Hat-tip to Lindsay: the seven New Orleans cops who shot at apparently unarmed civilians on Danziger Bridge have been charged with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. Police brutality may extend beyond City coundaries, but letting it go unpunished still doesn’t.
[Link] Seven policemen charged in a deadly shooting in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina turned themselves in Tuesday at the city jail, where more than 200 supporters greeted them in a show of solidarity.
Each of the indicted men faces at least one charge of murder or attempted murder in the Sept. 4, 2005, shootings on the Danziger Bridge less than a week after the hurricane hit New Orleans. Two people died and four people were wounded.
The defense attorneys insist that their clients are innocent, and the official police line is that they “were responding to a report of other officers down, and that they thought one of the men, Ronald Madison, was reaching for a gun.” Even if the police is right, it’s manslaughter. I’m fairly certain that if the district attorney had first sought a manslaughter conviction, the police would insist it was not a crime by a reasonable person standard.
But it’s not at all clear the police’s story is true.
[Link] A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.
In New York, cops empty tens of bullets into innocent civilians. In New Orleans, they prefer quality to quantity, so they get up close and shoot civilians at point-blank range instead.
Abstract Nonsense 