Department of Justice investigations. Federal involvement combined with aggressive actions on the part of a new mayor and police chief led to 200 officers fired and criminal charges brought against more than 60 cops.

Two NOPD officers received the death penalty for killing civilians. One of those officers, Len Davis, was caught on a federal wiretap ordering the assassination of a woman who had complained about police brutality. As officers were being fired and disciplined, the city’s murder and violent crime rates dropped dramatically, and the prosecution of corrupt officers was widely seen as making the city safer.

Advocates say that the changes begun in the 90s were cut short when Mayor C. Ray Nagin became mayor, at around the same time that the Clinton presidency ended and the Bush administration began. Both Bush and Nagin seemed uninterested in continuing to prosecute police, and New Orleans slipped back into being the nation’s murder capital, as well as the capital of police violence.


New Orleans Dentist Romell Madison -- referred to in the sign -- has served as a spokesperson for the Danziger Bridge victims and their families. His brother Ronald Madison, who suffered from mental disabilities, was killed by police, and his brother Lance was cleared of charges of attempted murder. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
Renewed outrage brings energy for change

The revelations of post-Katrina police violence have brought in a new era of outrage. Political and civic leaders, across boundaries of color and class, have called for systemic change in the NOPD. “The public has a right to know what really happened,” says Anthony Radosti, vice president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, which plays the role of an unofficial watchdog over the NOPD. “The police department failed in their mission,” adds Radosti, a 23-year veteran of the NOPD.

Ronal Serpas, who was hired by Mayor Landrieu to run the department in 2010, admits that the department has a long way to go. “Chief Serpas has always acknowledged that he inherited a fundamentally flawed department,” explains NOPD spokesperson Remi Braden. “He has done a lot, but there is much more to be done.”

Federal agents are looking into at least nine cases of police killings from the past several years, but that is just one aspect of their involvement. In March, the DOJ released a 58-page report that describes a department facing problems that “are serious, systemic, wide-ranging, and deeply rooted.” The report highlighted a range of areas in which it found “patterns or practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law.”

The bad news keeps coming out of the NOPD. In just the past two weeks, since the Danziger trial began, scandal has reached the very top of the department. The NOPD’s second in charge, Marlon Defillo, was found in an investigation overseen by the state police to have neglected his duty to investigate police violence, in effect helping to hinder official investigations.

Three police commanders -- the position under Defillo, and third in the overall NOPD hierarchy -- have also been the subject of internal investigation. One commander was accused of directing officers to specifically target young Black men for questioning during the city’s Essence Festival, one of the nation’s largest Black tourism events.

Criminal justice activists have demanded more federal investigations and a wider scope. “This represents a real opportunity for New Orleans to raise some fundamental questions about the nature of police and what they do,” says organizer Malcolm Suber. “But unless we talk about the entire system, this will repeat again.”

[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. His new book is 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. This is an expanded version of an article originally published by theLoop21.com. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog, including previous reporting on the Danziger Bridge incident and post-Katrina police violence.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : Murder Trial Begins for Danziger Bridge Cops

Crime scene: New Orleans' Danziger Bridge was the site of police shootings. Photo by Lucas Jackson / Reuters.
New Orleans cops go on trial:
Shot unarmed African-Americans in cold blood

Did New Orleans media contribute to police violence after hurricane Katrina?

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- Opening arguments begin today in what observers have called the most important trial New Orleans has seen in a generation. It is a shocking case of police brutality that has already redefined this city’s relationship to its police department, and radically rewritten the official narrative of what happened in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.

Five police officers are facing charges of shooting unarmed African-Americans in cold blood, killing two and wounding four, and then conspiring to hide evidence. Five officers who participated in the conspiracy have already pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against their fellow officers.

The shootings occurred on September 4, 2005, as two families were fleeing Katrina’s floodwaters, crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge to get to dry land. Officers, who apparently heard a radio report about shootings in the area, drove up, leapt out of their vehicle, and began firing.

Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged man, was shot in the back at least five times, then reportedly stomped and kicked by an officer until he was dead. His brother Lance Madison was arrested on false charges. James Brissette, a high school student, was shot seven times, and died at the scene. Susan Bartholomew, 38, was wounded so badly her arm was shot off of her body. Jose Holmes Jr. was shot several times, then as he lay bleeding an officer stood over him and fired point blank at his stomach. Two other relatives of Bartholomew were also badly wounded.

Danziger is one of at least nine recent incidents involving the NOPD being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, several of which happened in the days after the city was flooded. Officers have recently been convicted by federal prosecutors in two other high-profile trials.

In April, two officers were found guilty in the beating death of Raymond Robair, a handyman from the Treme neighborhood. In December, a jury convicted three officers and acquitted two in killing Henry Glover, a 31-year-old from New Orleans’ West Bank neighborhood, and burning his body.

New Orleans police arrest a man after Sept. 4, 2005, police shootings on the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans. Photo by Alex Brandon / The Times Picayune.

From survivors to looters

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people around the world felt sympathy for New Orleans. They saw images of residents trapped on rooftops by floodwaters, needing rescue by boat and helicopter. But then stories began to come out about looters and gangs among the survivors, and the official response shifted from humanitarian aid to military operation.

Then-Governor Kathleen Blanco sent in National Guard troops, announcing. “They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.” Warren Riley, at that time the second in charge of the police department, reportedly ordered officers to “take the city back and shoot looters.”

In the following days, several civilians -- almost all of them African American -- were killed under suspicious circumstances in incidents involving police and white vigilantes. For years, family members and advocates called for official investigations and were rebuffed.

“Right after the hurricane there were individuals and organizations trying to talk about what happened on Danziger,” says Dana Kaplan, executive director of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), a legal and advocacy organization based in New Orleans. “But their voices were marginalized.”

There is evidence that local media could have done a better job. Alex Brandon, a photographer for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper who later went on to work for Associated Press, testified in the Henry Glover trial that he knew details about the police killings that he didn’t reveal. “He saw things and heard things that proved to be useful in a criminal investigation. He didn't report them as news," wrote Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry after the Glover trial concluded.

Former Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who led an initial investigation of the Danziger officers, 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.”

Family members and advocates tried to get the stories of police violence out through protests, press conferences, and other means. Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, an organization dedicated to justice in reconstruction, held a tribunal in 2006 where they presented accusations of police violence -- among other charges -- to a panel of international judges, including members of parliament from seven countries. Activists even brought charges to the United Nations, filing a shadow report in February 2008 with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva.

But it was not until late 2008 that a journalist named AC Thompson did what the local media failed to do, and investigated these stories in detail. “It’s unfortunate that it took a national publication to really dig to the root,” says Kaplan, referring to Thompson’s work. “In New Orleans the criminal justice system has been so corrupt for so long that things that should be shocking didn’t seem to be raising the kind of broad community outrage that they should have.”

In 2009, after years of pressure from activists and the national attention brought on by AC Thompson’s reporting, the U.S. Justice Department decided to look into the accusations of police violence. This has led to one of the most wide-ranging investigations of a police department in recent U.S. history. Dozens of officers are facing lengthy prison terms, and corruption charges have reached to the very top of the department.

The Danziger trial is expected to last two months. Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Robert Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences if convicted. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, is charged only in the conspiracy and could receive a maximum of 120 years. Justice Department investigations of other incidents are continuing, and it is likely that some form of federal oversight of the department will be announced in coming months.

[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. His new book is 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. This article was originally published by Truthout. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...