New Orlean violence overblown...maybe.

www.breitbart.com...

On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."

Five days later, he told Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped. On the same show, Mayor Ray Nagin warned: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

The ugliest reports _ children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement _ soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.

The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations, including The Associated Press, carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements, and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.

But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.

They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are believed to have been murdered.

One of those victims _ found at the Superdome _ appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.

well it seems the media made it more dramatic than it really is. i mean no pictures of rapes. Or piles of bodies in the convention for example. people just making up stories to get on the media to be a star for like a minute or to see their name on newspapers, etc. but this is example of bad media in America. they report instead of cheking the info to make sure its true. its more like the news media just want to report this types of news to get ratings. sure it was bad and was like Hell in New Orleans but its no excuse to make up such stories and to immediately report before confirming its true.

This goes to show you, the media is just there to make a buck not to report factually. www.nola.com, the local paper in NOLA stay on report and avoided most of the hyping. I think even the mayor feel victum to the hype and repeated what he heard from CNN and Fox without checking facts. Now everyone thinks people in NOLA are bad people. Yes, the city has had a track record of crimes and corruption but it's only a small percentage of the 480,000 people living there. One thing that made it bad was that it is a port city with a lot of drugs with dealer using the city for cover. In the end it will be found that majority of the people were good citizens that were policing themseleves through all this.
A loco-local furniture dealer in my town is blaming God for all this.

Living just outside of new orleans and having nver left my house seince katrina hit.

Yes it was blown out of porption.

and my gosh..... n/m
the meida is perty wrong for it.

I could have sworn that there were a number of bizarre slashing deaths at the convention center...thought I even saw a thread on it here...I'll have a look around.

only 4 deaths at the convention center.

3 natural and 1 gun shot

while the media picking up on these stories and blowing them even more out of proportion is shocking, nobody seems to be bothered by the fact that there was even one murder in either place. The fact that someone was shot, or had their throat slit at an evacuation center is horrific. I understand that the police didn't stay after something like 7 pm but still, you have been evacuated. Your homes are flooded, your city is in complete ruins, there's gotta be something in your mind that tells you murdering another victim is not going to make things better.

I found an interesting and related article today from the New York Times:

Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality in New Orleans

For those who don't read the whole article, here are a few key quotes (in my opinion) from it:

In an interview last week with The New York Times, Superintendent Compass said that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue. Asked about reports of rapes and murders, he said: "We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault."
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What became clear is that the rumor of crime, as much as the reality of the public disorder, often played a powerful role in the emergency response. A team of paramedics was barred from entering Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for nearly 10 hours based on a state trooper's report that a mob of armed, marauding people had commandeered boats. It turned out to be two men escaping from their flooded streets, said Farol Champlin, a paramedic with the Acadian Ambulance Company.

On another occasion, the company's ambulances were locked down after word came that a firehouse in Covington had been looted by armed robbers of all its water - a report that proved totally untrue, said Aaron Labatt, another paramedic.

A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes, said Maj. Gen. Ron Mason of the 35th Infantry Division of the Kansas National Guard.
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For military officials, who flew rescue missions around the city, the reports that people were shooting at helicopters turned out to be mistaken. "We investigated one incident and it turned out to have been shooting on the ground, not at the helicopter," said Maj. Mike Young of the Air Force.

There's much more in the article and it's well worth reading.

Jaryn

Note: I would post this to ATSNN, but I'm obviously an incompetent writer as I don't get approved for publishing. Anyone that can convert this into an acceptable ATSNN article is not only welcome to it, but encouraged to do so.

I love that last line by the air force major - "a shooting on the ground, not at the helicopter"

the helicopter crew heard it otherwise it wouldn't have been reported. I'm guessing here but isn't it possible that some of the shootings rescue workers reported hearing was actually people in their homes shooting to be found? stuck in attic, hear the boat or helipcoter and start firing to alert them to your presence?

now, given the mass hysteria they managed to self produce (along with some actual incidents of violence) and the rescue workers don't stick around to investigate.

I remember seeing a thing on CNN at some point where someone was shooting at the police station and the reporter on the roof caught the whole thing on tape so it isn't all hearsay and rumor.

Who knows what really went on down there? the police commissioner resigns (is forced out) and there are investigations into police corruption (in New Orleans? really?) and there are tribunals to be held for the officers who didn't show up for work.

the place was always a bit chaotic. Now that the city is under the national microscope, they need to show some semblance of trying to control their own city.

it won't ever happen