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The Times-Picayune - NOLA.com
03 October 2009

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New Orleans Police Department,

Actions of New Orleans cops in

When state officials in 2006 booked Dr. Anna Pou with murder, saying she euthanized some of the sickest patients in an overwhelmed, flooded hospital where 34 patients died, Louisianans mostly rallied to Pou's cause.

A grand jury rejected charges and Attorney General Charles Foti, who had ordered the doctor arrested, was bounced out of office.

When Salvador and Mabel Mangano were tried in the drownings of 35 people at their St. Bernard Parish nursing home it took a jury only four hours to acquit them.

So how will New Orleanians react to the intensive federal investigation into the actions of some New Orleans police officers after the storm?

Grand jurors have been meeting for months in the federal building on Poydras Street, asking questions and seeking answers about what happened in the dark days after the storm.

Among the mysteries they're trying to unravel: Did New Orleans police officers fatally shoot 31-year-old Henry Glover? Did other officers incinerate a car with his body inside and leave it on an Algiers levee? If so, why? And what, exactly, happened on the Danziger Bridge, where two men were killed by police?

The facts, when they come out, are likely to be weighed -- at least by New Orleanians -- against the end-of-days world in which the alleged misdeeds took place.

At the heart of the matter are deceptively simple questions: Should the choices people make during a catastrophe be held to a different standard than those they make under more ideal circumstances? And if so, how drastically should the rules be bent?

It's a question that will forever be debated on barstools, in philosophy papers and in courtrooms.

The law is fairly clear, however.

"As a legal matter, the law doesn't change when the sky opens up and disaster takes place, " said Dane Ciolino, a professor at Loyola Law School.

Shades of gray

Still, the judicial system has its shades of gray. Prosecutors have extensive leeway in making charging decisions, Ciolino noted. And jurors undoubtedly take into consideration the extenuating factors of a crime when they come to their verdict, he said.

A handful of legal experts, criminal justice observers, ethicists and police leaders contacted by The Times-Picayune offered a range of views on the philosophical debate that swirls around the city's Katrina cases. All agreed that the law is set in stone, but there is a broad range of views on how it should be applied.

"It's like going to a horse track to bet on horses, " said former U.S. Attorney Harry Rosenberg. "Everyone is going to have a different opinion. Some will say the law applies as it did on Aug. 28. Some will say it's all about the circumstances."

Law is what makes civilization work, said Mary Howell, a longtime local civil rights attorney.

"But then you look at all these breakdowns that happened, " she said. "If you killed somebody in the storm, is it any more justifiable because of the storm? I don't think so. The standards don't change, but the application can."

Rosenberg, the former U.S. attorney, noted that the hurricane's impact clearly played a role in the jury's decision in the St. Rita's case.

Inside their Poydras nursing home, Sal and Mabel Mangano waffled, made grave missteps, then got caught in a maelstrom. Thirty-five of their weakest patients drowned in beds and wheelchairs. Despite the grimness of the case, a jury acquitted the Manganos of negligent homicide after just four hours of deliberation.

"I don't see how a jury can divorce themselves from what occurred, " Rosenberg said.

The death of Henry Glover

On Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, the fourth day after Katrina's landfall, someone -- possibly a police officer -- fired a gun at Henry Glover, 31, as he stood behind a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Algiers.

It was late in the morning, shortly before noon, when Glover, a native New Orleanian with a minor rap sheet, was wounded.

William Tanner said he was nearby, talking to a woman about where he might find gas, when out of the corner of his eye he saw a man fall to the ground. Someone yelled, "Henry Glover got shot, " he recalled.

Tanner immediately decided that driving to West Jefferson Hospital with Glover several miles away wasn't a good idea. Instead, he put Glover in the back seat, and along with two other men, drove to Paul B. Habans Elementary School on the other side of Gen. de Gaulle Drive, where the NOPD's SWAT unit had set up shop.

There, Tanner alleges, police handcuffed the three uninjured men, interrogated them and failed to assist Glover, who lay wounded in Tanner's car. Tanner said police thought the men were looters, and beat them, kicking and hitting them with the butt of a gun.

Police took his car keys, Tanner said. An officer in a tactical uniform, with emergency flares sticking out of his pocket, drove off in Tanner's Chevy Malibu -- with Glover's body still inside, Tanner said.

Tanner, who was eventually evacuated from the city, didn't see his car for weeks, when a federal agent told him that its burned remains were on the Algiers levee near the 4th District police station. Glover's remains, mostly charred bone fragments, were inside; they fit into five biohazard bags that had been sent to the coroner's office.

Metal fragments of an "unknown nature" were present in the remains, Glover's autopsy report said, without any suggestion that they might have been from a bullet. Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard did not rule the case a homicide.

There was no immediate investigation into Glover's death. The FBI picked up the case early this year -- more than three years after the storm -- after a storm of media attention.

Two die on Danziger Bridge

In addition to the Glover case, a federal grand jury has been meeting regularly to hear the facts of the Danziger Bridge incident, in which NOPD officers, responding to reports of shots fired at police, shot six people on the bridge, killing two men and wounding four others, on Sept. 4, 2005.

While the shooting victims have said they were unarmed and were ambushed by police, the officers have maintained they fired only after first coming under fire.

The seven officers were indicted by a state grand jury in late 2006 on murder and attempted murder charges, but a Criminal District Court judge last year dismissed the charges, saying that prosecutor errors had tainted the case. The Department of Justice picked up the case shortly afterward.

Ever since the NOPD regrouped in the wake of the storm, police service in the disaster has become a badge of fierce pride. Billboards went up after the storm with a clear message, set in bold letters: "We Stayed."

"There is a definite distinction between individuals who were here during that time and not, " explains Capt. Michael Glasser, president of the Police Association of New Orleans. "People who were not here, who had no stake in this, do not have the privilege of criticism."

Those who do not have that privilege, in Glasser's view, would include the Department of Justice, which is running the extensive investigations into the NOPD's post-storm actions.

After the storm, officers who deserted the department were fired. The overwhelming majority stayed, and nearly all of them were kept on the force. Though some officers committed theft or commandeered unnecessary supplies, such as Cadillacs, during the disaster, those sins generally went unpunished. The crucial fact, among many top officers, was that they had stayed.

Considering context

Glasser argues that context is everything. He notes the chaos of the post-Katrina environment: police communications were down, supplies scarce, a cogent gameplan non-existent. Across the city, unsubstantiated reports of rapes, mass murders, unchecked gang violence and looting had struck fear in the minds of those left behind. City leaders, including Mayor Ray Nagin and then-Police Superintendent Eddie Compass, perpetuated some of the worst rumors.

Some officers had spread the word that martial law had been declared, though no such order exists in this country, and no kind of no-holds-barred mandate had been issued.

"In some cases, there was a loss of boundaries as to what was acceptable and what wasn't. With fatigue, pressure, not knowing what was going on, some people lost a sense of boundaries and did things that in retrospect were not prudent, " Glasser said. "In a lot of cases, it was not clear judgment. But again, people all over did that. People did things they normally wouldn't do. Some were heroic; some were selfish. That's what the pressure of circumstance will do to you."

In such situations, officers are supposed to rely on common sense and training, said Neal Trautman, director of the National Institute of Ethics, a top police ethics training group.

"There are many instances where you have to bend the law in a crisis, " he said. Many policing guidelines, after all, rely on officer discretion.

In trying times, officers should ask themselves, "Would I be doing this if my family was standing right behind me?" Trautman said.

More importantly, perhaps, Trautman said, officers should ask themselves: Is what I'm doing a crime?

Closing ranks

Why the allegations of police misconduct have sparked so little public debate in New Orleans remains unclear.

Peter Moskos, an author and professor who previously worked as a Baltimore police officer, said police, like many groups, tend to close ranks. They don't do itto protect bad officers, he said, but to protect the good ones.

"Every cop lives in a glass house, " said Moskos, of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

"And they don't want anyone to throw stones."

The delay is not necessarily startling. Many communities struck by trauma are slow to deal with it directly, preferring instead to let the scar tissue form.

After Katrina, New Orleanians straggled back home from all over America to find ruined houses and shattered neighborhoods. Mostly, they focused their energy on rebuilding. Few people were eager to revisit Katrina. The NOPD, meanwhile, sought to increase its ranks and maintain some semblance of order.

"We were eager to put everything behind us, " Glasser said.

Howell, the civil rights attorney, said the city never came to terms with what happened, with the repercussions of the choices made by those who stayed. A civil society can't ignore them, she said.

"There are limits. You can't just wrap yourself in the shroud of Katrina and say anything goes, " she said. "As a community we never really dealt with what happened."

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Article sourced from

The Times-Picayune - NOLA.com03 October 2009

Actions of New Orleans cops in

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The Times-Picayune - NOLA.com
03 October 2009