Michael Hawkins quotes the Toronto Star on the New Orleans police experience of its photographer, Lucas Oleniuk:
... more than 350 images shot by Oleniuk depicted officers delivering a fierce beating to the two suspects, an assault so fearsome one of the suspects defecated.
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Realizing their frontier justice had been captured for posterity, the police turned on the photographer, one ripping a camera from his neck with such force it broke its shoulder strap.
Another grabbed a second camera and, somewhere in the melee, Oleniuk's press pass was ripped from his neck. The officers fumbled with the cameras, finally pulling out the memory cards with the photos. Oleniuk pleaded for the return of his cameras, was rebuffed, then, after retreating about a block, approached them again and asked for his cameras back.
One of the officers who had been hunkered down with Oleniuk during the 15-minute shootout said he could have his cameras, but when he asked again for his pictures, he was gruffly told: "If you don't get your ass out of here, I'm going to break your motherf---ing jaw."
In the chaos that is New Orleans, police menacingly pointed loaded weapons at me four times, and Oleniuk and I watched later when four officers armed with machineguns, after first demanding to know where we were going, turned on an approaching cab and screamed at the Hispanic driver to get his hands off the wheel or they'd open fire. When he wouldn't do so immediately, it appeared for a split second that he would be shot on the spot.
Mercifully, his shaky hands finally appeared above the dash.
Police aggression has been encouraged by the bloodthirsty words of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Bianco, and by the media's stereotyping of "black looters" vs. "whites finding food." To be fair, first responders are also dealing with a great deal of violence, most of which results from the actions of desperate and hungry people - but some of which also comes from thugs. Greedy people, in a land without law or leadership, sometimes do terrible things.
It all seems too much like "Night of the Living Dead": the widespread devastation, a land under occupation ... and an innocent black man who, having survived through days of horror, is shot down in the end by a police sharpshooter who says laconically: "Got another one."
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