By Michael Perlstein and Trymaine Lee, Staff writers
Copyright 2005 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
As Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans and launched one of the toughest tests ever thrown at a major police department, the first concrete piece of news received by then-Deputy Chief Warren Riley was dire. Jackson Barracks, where the local unit of the Louisiana National Guard stashed nearly its entire fleet of 40 boats and 24 high-water vehicles, was under water.
Suddenly, with winds still whipping at 80 mph, the pre-hurricane game plan to thrust officers and Guard members into joint rescue duty was tossed aside like so much storm-shredded debris.
That was just the beginning of the meltdown.
In those first hours after Katrina carved its deadly path through the region, the cascade of bad news seemed to hit the New Orleans Police Department in rapid waves, Riley said. Officers stranded on rooftops. Water rising inside district stations. More than 300 police cars flooded. Dozens of no-shows among the officers.
The following days, weeks and months would throw one challenge after another at a police agency that hardly needed a catastrophe to expose its fault lines. Before the storm, the Police Department was fighting a losing battle to stem New Orleans’ stubbornly high murder rate. The overall crime picture wasn’t much better, with the city regularly listed in the top 10 of the nation’s most dangerous. Embarrassing internal corruption cases surfaced at a steady pace. The public’s confidence in the force was flagging, with many jurors as likely to believe the court testimony of a street-corner hustler as that of a seasoned detective.
Controversy continued to dog the department throughout the one-two punch of Katrina and Rita, often overshadowing individual acts of police heroism. As officers in their private boats plucked people off rooftops, others were looting stores and car dealerships. Undermanned squads kept relative peace among tens of thousands of evacuees wallowing in subhuman conditions at the Superdome and Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, but scores of other cops walked off the job or disappeared for days at time. One officer was shot in the head and seriously wounded by a looter. Two officers committed suicide.
The missteps were hugely magnified by the swarm of reporters who blew in to chronicle the city’s anguish. One bombshell came four weeks into the crisis, with the surprise departure of former Superintendent Eddie Compass and Riley’s promotion to chief.
“Our image took a tremendous hit,” Riley said. “Whether the severity of that hit was justified, I don’t believe that. But regardless, our reputation has been severely tarnished.”
Riley is seen as having an unprecedented opportunity to reshape a long-troubled organization and, more important, to get a grip on New Orleans’ persistent crime problems. The city’s forced depopulation essentially scrubbed the streets clean of drug dealers, killers and stickup artists -- at least for a while.
Grim situation worsens
Of course, Riley wasn’t thinking of the department’s long-term prospects as desperate calls poured in to the 911 center at police headquarters during the storm. Most calls came from people too poor, old or stuck in their ways to evacuate.
Riley said his thoughts centered on people who were drowning in the inundated Lower 9th Ward and eastern New Orleans. By Monday afternoon, Lake Pontchartrain had engulfed much of the city through a breach in the 17th Street Canal, overwhelming dispatchers, many of whom broke down as callers took their last breaths.
The department learned firsthand about the dimensions of the emergency from a handful of officers stuck in flooded homes. Sgt. Jeff Hochman, less than a mile from the Lakeview breach, offered radio reports of the rising water from his attic. He directed rescuers to more imperiled neighbors until the water got so high that he had to be rescued by a fellow officer, Sgt. Russell Philibert, in his private boat. Hochman and Philibert, in turn, were helped to dry land by narcotics detectives in a larger boat they had commandeered.
Similar rescues of officers were being launched all over the city when, without warning, police communications all but shut down. A small piece of flying debris disabled the department’s radio tower atop the 44-story Entergy Tower, forcing all the area’s law enforcement agencies to use a single “mutual aid” band. The results were cacophonous at best, Riley said.
“It reached a point,” he said, “when everything that could go wrong was going wrong. All we could do was call the district, try to call the captains and see who and what was available. Everybody else was basically on their own.”
With the normal chain of command almost obliterated, police units became virtual militia groups of independent officers, Riley said. Even the top two commanders, Riley and Compass, seemed to be operating in different orbits.
Compass, with an automatic shotgun in one hand and his emotions on his sleeve, commanded a few of troops on the ground, providing the media with a highly impassioned mouthpiece for a beleaguered department.
“I’m still standing, baby. I’m the ultimate warrior,” Compass said in one interview, granted between huddles with city officials, military commanders and visiting dignitaries from Washington and Hollywood.
But during several national television appearances, Compass spoke of epidemic rapes and killings that, though drawn from cops in the field, turned out to be highly exaggerated. In forcing Compass into retirement, Mayor Ray Nagin elevated Riley from second-in-command to acting chief. Two months later, without even considering outside candidates, he made Riley’s title permanent.
People who observed Riley during the storm’s aftermath described him as a steady force who, after leading the evacuation of 300 dispatchers and dozens of officers from police headquarters, spent much of his time calmly deploying missions from the emergency operations center at the Hyatt Hotel.
“I was just focused on leadership, trying to lead,” Riley said. “I had officers tell me, ‘As long as we hear you on the radio, we know we’re going to be all right.’ ”
Officers under investigation
In the first full week after Katrina, before the military arrived with its big guns and other police agencies added to the show of force, the Police Department appeared overmatched. Morale was sinking. As rescues became more urgent and looting reached a fever pitch, desertions by officers swelled into the hundreds. Eventually, 91 officers resigned or retired, and another 228 have been investigated for leaving their posts without permission.
Thirteen officers remain under investigation after being accused of stealing from unprotected businesses. At the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street, news video and photographs show cops making off with merchandise.
In a separate case, the department’s Public Integrity Bureau and state attorney general’s office are investigating as many as 40 officers in the removal of about 200 cars from the Sewell Cadillac Chevrolet dealership in the Central Business District. The highest ranking cop under scrutiny, Capt. Donald Paisant, who commanded the 3rd District, resigned amid the heat of the probe two weeks ago.
The Wal-Mart and Sewell cases have been well-documented, Riley said. But the department also is reviewing police actions that were not as widely reported during that chaotic first week: at least seven separate police shootings in which four people were killed and seven injured, police spokesman Capt. Juan Quinton said. One shooting, by SWAT officers, unfolded on Interstate 10 near the Superdome. Another happened near the Convention Center.
The most controversial shooting took place on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans on Sept. 4. When it was broadcast over the police radio, a cheer erupted among commanders who were huddled miles away at “headquarters,” the valet parking apron at Harrah’s New Orleans Casino. When asked what the celebration was about, one captain answered, “We got six of them. None of our guys hurt.”
Police said 7th District officers came under fire when they responded to a report of “officers down” in an area where contractors had been fired upon earlier. After the smoke cleared, it turned out that no officers were wounded. Killed, however, was an unarmed 40-year-old mentally disabled man, Ronald Madison, shot multiple times in the back, Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard said. Also killed was a 19-year-old man, who has not been identified. Police say the 19-year-old victim was armed, but that has been disputed by several witnesses. Madison’s brother, Lance Madison, 49, has been booked with eight counts of attempted murder. A second suspect, Jose Holmes, Jr., 19, remains under investigation.
“Danziger Bridge is going to take on a life of its own,” said Capt. Bob Bardy, commander of the 7th District. “But that broadcast for help was from another officer who actually witnessed contract workers being shot at. And the broadcasts are public record. . . . When this comes out, I think you’ll see that they are engaged in a gunfight with these people.”
Bardy said the loss of life was distressing, but at no point did he think that his officers did anything wrong. “Two people died, and it’s unfortunate,” Bardy said, “but unfortunate circumstances are part of the job.”
Shooting a mystery
Such cases are normally investigated to ensure officers’ actions were justified, but hardly anything was normal amid the near anarchy that enveloped parts of the city in that first week. Furthermore, the kind of media scrutiny police shootings would normally spur has not kicked in, as family members of victims, witnesses and advocacy attorneys remain scattered by the evacuation.
Even on the West Bank, which was spared the brunt of the city’s flood-induced mayhem, police dealt with danger. Investigators continue to sort through hazy details of one incident, a shooting in the parking lot of the Algiers Wal-Mart just after the hurricane winds died down. As hundreds of people surrounded the Behrman Highway store, about 10 4th District officers tried to hold the perimeter, with pockets of looters already inside. Tension was rising. Threats were being hurled on each side of the human barrier.
A single gunshot silenced the crowd.
One man buckled, then fell. An officer stood close by, his service pistol hot and smoking. Capt. David Kirsch, commander of the 4th District, said the officer fired when a group of looters rushed him. But no body was recovered, no wounded man showed up at nearby hospitals, and police aren’t even sure the man was hit by the officer’s bullet. Riley said the man could have been shot by an armed business owner who threatened to kill anyone who encroached on his property.
An investigation remains open, Riley said, but answers may become yet another casualty of the storm.
First days chaotic
Riley, as chief, now gets to sort out the conduct of his officers during Katrina’s messy and confusing aftermath. He already has issued rulings in about a fourth of the 228 desertion cases, but he admits the process has been difficult.
Because the city remained in crisis for weeks after Katrina, investigators have been forced to cobble together splintered accounts about police activities. Riley had almost no information as they were unfolding. At the time, he had other emergencies to deal with.
“It disturbs me that I don’t know where I slept for the first few days,” he said. “It reached a point when we didn’t know what day it was.”
The day after Katrina made landfall, Riley and his assistant, Capt. Lawrence Weathersby, tried to drive to eastern New Orleans in a 2 ½-ton military truck, but they were turned back at Morrison Road by high water. Along the way, they spotted an officer swimming in the floodwaters to rescue a woman from a rooftop.
Later, Riley was with Weathersby and Sgt. Allison Gervais when they tried to walk into Hollygrove to rescue Officer Troylyn Lyles from her home. Weathersby and Gervais, both over 6 feet tall, had walked only about a block before the water was up to their nostrils.
“This was the ultimate enemy,” Riley said of the flooding. “What do you do when the enemy has cut off your supply routes, your food, your water and puts you in a situation where your rescuers had to be rescued? Nothing prepares you for this.”
Amid the chaos, though, officers -- from commanders to rookies -- showed remarkable resourcefulness, Riley and his commanders said. Cops set up living quarters, supply depots and infirmaries in hotels, schools and nursing homes. They siphoned scarce gas from inoperable pumps, using little more than hoses and a generator. They rigged car batteries for electricity, hot-wired golf carts and improvised boat repairs. The dry 4th District became the department’s lifeline, dispensing goods from the liberated Wal-Mart to supply socks, underwear and food to officers throughout the department.
But if logistics were a bad dream, morale was a nightmare. About 70 percent of the people on the force lost their homes and almost everything in them. In the flooded districts -- the 3rd, 5th and 7th -- officers were left without an office. Many cops lost contact with their families for weeks.
The desertions hit especially hard. Some cops who went AWOL during the storm’s aftermath were shunned by fellow officers when they returned.
“Those who search their hearts and realize they left because they were scared, they might be better off looking for other employment,” said Lt. David Benelli, Police Association of New Orleans president. “I think we were all scared at some point in this, but the fact is, the vast majority of officers stayed. They went into that mucky water to rescue people, chased after looters and kept this city from burning to the ground.”
Perhaps the lowest point for the department came on consecutive days less than a week after Katrina struck. On Friday, 7th District patrolman Lawrence Celestine committed suicide in front of his fellow officers. The next day, Sgt. Paul Accardo, a public information officer, drove out of town and took his life.
“As a police officer, you spend more time with these people than you do with your own family,” said Bardy, Celestine’s commander. “I think for a lot of these young officers, these deaths might have been the first family deaths they’d ever experienced. . . . Most of them had already lost their homes, and then one of their heroes kills himself in front of you. That’s a big deal.”
French Quarter beating
By the time Rita sideswiped the city Sept. 24 and reflooded the Lower 9th Ward, the atmosphere of crisis had evaporated. The city was dark and empty. Alongside thousands of military troops and outside police agencies, New Orleans cops patrolled a ghost town. During work hours, they manned checkpoints, patrolled for looters and enforced the dusk-to-dawn curfew. On their own time, they tried to regroup from personal losses.
It was during that period of relative calm, on Oct. 8, that the department was hit with perhaps its most damaging public relations blow: the videotaped beating of a 64-year-old retired teacher by three officers in the French Quarter. It couldn’t have come at a worse time: The city was packed with reporters from around the world, dramatic stories were becoming scarce since the wrap-up of the rescue phase, and Riley had just been thrust into the top job.
But the acting chief wasted no time making a statement. Within 24 hours, Riley suspended the three officers, a swift decision that opened eyes within the department. He made the call after watching the videotape, which showed officers punching and kneeing Robert Davis, who ended up in a bloody heap on the sidewalk. The officers’ attorney said Davis was drunk and had resisted arrest. Davis denied he was drunk, and Riley said that in any case the rough treatment didn’t “conform to the department’s policy and procedures.”
Benelli said the episode has been blown out of proportion.
“No police department has ever had this much scrutiny,” he said. “We had Super Bowl-type coverage for three straight months: the minute-to-minute, second-to-second scrutiny of every single action of every officer.”
But even as the department was absorbing blows to its image, the cops who held their ground have bonded like never before, many commanders said. In the 1st District, for example, officers tattooed their arms with “Katrina -- Fort Apache,” the nickname they adopted for their precinct. In turn, old-timers in the 6th District swiped the 1st District’s “Fort Apache” rooftop banner, claiming their district had earned the moniker decades ago.
Riley said Katrina was a stiff test, but new leaders emerged from the rubble and old leaders have been re-energized. Troop strength may have been reduced, but those who remain are hurricane-hardened and more cohesive than ever.
“Some outstanding leaders were born as a result of this storm,” Riley said. “And those who just had a job, well, they’ve moved on. Although we’re smaller by 200-some officers, we’re stronger.”
Even with a good chunk of the city’s cops still homeless and sleeping on the cruise ship Ecstasy, Riley wasted little time naming his command staff and reorganizing the department to match the reality of a rebuilding city. He vowed to regain public confidence with tough public integrity and inspections bureaus. He resurrected the concept of a centralized detective bureau after a decade-long absence. He promised a more professional and courteous street presence.
Perhaps the centerpiece of Riley’s reorganization is the new Intelligence Bureau, which will work hand in hand with federal authorities to closely track convicted felons as they return and short-circuit illegal activity before it takes root.
“The fact that we’re not overwhelmed gives us the ability to track all criminals who reoccupy the city. We’ll go to bed with them and wake up with them,” Riley said.
In Benelli’s words, “We get an unabridged do-over.”
Like everybody else wracked by the storm, from homeowners to institutions, the Police Department won’t be immune to periods of depression and hardship during the rebuilding process, Riley and other commanders said. More storm deserters will be fired. More good cops will get fed up and leave for better opportunities.
But Capt. Anthony Cannatella, promoted Friday to chief of the new Administration Support Bureau, said the department will pull through better than before. When asked to elaborate, he pointed to officer Kristi Foret.
Foret, a wiry wisp of a woman who barely tips the scale at 100 pounds, graduated from the police academy only two weeks before Katrina. After evacuating her children, ages 3 and 6, Foret spent two days on the roof of her decimated Lakeview home before being rescued in a private boat. Instead of panicking, instead of rushing to be with her kids, Foret plied the floodwaters in that boat, cutting holes into attics to rescue people, finding a multiple-story bank building to deposit stranded victims, making contact with other officers cruising her drowned neighborhood.
When Foret finally rejoined her training district, the 6th, it had been relocated to the Tchoupitoulas Wal-Mart, now referred to by cops as “Fort Wal-Mart.” She found her way there, Cannatella said, bedraggled but dry. After a round of hugs, he said, Foret snapped to attention and asked, “Who am I riding with, sir?”
“She plunged right back to work like nothing happened,” Cannatella said. “This is the real future of the NOPD. The ones who left and the ones who are leaving, we don’t need their type. The guys who turned tail and ran, they simply don’t deserve to be around the heroes.”
. . . . . . .
Michael Perlstein can be reached at mperlstein@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3316. Trymaine Lee can be reached at tlee@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3301.