It doesn’t take anything to start a rumor around here.
If you believed all the stories of looting, assault, robbery, mayhem, manslaughter, rape, and murder in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, the city was like something straight out of the movie Children of Men—a postapocalyptic nightmare, hell on Earth.
Disasters and tragedies always bring out the best as well as the worst of humankind. You are who you are, to the 10th power.
In the case of Katrina, it seemed as if the worst was winning. The stories ranged from the disgusting to the horrific.
I received an e-mail from someone claiming to be related to a New Orleans resident. The resident told this person that a police boat had approached a young woman who was stranded on the roof of a house. The cops allegedly told the woman, “Show us your t—s!” as if this were Mardi Gras and not one of the worst disasters in the American history.
When the woman refused to comply, the police boat continued on.
At least according to the story I was told.
In the early days of the disaster, the mainstream media reported that post-flood New Orleans had essentially been overtaken by the criminal element.
On the Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes program on September 1, 2005, Alan Colmes said, “There are troubling reports tonight, coming from inside the city of New Orleans. There’ve been shootings. There are reports of people being robbed and raped. Shots have been fired at police officers. And gangs roam the streets at night in the darkness.”
In a story that was picked up by hundreds of news outlets across the world, the Associated Press reported that in the early morning hours of September 1, shots had been fired at a military helicopter and that evacuation proceedings had been halted because of the gunfire.
“LOST CITY” was the headline in the Chicago Sun-Times that accompanied an AP wire story. “New Orleans in anarchy as rage, frustration grip desperate survivors.”
The AP story began, “Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday.”
New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass was quoted as saying, “We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten. Tourists are . . . getting preyed upon.”
In an exchange with the Reverend Al Sharpton, MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson said, “People are being raped. People are being murdered. People are being shot. Police officers being shot. Helicopters are being shot at. And that’s one of the reasons people who need it aren’t getting the aid tonight. There’s no excusing that behavior.”
Arthel Neville, a New Orleans native and the host of A Current Affair, told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren some stories bordering on the unfathomable.
NEVILLE: My cousin swam down Tulane Avenue. She says,”I can’t take it here.” There’s snakes in the water, there’s sharks in the water. She said, “I don’t care.”
VAN SUSTEREN: Really, sharks?
NEVILLE: I haven’t seen them. I heard that. Snakes, you got to believe that….One guy gets into a scuffle with a National Guardsman, takes the gun and kills the guardsman with the gun. Another guy, this is really sad, if there are any children in the room take them out of the room, a man rapes and kills a seven-year-old girl. About 10 guys, I don’t know how many, but a group of guys turn around and beat this guy to death. This is just horrible. I cannot wrap my mind around how ... a human person can be reduced to such animalistic behavior. I don’t understand it.
The horror stories kept coming, one after another.
According to a French newspaper, some 1,200 people drowned inside a school.
A local blues singer told a Baton Rouge television station she had been raped and had witnessed alligators eating people before she commandeered a bus and drove a number of people to safety.
Chief Compass went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and said babies were being raped in the Superdome. Mayor Ray Nagin told Oprah of people who were “in that friggin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”
But after the first few days, the reports of mayhem seemed to just fade away. To be sure, New Orleans was still reeling from the overwhelming scope of the disaster, and crimes were committed, but there were few follow-ups offering further details concerning the rapes and the murders and the episodes of alligators eating people, like something out of a John Carpenter movie.
The conspiracy theorists said it was obvious the White House had placed the media under a cone of silence—ordering news organizations to pull back on the horror stories. This was no time to cause further panic in New Orleans; neither was it helping our image around the globe if the international media believed there was chaos in the streets of New Orleans and that thousands of Americans had turned into rabid animals.
The conspiracy was on.
Or not.
What really happened: once the media took some Responsibility Pills and reporters had the time and opportunity to start examining some of the more incredible stories, they were able to separate fact from urban legend.
I mean, come on. A woman saw alligators eating people just before she took control of a bus and drove a bunch of people to safety? I wouldn’t believe that scene if I saw it in Fantastic Four.
Turns out everyone, from the mayor of New Orleans to the police chief to the host of A Current Affair, was repeating stories someone had told someone who had told someone else. In hindsight, it’s easy to say that talk show hosts such as Winfrey and Van Susteren should have expressed more skepticism from the get-go, but that’s not always the first reaction when you’re hearing such mind-boggling tales of chaos and anarchy—especially when it’s an authority figure telling the tales.
As the cleanup and restoration efforts in New Orleans continued, a number of mainstream news organizations and Internet investigators were disputing most of the worst stories, with the help of authorities.
“Katrina spawned rumors; media ran with them” was the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer on September 28, 2005.
“Over five days ... stories of unspeakable horror were reported around the world, by broadcast and cable TV, the BBC, the Associated Press, Reuters, web sites, and many newspapers” read the article, which went on to refute nearly all of the horror stories.
The New Orleans Police Department has no substantiated reports of rapes—no victims, and no eyewitnesses. There was a single homicide inside the Convention Center, and no murders inside the Superdome, according to the Louisiana Health and Human Services Department, which is overseeing the recovery of remains.
Officials who were prepared to remove hundreds of the dead from the shelters found 10 bodies in the Dome, four brought in from the streets and six of people who died on-site—four of natural causes, one of a drug overdose, and one of a fall from a balcony listed as an apparent suicide.
The reports of thugs killing cops and National Guardsmen were bogus, as were the tales of man-eating alligators. There were no substantiated reports of mobs firing on rescue helicopters. Nobody ever reported a baby being raped, a seven-year-old being murdered, a mob killing the man who killed the seven-year-old.
“The incidents were highly exaggerated,” a Louisiana National Guard spokesman told the AP. “For the amount of people in the situation, it was a very stable environment.”
So where did all these stories come from? And why were so many officials and mainstream news organizations so quick to repeat them?
As is the case with most widespread urban legends, a number of ingredients contributed to the mix.
First, the situation in New Orleans was beyond awful. The response to the disaster by state and federal authorities was scandalously, shamefully slow. People were dying in the streets. The conditions in the Convention Center and in the Superdome were primitive. There were some examples of criminal and unethical behavior. One could certainly fathom such a situation spinning violently out of control.
Part of the problem was the near-complete collapse of traditional communications systems in the city. It was virtually impossible to verify stories—and rather than proceed with caution, too many officials (including the mayor and the chief of police) and too many reporters chose to believe the worst.
Racial stereotypes also played a factor. Consider the controversy that occurred when one AP photo caption said a black man “walks through chest deep flood waters after looting a grocery store,” while a similar photo of two white residents noted they were wading through waters “after finding bread and water from a local grocery store.” The AP said that in the first case the photographer had actually witnessed the man going into the store and taking items— but does that mean we’re to assume the white folks left money on the counter for the bread and water?
Regarding the reports of rampant, vicious crimes, New Orleans Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss told the Los Angeles Times, “If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”
Then there was the phony e-mail, supposedly from a doctor who volunteered at the Astrodome and claimed:
Only one out of 10 people would say “Thank you.”... They would ask for beer and liquor.... They treated us volunteers as if we were SLAVES.... I was laughed at and more “white boy jokes” were made at me….I saw ONE white family and only TWO Hispanic families. The rest were blacks. Sorry, 20 to 30 percent decent blacks and 70 percent LOSERS ... thugs and lifetime lazy-ass welfare recipients . . . like idiots we are serving the people who will soon steal our cars, rape, murder and destroy our city while stealing from our pockets on a daily basis through the welfare checks they take.
The e-mail was pure fiction, penned by someone with a small brain, a foul heart, and extremely limited communication skills. Still, it made the rounds, forwarded by people who, for whatever pathetic reasons, wanted to believe it was true.
Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster greatly exacerbated by a lack of preparation, a city that ignored published warnings for years, incredibly inadequate early response from local and national leaders, and, in some cases, bad behavior on the part of a very small pocket of thugs and criminals. In reality, though, the great majority of Louisiana and Mississippi residents—even those who had lost loved ones and everything they owned—did not resort to lawlessness or shameful behavior. They struggled to survive and endure, they mourned their losses, and they helped one another in whatever ways they could.
That’s the real and lasting headline about human behavior in the wake of Katrina.