New Orleans and race relations

You may have thought that George W Bush’s comments, following publication of his autobiography Decision Points, about being called a racist by Kanye West being the low point of his presidency would be the last we would hear of the New Orleans saga with regards to race. Not so. There is an ongoing trial of five officers into their involvement in the killing of a suspected looter.

In an echo of the Rodney King trial, the five officers have been accused of taking the law into their own hands in response to an outbreak of looting in the aftermath of Katrina.

This is an excellent example of how opinion can be divided, essentially along conservative/liberal lines, on the issue of race and supplements analysis of the issue from a synoptic perspective.

According to the Guardian:

“Federal prosecutors and civil rights lawyers say that Katrina laid bare a culture of corruption, racist violence and a code of silence in the New Orleans police department (NOPD). They describe a force in chaos: while some officers were dedicated to saving lives, others armed themselves with their own automatic weapons and behaved like vigilantes; senior officers spread false assertions that martial law was declared and encouraged the shooting of looters.

At least 10 people died at the hands of the police. Some civil rights lawyers suspect the real figure is much higher. All the victims were African Americans.”

This essentially supports the view of liberal/those on the left that race is a barrier in the US since racism is deeply entrenched in parts of US society. On the other hand:

“The defendants claim that those were exceptional times in which officers feared for their lives and were under orders to bring an end to the anarchy that consumed the city.”

This argument therefore supports the view of those on the right, that the US is not racist of those committing the thefts a high number were black.

We could take this argument further, in order to supplement the argument against the accusation that the police were racist:

“Peter Scharf, a renowned New Orleans criminologist and author of The Badge and the Bullet: Police Use of Deadly Force, is dismissive of the contention that officers felt they were unaccountable because of endemic corruption in the police. He says that the circumstances in which they found themselves were almost unprecedented in modern America: there was a total collapse in the leadership of the police force while officers were confronting anarchy and devastation on the streets.

“These officers are not angels: they’re flawed, they’re rough, they’re crude. I totally believe all that. But there was a horrible failure of multiple layers of leadership, an implosion of responsibilities at all levels. It’s not to defend these actions; it’s to put them into context. If you criminalise individual behaviour for what is essentially a system breakdown, there’s a problem with that,” he said.

“Is this a political trial or a criminal trial? Are they trying to make a point about race relations? Are they trying to create a social objective – clean up the NOPD – through a legal process? That’s my suspicion. Political trials are often bad justice.”“

If you haven’t seen the Kanye West clip, you should be able to watch it on the link below.