NEW ORLEANS — A scathing examination of this city’s Police Department has concluded that five detectives tasked with investigating sex crimes failed to pursue hundreds of reported cases, finding records of follow-up efforts in only 14 percent of such calls over three years.
The report, released on Wednesday and prepared by the city’s inspector general, Edouard R. Quatrevaux, found that of 1,290 sex crime “calls for service” assigned to five New Orleans police detectives from 2011 to 2013, 840 were designated as “miscellaneous,” and nothing at all was done. Of the 450 calls that led to the creation of an initial investigative report, no further documentation was found for 271 of them.
“It was a persistent, systemic problem,” said Howard Schwartz, the inspector general’s lead investigator. “It was a problem of lack of supervision and management that this could go on for three years and no management or supervision at N.O.P.D. recognized it.”
It was the Perfect Storm.
No, not Hurricane Katrina. That could have been much worse. Back in the 1990s, my friend Rob Brennan wrote an unpublished novel called Category 5 about a ferocious hurricane that strikes New Orleans at the worst possible angle. Katrina, in contrast, was a Category 4 hurricane and hit New Orleans only a glancing blow.
No, the perfect storm was actually the combination of social and governmental incompetence at local, state, and federal levels—and unmentionable racial reality.
Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision for crooked Democratic urban machines. But the White House is now occupied by George W. Bush, a politician so irresponsible, so uninterested in proficiency and honesty among his minions that late last year he tried to appoint as Secretary of Homeland Security the egregious Bernie Kerik.
Mr. Bush shows no evidence of holding his appointees accountable, so long as they remain loyal to him personally. Just as he has never vetoed a bill, he almost never fires anyone for poor performance.
VDARE.com readers are familiar with the contempt with which Mr. Bush treats his sworn duties to uphold the laws against illegal immigration. Now the whole country is starting to catch on to his disregard for his duties in his pursuit of image over effectiveness.
His invade-the-world-invite-the-world policies have left America unprepared for predictable domestic troubles, as Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out here.
The ineptitude displayed by the Louisiana state government is also unsurprising. The state is unique in having a Latin political tradition (it uses the Code Napoleon rather than the English common law, even though Napoleon didn`t release his code until the year after he sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson), a culture in which the Argentinean demagogue
Juan Peron would have felt at home.
The unofficial state motto is "Laissez les bons temps rouler" or "Let the good times roll." Compare that to New Hampshire`s official motto of "Live free or die," which display a rather different understanding of freedom. Louisiana`s reigning philosophy is freedom from responsibility.
It`s a general rule that the tastier the indigenous cuisine, the lousier the government. Its culture has provided America with jazz, A Street Car Named Desire, and the great American comic novel of the 20th Century,
A Confederacy of Dunces. New Orleans is a nice place to visit. But you wouldn`t want to raise your kids there.
All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won`t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is anespecially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.
New Orleans itself is two-thirds black. It has had nothing but black mayors since 1978. All four of them are from the light-skinned "creole of color" elite, including the notorious
Marc H. Morial, now head of the National Urban League. The city government is corrupt and lackadaisical. While the police department has perhaps rebounded from the depths it reached a decade ago when an officer was condemned to death for having a mother of three rubbed out by drug gangstas in his employ, nobody should be surprised that last week numerous officers ran away, and some even freelanced as looters.
In a racially diverse democracy like New Orleans, voting for good government takes a backseat to voting for your tribe`s representatives in the eternal ethnic tussle over slices of the pie. As the ultra-competent but not terribly democratic founder of the state of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, noted in a recent interview:
"In multiracial societies, you don`t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion."
For instance, after blacks took control of New Orleans, they required new police recruits to live in the city itself as a way to exclude white cops. Dean M. Shapiro writes for Court TV`s "Crime Library":
"The department was being depleted of experienced officers and the numbers within the ranks were decreasing as crime stats were rising at an alarming rate… In order to beef up the rapidly dwindling numbers of NOPD, the department was forced to lower its acceptance standards. Recruits with criminal records, DWIs, unfavorable employment records and dishonorable discharges from the Armed Forces were allowed to enter the Police Academy, whereas they had previously been excluded… Their records were expunged and, on completion of their training, they were issued badges, guns and patrol cars and turned loose on the street… These new officers were expected to suddenly straighten up and begin enforcing the laws they had not-so-long-ago been breaking. They were expected to arrest those suspected of crimes, even if those accused had once been their street buddies. But this was an unrealistic expectation."
