What You Think You Know Is Wrong
Everyone knows that in the days following Hurricane Katrina, the City of New Orleans fell into anarchy with widespread violence, murder in the streets and even multiple rapes (including those of children) at the Superdome and Convention Center right? Wrong. In the confusion and hysteria that followed the collapse of the levies there imaginations ran wild, rumors were widespread and an international media eager to serve up the worst unconfirmed stories propagated these myths to the point where they are now taken as gospel. In the days and weeks that followed, what emerged was a clearer picture of the situation and that nearly all New Orleanians increased their pro-social behavior and decreased their criminal behavior. The truth notwithstanding, the incorrect belief that the criminals ran wild following the flooding caused law enforcement to broadly and illegally curtail civil liberties.
The sensationalistic and false Katrina stories are part of a broader phenomenon sociologists and other scholars refer to “Disaster Mythology.” In short, the Disaster Mythology is that following a disaster the streets become a post-apocalypse landscape of zombie-like marauders raping and pillaging. Instead, the empirical research of disasters including studies of what actually happened in the after-math of Katrina itself shows just the opposite, that generally speaking there is an overall increase in pro-social behaviors and a decrease in anti-social ones. However, it is the perception and expectation of these terrible outcomes which leads law enforcement, government and even ordinary citizens to act in ways that are counter-productive to the common good as well as damaging to everyone’s civil liberties during emergency situations.
For an excellent review of this scholarship, we can recommend a fascinating article recently published in The Cornell Law Review by law school Professor Lisa Grow Sun called Disaster Mythology and The Law. Her research reveals not only what actually happens following disasters, but has led her to call for structural changes to disaster management, the most important of which are to focus on humanitarian responses (as opposed to military ones) and to remove FEMA from the DHS.
What Professor Sun discovered after exhaustive research about what really happened in New Orleans was that nearly all of the reports of crime immediately following the levies collapsing were simply wrong. As she wrote in her article:
In late September 2005, Police Superintendent Compass admitted to the New York Times that some of the most shocking statements he made turned out to be untrue. Compass explained, “We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault.” Lieutenant David Benelli, who headed the New Orleans Police Department’s sex crimes unit, reported that he and his officers investigated every rumor of rape or atrocity and only made two arrests for attempted sexual assault, concluding that no other attacks occurred. Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan reported, as of September 26, 2005, that officials had confirmed only four murders in post-Katrina New Orleans, rather than the forty or fifty murders that reports led him to expect. Four murders in a week may be a typical number for a city that, absent disaster, expected over two hundred homicides in 2005.
In other words, while there was some violence in the city, the numbers were actually lower than what would be typical without the disaster. And, as set out below, much of that crime was committed by a few law enforcement officers and vigilantes. Moreover, while there was some looting as well, it was not nearly as widespread as first reported and even those reports make no distinction between citizens taking what was needed to survive from the hordes of looters stealing luxuries. (We will leave it to another article to examine the ethics of citizens taking what is necessary to survive in an emergency vs. opportunists stealing sneakers and flat screen TV’s.)
The True Dangers of The Disaster Mythology
So, while a few of the reports of violence or property crimes were true, the vast majority were not. What does this mean for those who live in urban areas, preppers, law enforcement, civil libertarians and those in disaster management? There are two main problems with citizens and government both subscribing to the disaster mythology— misallocation of resources and further erosion of civil liberties. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, we have quite a bit of empirical evidence to show that these two problems caused real damage to real people.
The Case of Zeitoun
For those interested in what an American-style police state looks like, and what indefinite detention of an American citizen permits, you need go no further than read Dave Eggers’ 2009 best seller, Zeitoun based upon the true story of Mr. Abdulrahman Zeitoun a Syrian-American with a family, investment properties and a construction and house painting business in New Orleans.
Immediately following Katrina and the levy breaches, New Orleans became militarized by FEMA who deployed armed National Guardsmen in order to keep order. In addition, members of the 82 Airborne were deployed, and perhaps most distressing (and confounding) “troops” from Blackwater which was paid approximately $73 million to “protect FEMA workers” were also deployed. This militarization was caused by the twin biases caused by the War on Terror as well as Disaster Mythology. Mr. Zeitoun was arrested by National Guardsmen fresh from rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan and thrown in jail. He was not tried or convicted, was not even charged with a crime, was not given his Miranda rights, was not given access to a lawyer or even a phone call, was physically and mentally abused, pepper-sprayed, strip searched and labeled a terrorist. When he was arrested his building was not secured by those who arrested him and it was later looted and further damaged. He was innocently and wrongfully disappeared into the industrial-prison system for months.
At first he was kept at a temporary prison built at the request of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. The prison is at the Greyhound Bus/Amtrak Station down the street from the Superdome. Similar to Guantanamo Bay, the guards came to call it Camp Greyhound, it was little more than a dog kennel. Again, this is not a work of fiction, but the true-life account of what really happened to a fellow citizen. You owe it to yourself to read the entire book.
And, while apologists of the status quo can write off what happened to him (and the many other innocent citizens illegally arrested and detained without due process) as an aberration during a chaotic national emergency, what is so shocking is the revelation that within days of the water flooding into the city, the authorities were able to construct Camp Greyhound while people were dying in their attics and their beds at abandoned nursing homes. Mr. Zeitoun, while not a perfect human being, was not a criminal and did nothing wrong. But, what happened to him is directly attributable to what FEMA, the National Guard and NOPD believed about what was happening to the City of New Orleans. In short, they subscribed to the Disaster Mythology, and they based their actions on that erroneous belief. His story is should serve as a warning of the wrongful outcomes caused by those beliefs: short-circuited civil liberties and misapplied resources.
The Post-Katrina Gun Confiscation
The Disaster Mythology had other bad outcomes for many other citizens of New Orleans. For example, it caused the Mayor to direct the New Orleans Police Department and National Guardsmen to confiscate the lawfully owned weapons of citizens. Over 1200 lawfully owned weapons were confiscated in the weeks following Mayor Nagin’s order. This decision must have been based upon the various Disaster Mythologies circulating at the time, many of which the Mayor himself, in a spectacular failing of leadership and common sense, propagated himself to various media outlets. A widely-circulated report of the gun confiscation can be seen here:
Following the disaster a lawsuit was filed by the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation which sought to require the return of the confiscated weapons as well as an injunction against further confiscations. After nearly three years of litigation, that case was settled in October 2008 just weeks before it was set to go to trial with the City of New Orleans agreeing to a streamlined program to return the weapons and to agree to the injunction prohibiting such confiscations in the future. Moreover, the uproar over the illegal confiscations by the NOPD directly lead to Federal action on the issue with the passage of the Disaster Recover and Personal Protection Act that makes it illegal to confiscate weapons during an emergency if they are otherwise legally owned under State and Federal law. Perhaps the injunction and the passage of the DRPPA will prevent exactly this type of abrogation of Constitutionally protected liberties in the future and perhaps they won’t. Nonetheless, they are the direct consequence of Disaster Mythology.
Vigilantism and Illegal Police Action
With a citizenry and a police force brought to the edge by the flooding and the fear-mongering of false media reports, they engaged in many acts of violence. Indeed, many of the confirmed reports of violence have been attributed to acts of vigilante violence undertaken by the city’s white minority with at least 11 shootings (and some murders) attributed to them. And, it has been widely reported that the unjustified killings and coverup by New Orleans police at the now infamous Danziger Bridge and elsewhere has resulted in the conviction of several NOPD officers. Again, it is the widespread belief in the Disaster Mythology which motivated these acts. In the case of New Orleans specifically, the empirical evidence has shown that an a priori conviction that your fellow citizens are part of a marauding band of criminals resulted in several documented illegal acts by those subscribing to the Disaster Mythology.
A Way Forward
Natural disasters and emergencies are a part of life. The prudent person should prepare themselves. Indeed, Katrina showed that not only were the local, state and federal governments unprepared, but that the thousands of people who showed up at the Superdome and Convention Center had made virtually no preparations for their own protection during that disaster. And, while law abiding citizens have a natural right to defend themselves and their property through the use of force (up to and including lethal force under the right circumstances) the prudent person must also understand that fear of fellow citizens can result in even greater and unjustified violence. Similarly, police forces and governments (including individual police officers and Guardsmen) must be held to their oaths to protect their communities and to honor the Constitution.
Moreover, the emphasis on a law enforcement/military response as opposed to a humanitarian one raises serious concerns regarding the Posse Comitatus Act, and the call by some that the appropriate response to a similar disaster in the future will be to invoke the related Insurrection Act to put down the imagined lawlessness suggested by the Disaster Mythology. As Professor Sun writes:
The clarity of hindsight, combined with an understanding that early reports of survivor violence were tragically inflated, confirms the wisdom of continuing to adhere to existing Posse Comitatus Act restrictions and rejecting expansive interpretations of (or amendments to) the Insurrection Act that would give the President wider discretion to commit federal troops in a law enforcement capacity. Despite its ignominious origins in “[r]econstruction bitterness and racial hatred,” the Posse Comitatus Act strikes a compromise for the domestic use of federal troops in disasters that remains useful today. That compromise is eroded when the decision whether to invoke the Insurrection Act is clouded by erroneous perceptions about the amount of violence and disorder actually taking place. To some extent, the belief that post-Katrina New Orleans was a “war zone” became a selffulfilling prophecy; most of New Orleans’s remaining citizens were surely not combatants, but New Orleans was, at times, policed by both National Guard and federal troops as though it were Baghdad.
Unfortunately, disaster response is following the same trend as much of the rest of Federal policies. Since 9/11 we’ve seen a wholesale degradation of civil liberties, and we’ve previously written about many other similar trends including the continued militarization of local police departments, the ever expanding digital panopticon, and now enabling legislation to permit warrantless and indefinite detention of US Citizens.
Notwithstanding the foregoing sober facts, we remain warily hopeful that the next disaster in an urban area will not result in the unnecessary loss of life and property caused by misallocated resources nor the loss of civil liberties. We remain equally hopeful that the law enforcement officers and the members of that as of yet unknown community will recognize that the media has a vested interest in the Disaster Mythology and will see beyond the hype and to remember the first rule of any crisis situation: remain calm.
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Though you may be correct about the over all affect in the aftermath of Katrina, the truth is that it did occur in isolated cases and in other disaster or war torn areas in the world. The exact opposite happened in Sarajevo. Gangs raped, pillaged and burned. People died. It was not pretty. Survivors survived by doing the unthinkable at times.
I prefer to prepare for the worst and if it does not come about, Hooray for the USA…
Certainly, there is anti-social behavior after a disaster, just as there is before a disaster. That being said, research shows that criminal activity (on the part of the victims at least) decreases, and pro-social activity increases. Sarajevo is really a different situation all together though, isn’t it? That was not a hurricane, earthquake, flood, etc., but was in fact a civil war which had terrorism and ethnic cleansing as part and parcel of a wider program between religious/ethnic groups which has been at work there for centuries. We’ve seen similar atrocities throughout history and in varying regions. I think to conflate these two phenomena makes our understanding (and therefore our planning) less clear, not more so. That being said, preparation (for the worst) is always the right move, and we are heartened to see more and more people in this country identifying themselves as “preppers.” We count you among the wise!
Always remember that NOPD = Not Our Problem, Dude.
I was in San Francisco during the loma prieta earthquake and saw first hand that people come together and act like rational human beings In times of disaster. In Oakland and all around the bay area people rose to the occasion. I am a firm believer that it is the media and the government that created the problem in New Orleans. They are conditioned to think the worst of people because it justifies the police militarization and sells advertising. It is another way to manufacture the consent of the people to give up their civil rights through psychological terrorism.
Thanks for sharing your first-hand experience.
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I have no doubt that media contributed to negative behavior. I know all too well how rumors can grow to bear little resemblance to reality.
That said, your denial here is striking.
I’ve personally spoken to Navy pilots who were shot at from the ground, and whose “rescue-swimmers” – lowered to ascertain the needs of people trapped on a bridge or overpass – were physically attacked and forced to use their “rescue hawk” to defend themselves and prevent their being beaten or torn to bits!
Among people with a culture of Liberty and self-reliance, there is no need for Government. In general, these people are “the producers” in our society. When “TSHTF” they do what they’ve always done – set about trying to make things better.
There are however “two Americas” – and especially in our large, urban centers there exists a second culture. These people have no history of self-reliance, but rather have been dependent for generations. Their culture not only accepts but even encourages criminality and violence in the best of times – as is demonstrated by the sad reality that sixty to eighty percent of their young men will spend time in prison, and be more likely to die of a gunshot-wound than to graduate high-school.
Even the heavily-armed and armored police are reluctant to enter neighborhoods where this culture is predominant as the potential for startlingly-brutal violence is always there – simmering just below the surface.
These people are the figurative and literal “looter” class that predominates in our urban areas.
In “Producer-America”, the police and government are part of “the team” – though not really necessary to most people. When crises like Katrina hit, people band together and solve their own problems, often through cooperation and voluntary pooling of resources. Among such people, looting is almost unimaginable – as all are accustomed to hard work they know the value of personal property – and thievery is rightly ABHORRED.
Among the looter-class however, there is no such culture of self-reliance – but rather one of utter dependence. `The police are seen as an occupying army, just one of the ways in which these areas bear a striking resemblance to Fallujah or other battle-zones. The Government is an odd blend of ultimate benefactor — the source and provider of everything – food, shelter, clothing and even luxury goods like designer clothing, cell-phones and jewelry — and ultimate tyrant who is together with the police considered ultimately responsible for “keeping us down.”
Among such people, the lapse in authority is an opportunity for “freedom” – freedom to do all the things they cannot do under normal circumstances. This “freedom” is generally expressed in rampant looting, and outright rioting if not quickly squelched. At such times, “if I can take it, it’s MINE” – whether “it” is a pair of sneakers, a flat-panel TV, or sex with whatever female is unfortunate enough to be handy.
We’ve seen this sad reality manifest itself all over the world – from New Orleans to London, Los Angeles to Liberia.
While it may appear to the uninitiated that these cultures divide largely along racial lines, the truth is that the problem is not race, but CULTURE. “Looter-class” whites subject to multi-generational dependence become just as feral, and “producer-class” blacks wouldn’t dream of sinking so low.
Nor is it really about poverty – as the most extreme rural poor of all races tend to operate by a “producer” ethos almost indistinguishable from that of any other economic strata.
These problems are indeed purely borne of culture, and they will never be solved until the culture is forced to change.
Personally, I believe that day is growing ever closer — as our Republic teeters into economic and cultural collapse, we’re going to find it increasingly difficult to come up with the “dane-geld” necessary to keep the lid on the looter-classes’ baser instincts.
When the inevitable finally happens, when the cash-spigot finally dries up and the EBT cards stop working, things are going to get very ugly, very quickly.
Pretending this isn’t so benefits NOBODY.
I think you nailed it. I’ve seen the same things everywhere I’ve been in the world. In addition to the looter class, and the producers, I have seen the upper class (elites, those above the law, etc.) that typically can’t distinguish between the first two groups. To my mind, that’s why they are always enacting laws to “control” the rest of us.
I think things are coming to a head too fast to resolve peacefully. I hope that I am wrong, but I’m prepping in case I’m right.
Gentlemen:
Thanks to both of you for sharing your viewpoints. I think that we will all agree that preparing for bad times is wise. I think we can all agree that some people have adopted a debilitated and debilitating mindset about their role in their communities and the relationship between themselves and their government. That being said, the viewpoint that when things go bad during a disaster, the poor turn into a roving pack of animals is simply not borne out the the research. If it didn’t happen in New Orleans, one of America’s poorest and most violent cities in the best of times, I am left wonder how likely it will be in other cities. Disaster mythology sells ad space, it justifies a militarized response, and it serves to lessen our civil liberties, but it does little to help all of us recognize that we have far more in common with our neighbors than many might expect.
Was there crime following Katrina? Absolutely. Was it anywhere near the scope, type or amount as eagerly reported by the media? Absolutely not. So, what was the result of that reality? Gun confiscations, martial law, innocent people being thrown into jail, cops murdering citizens on Danziger Bridge and elsewhere, vigilantes murdering evacuees. These are terrible outcomes and there were driven in large part by the disaster mythology borne by too many of our fellow citizens.
You mentioned people shooting at helicopters and rescue workers. I haven’t spoken to the people you have. But I have read the reports which showed that there was exactly a single incident of a single person who was maybe arrested for shooting out of his window while a helicopter was in the area. Media reports do not provide any further details of that. Not his name, not which agency charged him, whether we was convicted. Nothing. As such, I have to believe that the incident is more disaster mythology.
Continue to prepare for bad times because that’s what smart people do. However, if bad times do come to where you live, I trust you will consider what the research says about your fellow man and act responsibly, stand on your own civil liberties, and lend a hand.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything that is written here. I was front and center to Katrina (I live in Tallahassee, FL) and within 72 hours of the Hurricane hitting the coast, was in my car with relief supplies, water, food and medical aid. I grabbed my tent and my best friend (a rugged survivalist who lived off the land in the Outback of Australia!) and we drove until we found a small community that needed help (Bayou La Batre, Alabama). During the three weeks that I stayed in the Gulf Region following the Hurricane, I witnessed and participated in extraordinary acts of pro-social behavior. Indeed, many of the people that I met, victims themselves, most homeless and hungry, were reaching out to help each other. Not once did I come across “roaming looters” or anything like that… the greatest threat to survival during that time was the lack of clean water and food. During a short trip one week after the Hurricane to Biloxi, MS, I drove a family to their (demolished) home to salvage belongings before getting them to a safe house in California and we met the National Guard there who did stop us and inquire with us about our activity, but they did not act poorly either. It was clear to me that they were just as concerned about our welfare as we were and did a great job of securing areas that were dangerous. I understand and see the fear that people have about surviving through a major catastrophic event, but I hold a strong belief in the strength of the human spirit and the ability of human beings to come together for mutual support during times of crisis as well. I’m happy to see that sentiment articulately so well in this article. And as for the reduction of civil liberties, that is a sad and misguided consequence of ignorance and I do hope that one good consequence of our dismal economy will be a lack of funding for government resources in that regard!
Jo Hannah
Thanks for your comments and for stepping up to assist your fellow Americans.
– TPR