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By George Neumayr
Published 9/2/2005 12:12:28
AM
New Orleans has one of the highest murder
rates in the country. By mid-August of this year,
192 murders had been committed in New Orleans, "nearly
10 times the national average," reported the Associated
Press. Gunfire is so common in New Orleans -- and
criminals so fierce -- that when university researchers
conducted an experiment last year in which they
had cops fire 700 blank rounds in a neighborhood
on a random afternoon "no one called to report the
gunfire," reported AP.
New Orleans was ripe
for collapse. Its dangerous geography, combined
with a dangerous culture, made it susceptible to
an unfolding catastrophe. Currents of chaos and
lawlessness were running through the city long before
this week, and they were bound to come to the surface
under the pressure of natural disaster and explode
in a scene of looting and mayhem.
Like riotous
Los Angeles since the 1960s, New Orleans has been
a wasteland of politically correct dysfunction for
decades -- public schools so obviously decimated
vouchers were proposed this year (and torpedoed
by the left), barbaric gangster rap culture no one
will confront lest they offend liberal pieties,
multiculturalist frauds who empower no one but themselves,
and cops neutered by the NAACP and ACLU.
Criminals have ruled New Orleans for some time,
convincing many members of the middle class, long
before the hurricane, that the city was unlivable.
In 1994, New Orleans was the murder capital of America.
It had 421 murders that year. Criminologists predicted
300 murders this year, a projection that now looks
quite conservative.
Criminals dominate their
neighborhoods to the point that people don't even
call in crimes. The district attorney's office,
tacitly admitting that the city's law-abiding citizens
live in fear, has taken the "unusual" step of establishing
a local witness protection program to encourage
the reporting of crime, reports AP.
According
to the New Orleans Police Foundation, most murderers
get off -- only 1 in 4 are convicted -- and 42 percent
of cases involving serious crimes since 2002 have
been dropped by prosecutors.
Meanwhile, cops,
when they can get away with it, have been living
out of town. It is far too scary for them and their
families. New Orleans Police officers are required
to live in the city but many ignore this residency
requirement, according to the Times-Picayune. The
paper discovered that many top-ranking New Orleans
cops lived in the suburbs and that most cops, both
black and white, wanted the residency requirement
rescinded.
For reasons of political correctness
-- critics of law enforcement say lifting the residency
requirement will mean more white cops eager to brutalize
residents of the inner city and fewer black cops
understanding of them -- the residency requirement
remains, though cops breaking the rule told the
Times-Picayune that it seriously hurts recruitment.
It also -- this is particularly evident in Los Angeles
where cops involved in the Ramparts scandal turned
out to be ex-criminals -- distorts recruitment.
If the New Orleans Police Department has
appeared feeble during the chaos -- and in some
cases complicit in it -- policies like the residency
requirement explain the breakdown. (Perhaps another
factor that has rendered the NOPD feckless in the
face of a rising murder rate is the criticism of
its handling of a minority Mardi Gras.) Americans
who have seen cops join in the looting ask: Why
are police officers behaving like criminals? Well,
because PC police departments like the NOPD hire
them. Aggressive, let's-just-meet-the-quota-style
affirmative action has become the door through which
criminals enter the police academy.
More
than the physical foundations of New Orleans will
need to be rebuilt over the next few years. Its
politically correct culture in which pathologies
are allowed to fester in the name of "progress"
forms much of the debris that must be cleared away
if civilization is to return to New Orleans. A city
which boasts as one of its businesses memorial "death
t-shirts" -- clothing made popular by the frequency
of gangland slayings in New Orleans that say things
like, "Born a Pimp, Died a Playa" -- was headed
for collapse even without a hurricane, and had become,
as the exodus of cops illustrates, unlivable.
Conservative black leaders have been mau-maued
into silence whenever they tell the truth about
this barbarism and call for dramatic reform. But
they are the ones who must lead the city now, and
the phonies at organizations like the NAACP who
despite all their rhetoric haven't done a thing
to help the black underclass should step aside.
Hurricane Katrina has made vivid the civilizational
collapse they have long tried to conceal.
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