Police Trapped Thousands in New Orleans

As the situation grew steadily worse in New Orleans last week, you
might have wondered why people didn’t just leave on foot. The Louisiana
Superdome is less than two miles from a bridge that leads over the Mississippi River out of the city.

The answer: Any crowd that tried to do so was met by suburban
police, some of whom fired guns to disperse the group and seized their water.

Around 500 people stuck in downtown New Orleans after the storm
banded together for self-preservation, making sure the oldest and
youngest among them were taken care of before looking after their own needs.

Two San Francisco paramedics who were staying in the French Quarter for a convention have written a first-hand account that describes their appalling treatment at the hands of Louisiana police, a story confirmed today by the San Francisco Chronicle, UPI, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

When buses charted by the group to escape New Orleans never
showed up, they camped out beside a police command center on Canal
Street, believing it was the best place to get aid, protection, and
information. They were told they could not stay there and should leave
the city on foot over Highway 90, which crosses the Mississippi River from New Orleans to the suburb of Gretna, a city of 17,500 people.

Running out of food and water, they walked to the bridge,
growing in number to around 800 people as word spread of a safe way
out:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the
foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing
their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various
directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and
managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our
conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The
sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to
get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there
was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was
not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their
City.

In an interview with UPI, Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson
confirmed that his department shut down the bridge to pedestrians: "If
we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans
does now: looted, burned and pillaged."

The increasingly desperate group set up camp on the New Orleans
side of the bridge, where they were seen by several media outlets,
until they were chased off at gunpoint by Gretna police:

Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge
in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding
from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from
the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill
policies.

The paramedics believe that race played a factor in the decision to
block evacuees on foot. Gretna’s population is 56 percent white and 36
percent black, according to the 2000 U.S. Census

http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/2748