The
federal trial of seven New Orleans police officers began on June 27
and continues as we go to press with this article. The accused
officers were involved in the Danziger Bridge massacre, where police
opened fire on six unarmed African American survivors of Hurricane
Katrina,
killing
two and maiming the other four.
The
original charges against the police for the racist shooting and
subsequent cover-up were dismissed in August 2008
,
after
District
Judge Raymond Bigelow accused the prosecution of misconduct with the
grand jury.
The
two
victims killed by the cops were Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old
mentally disabled man, and James Brissette, 17. Madison died when he
was shot in the back and then stomped repeatedly by
NOPD
officer Robert Faulcon.
Brissette died from shots at the hands of three
officers:
Robert Gisevius, Kenneth Bowen and Anthony Villavaso. Five of the
officers on trial are white.
Danziger
Bridge:The
horror of police terrorism
Former
officer Michael Hunter, who has already pleaded guilty, stated
that
the officers received a radio call claiming that officers were und
er
fire and injured in a gun battle on the bridge. After commandeering a
Budget rental truck, Hunter and the other officers drove to the
bridge, where they found people whose only crime was walking down the
street about a week after fleeing their flooded homes. The police
opened fire using assault rifles, pistols and a shotgun.
Susan
Bartholomew
lost
her arm in the shooting and had to be sworn in with her left hand.
She testified that an officer found her hiding behind a barricade,
clinging to another shooting victim. Both women were crying. An
officer then leaned over the barricade and opened fire on them with
an assault rifle in a sweeping motion.
After
Susan Bartholomew was shot,
the
police demanded she raise her hands. “I couldn’t do it, because
my arm was shot off. I raised the only hand I had,” she said
softly.
The
youngest victim was her 14-year-old son, Leonard Bartholomew IV, who
was shot
before
being kicked and arrested by former officer Kevin Bryan Sr. He was
then dropped off at a makeshift police station without money or shoes
while his parents were hospitalized. He spent a week and a half
living with a sympathetic stranger who blogged about Leonard’s
situation until he was reunited with an uncle who had seen the
woman’s blog posts.
The
civilians on the bridge that day were unarmed. At no point did they
engage in any behavior that would indicate they were hostile to the
officers or that they possessed a weapon.
Jackie
Madison Brown, the sister of Ronald Madison, took the witness stand
on July 7. “My brother Rommel called and told me Ronald had been
killed,” Brown emotionally recalled
under
questioning
.
Ronald
Madison was shot in the back by a hail of gunfire. His disability
prevented him from forming full sentences and he had the mental
capacity of a 7-year-old.
His family had always been protective of him.
Brown’s
testimony came after that of former NOPD crime scene technician Tracy
Haas. Haas testified that the department waited seven weeks to send a
crime scene tech to the Danziger Bridge.
Haas
collected 30 spent shell casings in the grassy area next to the
Danziger Bridge. She testified that she was not even told a homicide
had taken place; however, Sgt. Gerard Dugue did take time to point
out a spot in the grass where he said a gun had
lain
after the shooting. Despite no evidence that any of the victims had
guns, Haas took a picture of the spot and labeled it “possible gun
location.”
After
photographing the area, Haas made her way to the top of the bridge
and started to head towards the Friendly Inn Motel,
where Ronald Madison was shot and killed. But Haas told the jury that
she was stopped by officers: “They told me they had an incident in
that area but no evidence was found.”
A
racist system through and through
The
world looked on with horror at the racist government response in the
aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina that killed 1,836 people—most
of whom perished in the floods after the hurricane hit New Orleans on
August 29.
The
Danziger Bridge
massacre
took place a week after the hurricane while many survivors were still
trapped in New Orleans, which was 80 percent underwater.
Only
a system that functions on the most violent and repulsive racism
could produce such an event where people struggling to survive in the
aftermath of a natural disaster are shot down in the street.
But
the masses in Louisiana know all too well that Danziger is part of a
system where terrorism against African American people is
commonplace, from lynchings after the Reconstruction period to naming
the largest prison in the United States, Angola Prison, built on the
site of a slave plantation, after the place where the slaves were
taken from in Africa.
Five defendants
have pleaded guilty to charges of hindering a federal investigation
into the shooting by conspiring to cover up facts, lying to federal
officials and lying about the actual felony itself, which was an
attack on unarmed civilians in which the officers neither identified
themselves nor assessed whether the civilians posed a threat.
The
defense argues that Katrina
was
a mitigating factor in the shooting, and that officers were
responding to a radio call stating that officers had been fired on at
the bridge and were injured, prompting the seven involved to speed to
the scene.
One
tactic the defense is using is to show the involvement of many others
in the NOPD, such as the
officer
who rewrote Faulcon’s statements. What is not being said, of
course, is that the police responded in this racist, violent manner
simply because this is the role of the police under capitalism.
As
V.I. Lenin explains in State
and Revolution,”
the role of the police or the special bodies of armed men is to
maintain the social order in the face of class antagonisms.
However,
officers conspired to cover up the shooting—which began as soon as
they drove to the bridge, and before engaging any of the people
present—by claiming
that guns were found at the scene but were “kicked off the
bridge,” according to Hunter, who drove the Budget rental truck
to the scene.
A
first step for justice would be not only to jail the killer cops
involved in the
Danziger Bridge shootings, but indict all those who organized the
racist terror against the African American survivors in New Orleans
in the aftermath of Katrina. A united, multi-national people’s
movement is needed to assure that outcome.
