Cops fatally shoot man on St. Charles Avenue

By Bruce Nolan

About a dozen New Orleans police officers, guns drawn and leveled, confronted an agitated man with a knife on St. Charles Avenue on Monday, repeatedly commanded him to drop the weapon as he slowly backpedaled for nearly a block, and shot him to death when he lunged at one of them, police said.

Police did not identify the man after the 3 p.m. incident, other than to say he was 38 years old. Some people who work in businesses along the 1700 block of St. Charles Avenue said he was a familiar figure in the neighborhood. Several said they believed he was mentally ill, although they did not know him to be violent

Police said they tried unsuccessfully to disable him with pepper spray before he finally lunged at them, coming so close that one officer had to step back to avoid the man's 3-inch knife.

The unidentified man went down in a hail of gunfire. Witnesses reported hearing too many gunshots to differentiate. Investigators working the scene at the corner of St. Charles and Felicity Street later put down about 10 evidence markers in the street like those used to mark spent shell casings.

Police spokesman David Adams said the incident began at a Walgreens at St. Charles and Felicity. Adams did not describe the incident there, but a customer who identified herself as Evangelist Jackson said the man became agitated and got into an argument with a store employee, perhaps over a credit card that would not work.

She said the man swung at the employee but did not hurt him seriously. "It was more like, you know, a slap or something," said Jackson. She said she saw him leave the drug store parking lot, walking downtown. The store manager declined to comment about the incident. He referred questions to a corporate office, which did not return a telephone call. About a block away, an off-duty St. Bernard sheriff's deputy saw him and flagged a passing police officer, Adams said.

Within minutes, 10 or more police officers had arrived. They left their cars and, guns drawn, were trying to confine the man in the middle of the downtown lanes of the avenue in front of apartments at 1750 St. Charles Ave. Videotape of the event was shot by videographer Phin Percy, who said the sound of sirens drew him to his second-floor window overlooking St. Charles Avenue. The tape shows about a dozen officers in the street and on the neutral ground confronting the man, with their weapons leveled at him.

The man slowly backpedals up the street, waving his arms at them and keeping his distance. The officers keep pace, guns pointed at him. He appears to be holding a small knife in his right hand. Police said the knife carried a 3-inch blade. Percy said he stopped taping when the knot of people moved behind a tree, which obscured his view. He left his position to run outdoors and heard the shots before he reached the sidewalk. Adams said he did not know how many officers had fired their weapons, but that they would be put on administrative leave while the investigation unfolds. 

Source: Times-Picayune (Tuesday, December 27, 2005)

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Ministers urge NOPD to reconsider 'shoot to kill' policy

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A group of ministers met with New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley today to ask him to reconsider the department's policy on shooting to kill. The meeting comes three days after police killed 38- year-old Anthony Hayes, who was wielding a hunting knife. Hayes' confrontation with 18 officers, though not the shooting itself, was taped by at least three bystanders.

Riley says two sergeants and one patrol officer fired nine bullets after Hayes tried to stab a lieutenant. He says he did not have an autopsy report, so he did not know how many bullets hit Hayes. The Rev. Norwood Thompson, a member of the national board of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and pastor at Jesus Never Fails Christian Church, said it was obvious from the videotape that Hayes was mentally ill. He said police should have been able to "overtake a man who may be mentally incapacitated without killing him.'' Riley says a police review will determine whether proper procedures were followed. He says that all witness accounts indicate the shooting was justified.

Ministers who had said before Thursday's meeting that police should have aimed at Hayes' legs, to stop him rather than kill him, said afterward that they understood why the officers hadn't done so. "The reason a lot of police do not shoot at legs is that the bullet might travel through and hit someone else," said the Rev. Marie Galatas. She and Thompson said they both still want a change in policy, so that officers are not trained to shoot only to kill.

Riley said he is looking at several alternatives to bullets, and spoke on Wednesday with representatives of two companies selling such weapons. He wouldn't say whether he is considering stun guns, rubber bullets or something else, but said the representatives will be in New Orleans "later in January." "We want to ensure we do all we can to de-escalate situations," he said.

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3 Katrina evacuees in Texas die in apparent murder-suicide

GRAPEVINE, Texas -- A family of three Hurricane Katrina evacuees facing eviction was found dead in their Texas apartment in what appears to be a double murder-suicide, authorities said. Police were called Friday [12/30/05] by the apartment complex to assist in the eviction and discovered the bodies, said police Sgt. Todd Dearing in Grapevine, near Dallas. Found with gunshot wounds were a 40-year-old man, a 37-year-old woman and a 14-year-old boy, all from Louisiana. Police found a shotgun believed to be the weapon, Dearing said.

Police were searching for a 16-year-old daughter they believe was living elsewhere, he said. Names were being withheld until relatives could be notified. A resident told the complex Thursday of hearing what sounded like three gunshots near the victims' apartment, Dearing said. Police were called but left when no one answered the door. "There was no reason for us to make entry," Dearing said. "They said it was their usual method of not answering the phones or door because they were being evicted."

The family was supposed to leave the apartment Tuesday, but the complex offered a few extra days. The family was receiving assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Dearing said. He did not know how long the family had not been paying rent. Apartment managers could not be reached for comment Friday. Calls to the complex's leasing office rang unanswered. (AP) Copyright 2004-2005 THE MAINICHI NEWSPAPERS.

posted 27 December 2005

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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created By Charles C. Mann I’m a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that it’s anything but exhausting to read. With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchange and, I’m proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, “globalized” entity. Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose “southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.

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The Katrina Papers by Jerry W. Ward, Jr  /  The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)

The Katrina Papers is not your average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of writing, including intellectual autobiography, personal narrative, political/cultural analysis, spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry. Though it is the record of one man's experience of Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a part of his life and work as a scholar, political activist, and professor.  The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but also for ruminations on authors such as Richard Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The result is a complex though thoroughly accessible book. The struggle with form—the search for a medium proper to the complex social, personal, and political ramifications of an event unprecedented in this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of The Katrina Papers. It depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view which takes the local as its nexus for understanding the global.  It resists the temptation to simplify or clarify when simplification and clarification are not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very direct, but he always refuses to simplify the complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the process and the historical moment that he is witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer

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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America By Melissa V. Harris-Perry According to the author, this society has historically exerted considerable pressure on black females to fit into one of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the Matriarch or the Jezebel.  The selfless Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.      Professor Perry points out how the propagation of these harmful myths have served the mainstream culture well. For instance, the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for black females to feel a maternal instinct towards Caucasian babies. As for the source of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their own bodies during slavery given that they were being auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless, it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate indiscriminately.

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

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