Union paramedic: Law enforcement mistreated hurricane victims

Two paramedics from California, including the chief shop steward of a Service Employees local in Oakland, are painting a harrowing picture of mistreatment of New Orleans residents by local sheriffs and other law enforcement officers in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

“The official relief effort was callous, inept and racist,” concluded paramedics Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, both of whom were attending an emergency medical services convention in New Orleans and who were trapped there when the hurricane hit. Bradshaw is chief shop steward of SEIU Local 790 in the Bay Area.

The two admit that after returning home they have not read back newspapers or viewed tapes of television coverage of the week in New Orleans after the hurricane hit and the levees were broken — which was the week they were stranded there.

“But we suspect the media will have been inundated with ‘hero’ images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the ‘victims,'” they wrote in an EMS Network News article, dated Sept. 6 and circulated on the Internet.

“What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: The working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots,” they said.

That working class also included “nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive, doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators, refinery workers who broke into boat yards, ‘stealing’ boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters, and mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city,” the two writers added.

Meanwhile, food service workers “scoured the commercial kitchens” to find bread and food for improvised communal meals, though many of them had lost their homes or not heard from family members because four-fifths of New Orleans was under water.

By contrast, the two said, the attitude of sheriffs’ officers — particularly from New Orleans suburbs — and other law enforcement personnel was callous or worse, in and near shelters such as the city convention center and the Superdome.

In one case, 500 people stranded in French Quarter hotels after the flood from the broken levees pooled their money and produced $25,000 to hire 10 buses to evacuate themselves. They shared food, waited 48 hours, gave priority to the elderly, ill and new-borns, and the buses never came. “We later learned that the minute they arrived to the city limits, they were commandeered by the military,” they wrote.

Evicted from hotels after food and water ran out, the group headed towards the convention center and the Superdome, but the National Guard turned them away due to overcrowding, lack of supplies, deteriorating conditions and no security. “‘If we can’t go to the only two shelters in the city, what was our alternative?’ we asked. The guards told us that that was our problem. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile ‘law enforcement,'” Bradshaw and Slonsky said.

In one incident shortly afterwards, New Orleans police assured the group that evacuation buses were available at the Greater New Orleans Bridge. On their walk to the span, the group picked up additional evacuees. But when the group, by then numbering 200, reached the bridge, they met a hostile reception.

“As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of it. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions,” they wrote.

When several people later questioned the deputies, the response was: “The West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans,” they added.

The Gretna Sheriff himself later broke up an ensuing encampment of 80-90 people on the nearby freeway, by waving a gun in their faces and ordering them off. He then took the group’s food and water, the two wrote. “All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of ‘victims’ they saw ‘mob’ or ‘riot,'” they stated.

That was different from the reception evacuees received from civilians — but not law enforcement or the National Guard — in Texas, Bradshaw said. Before that airlift, they faced final overcrowding and hazards at the New Orleans airport, where relief flights were delayed for President George W. Bush’s “photo-op,” they added.

“This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome,” Bradshaw and Slonsky concluded.

Since writing about their experience, Bradshaw and Slonsky’s account of the encounter has been confirmed in reports on national TV networks and in several newspapers. The sheriff with jurisdiction over the suburb of Gretna told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that it was necessary to bar any evacuees from entering his community to “prevent looting.”

This article was written by Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.