How the New Orleans Police Department Experienced Hurricane Katrina: Baum’s Article in “The New Yorker”

The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) “disintegrated with the first drop of floodwater” but “around the city individual police officers acted heroically”, asserts veteran journalist Dan Baum in his well-mannered article “Deluged: When Katrina hit, where were the police?” in the January 9, 2006 issue of “The New Yorker” (pp. 50-63). (1) Baum’s article contains some important information about NOPD sworn officer and staff behaviors in the days before and following Katrina’s landfall.

I have grouped this information under five headings: 1) how some NOPD officers came to drive new Cadillacs; 2) why the NOPD lacked a mobile communications post; 3) how NOPD Police Chief Compass behaved; 4) how the NOPD was involved in moving some Ninth Ward residents to the Convention Center; and 5) how the NOPD and the National Guard interacted. The information presented below is a sampling from Baum’s article, which is worth a read.

1. How some NOPD officers came to drive new Cadillacs on the day before Katrina made landfall.

On Saturday, August 27, 2005, two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin signed a proclamation declaring a state of emergency. “He asked residents to evacuate and, in a clause that led to untold mischief, authorized police to commandeer private property ‘necessary to cope with the local disaster emergency’”, according to Baum. (p. 54)

At 10 a.m. on Sunday, August 28, 2005, an employee of Sewell Cadillac Chevrolet, a large downtown car dealership, called his boss, Doug Stead, who was evacuating to Lafayette, Louisiana, to report “he’d seen NOPD officers driving around Metairie, a suburb west of New Orleans, in new Cadillac Escalades with Sewell license-plate frames on them,” and wanted to know if they had Stead’s permission. Stead had not given permission, according to Baum.

Stead later reported that he lost more than two hundred cars—some to cops, some to looters who followed when the police left the dealership open.” (p. 63) When Baum’s article went to press, Stead still had “not received a call about the cars from either the police or the city attorney.” (p. 63)

2. Why the NOPD lacked a mobile communications post during the first days of Katrina.

At around 2 a.m., Monday, August 29, 2005, as Katrina’s winds raged, police cancelled all patrols because “responding to calls would have been too dangerous.” At daybreak, officers noted that the storm had swamped police headquarters, the crime lab, the evidence room, the armory, the jail, and all the police cars that had been stored in low garages the day before. Radio antennas were destroyed and the NOPD primary radio system failed later that day. Cell phones did not work because “the exchange that handled the 504 area code had perished in the storm.” (p. 55)

A mobile command post housed in an eighteen-wheeler trailer contained radios, generators and emergency supplies for situations exactly like those the police officers were experiencing that morning. However, it was unavailable because “somebody had moved it out of the city for protection from wind and flooding, and no one knew where it was.” (p. 55)

3. How NOPD Police Chief Compass behaved.

Superintendent (Police Chief) Eddie Compass slept the night of the storm (late Sunday night and early Monday morning, August 28th  and 29th ) with his eight-months-pregnant wife and three-year old daughter in the Hyatt Regency Hotel near the Superdome, along with Mayor Nagin and his staff. Compass told Baum that he had “made forays into the city to talk to his officers, but [his officers] didn’t see him at the Harrah’s [Casino] command post during the first three days of the crisis. Aside from one brief encounter with a Times-Picayune reporter on the second day, Compass was also invisible to the press during that period. Many cops believe he left town; Compass insisted to me that he did not,” wrote Baum. (p. 55)

Chief Compass did respond to the “rumor that [he] had fled to Baton Rouge. He said the bad information circulated because his car was seen heading to the Capitol, carrying his eight-months-pregnant wife when she went into distress,” according to a September 4, 2005 Times-Picayune article titled, “I told them that the worst is yet to come” by Michael Perlstein (retrieved from archives on January 6, 2006).

Former New Orleans Police Superintendent Richard Pennington told Baum the following: “When officers don’t see their commanders, they become renegades. I never saw the chief for three days. I was saying, ‘Damn, you watch CNN, where’s the police chief?’ Pennington also noted that when he was the NOPD chief (1994-2002) and low-lying neighborhoods flooded during hurricanes, “he made a point of driving around with the mayor [Marc H. Morial, tenure: 1994-2002] in a National Guard high-water truck, to let his officers see that he was on the job. ‘Troops will wait for instruction and guidance,’ he said.” (p. 57)

Pennington also noted that “he was astonished at the number of officers who disappeared during the storm. ‘I heard them say they might be moving their families out of the city,’ he said. ‘But we had a policy where twenty-four hours before a storm we’d allow all our cops time to get their families out of the city. Then they had to report back to work. When I watched television and heard them say some of these people left and didn’t come back because they’re caught in the water, I said, ‘How did that happen?’” (p. 57)

4. How the NOPD was involved in moving some Ninth Ward residents to the Convention Center

On Tuesday, August 30, 2005, Captain Anthony Cannatella, commander of the NOPD’s Sixth District, moved his officers across the Mississippi River on the Crescent City Connection bridge to the parking lot of a McDonald’s in an unflooded part of the City of Algiers. That night, he was instructed via short-range walkie-talkie by Deputy Chief Warren Riley that “boats were leaving people from the Ninth Ward on Interstate 10, and that he should send patrol cars to take them out of the city.” (p. 55)

Cannatella took seven officers and seven patrol cars back across the bridge to the “Louisa Street exit, where hundreds of wet, terrified people milled about in the heat. A hodgepodge of fishing skiffs, makeshift rafts, and waterskiing boats were approaching with more.” (p. 55)

Deputy Chief Riley then told Cannatella “to ferry people to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, a complex of cavernous exhibition halls that had not previously been thought of as a shelter. The Superdome, which was guarded by hundreds of cops and soldiers and was stocked with food and water, was inaccessible to cars.”

“Cannatella and his officers dropped carloads of traumatized refugees [sic], each clutching a few belongings, at the huge darkened building,” according to Baum. (p. 56) “They had no idea what predators might await them in the center’s stifling heat. The Convention Center is Eighth District police territory, but no police or soldiers were assigned to receive the refugees, and officers visited only intermittently during the five days that the center served as an impromptu shelter.” (p. 56) The Convention Center was empty by Sunday, September 4, 2005.

Cannatella had ordered his cops not to patrol because of low gas supplies. One officer named Sabrina Richardson did anyway, according to Baum, by “taking a short drive onto the interstate, which was elevated above the floodwaters. Masses of desperate people crowded the searing asphalt. As she rolled past, they banged on her windows and begged her to stop. Terrified, she floored the accelerator. She never went back.” (p. 56) [For evacuee’s perspective on this drive by, see SEMP Biot 306: “Three Katrina Evacuee Stories” at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_306.html; accessed January 6, 2006, particularly the testimony of Patricia Thompson.]

5. How the NOPD and the National Guard interacted.

National Guard units first showed up in New Orleans on Saturday and Sunday, September 4th and 5th, according to Baum, with, for the most part, “M-16s—no chain saws or bulldozers, no grappling hooks, generators, or field hospitals. They were not equipped to clear debris, repair power lines, or delivery mass medical care. Like the city’s armed residents, they had prepared for an uprising, and stood on street corners nervously fingering their weapons,” according to Baum.

In addition to the National Guard, “[t]he dry slice of New Orleans filled not only with federal and state troops but with well-meaning deputy sheriffs and policemen from as far away as Oregon and Michigan—cops whose activities were uncoordinated, who knew nothing of the city, and who were pumped on rumors of violence. They tumbled out of their cars in boxy bulletproof vests, pointing their M-4 carbines every which way, as though expecting incoming rounds. Adding to the Dodge City atmosphere were such private soldiers as those of Blackwater, USA, who lurked on the broad steps of several mansions, draped in automatic weapons.” (p. 60) [For more on Blackwater, USA, see http://www.blackwaterusa.com/securityconsulting/.]

Baum said that the phrase on the lips of the “guest enforcers” was “martial law.” “An Oklahoma Guardsman stopped [him] Sunday afternoon [September 4, 2005] and ordered [Baum] to get out of town. When [Baum] told him that the NOPD was allowing reporters to stay, [the Guardsman] said, ‘It’s not up to the police. We’re in charge now. The city’s under martial law. We’re not backing them [the police] anymore—they’re backing us up.’ Later, a California Guardsman whose emblems identified him as Sergeant Kelly pointed an M-4 at me and said, ‘See this? This is martial law. We’re in charge.’” (p. 60)
Baum notes here that the “Constitution makes no provision for anything called ‘martial law,’ though Article I allows for the possibility of calling out militia—even of suspending habeas corpus—in times of unrest. The sole large-scale unrest afflicting New Orleans that weekend was thirst and a hankering to bathe.” (p. 60)
When Baum was finally able to corner Police Chief Compass for an interview of sorts several days later on Thursday, September 8, 2005, he asked him whether what the Oklahoma Guardsman had said about the NOPD being subordinate to the military was true. Compass replied, “I am in charge of all law-enforcement aspects. Does it look like I’m not in charge?” and, after saying this twice more, “walked away.” (p. 61)

On Tuesday, September 6, 2005, “Mayor Nagin…signed a four-page handwritten ‘Promulgation of Emergency Order’ that directed the police, the Fire Department, and ‘any branch of the US military’ to ‘compel the evacuation of all persons from the city of New Orleans regardless of whether such persons are on private property or do not desire to leave’”, according to Baum (p. 60) This was the mandatory evacuation order many people expected on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, August 26, 27, or 28, 2005, but it was coming an incredible 9 days after Katrina’s landfall.

Baum wrote that Nagin’s order “frightened the holdouts” and “each lawman and soldier seemed to interpret it differently.” For example, “two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents told a couple of old men sitting outside drinking beer that they had to leave the city at once. ‘We’re using the ATM method,’ they barked. ‘Today we ask. Tomorrow we tell. The day after that, we make you leave.’ The men nodded politely, and were still sitting there several days later,” according to Baum. (p. 60)

Guardsmen “hauled a black 57-year old social worker named Ernest Timmons from his house and drove him forcibly to the airport, from where, he told the Times-Picayune, he was flown to Salt Lake City.”

When Baum tried to leave the city, “officers out of Springboro, Ohio, police department and soldiers out of the Oklahoma National Guard refused to let [him] pass. As frantic drivers lurched through three-point turns, [Baum] asked the soldier in charge if he’d been told about the mandatory evacuation. ‘Sir, turn your vehicle around,’ he said.”
 
In summary, reporter Dan Baum believes, based on his observations, that the NOPD as an organization “disintegrated with the first drop of floodwater” but that some officers demonstrated pro-social behaviors during the days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. Baum intimates that the root causes of the NOPD’s disintegration include, but are not limited to, a dire leadership void by Superintendent (Police Chief) Eddie Compass and gross judgment errors by Mayor Ray Nagin. As the current chief, Warren J. Riley likes to say, however, that no department anywhere has ever faced “an enemy like Katrina.” (p. 52)