There’s no doubt that chaos reigned in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Yet some dark acts hidden by the veil of that chaos have only recently come to light. The latest are alleged in an indictment filed Tuesday by the Department of Justice. It claims that four New Orleans police officers used the aura of chaos to shoot unarmed civilians on the city’s Danziger Bridge on Sept. 4, 2005, while flood waters were still high, and then to cover up the shootings. Four people were wounded and two others killed in the shootings.
The account cited by the indictment is chilling. After a police report went out that police were under fire, the accused officers drove to a bridge over the city’s Industrial Canal in a rental truck. There, the indictment says, Officer Robert Faulcon, Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, St. Robert Gisevius and Officer Anthony Villavaso opened fire without cause on members of the Bartholomew family and a companion, who were unarmed and walking across the bridge to a nearby supermarket.
Four members of the family were shot — Susan Bartholomew, 38, lost an arm and her husband, Leonard Bartholomew III, was shot in the head. Their companion, James Brissette, 17, was shot seven times and killed.
Some of the officers then went to the end of the bridge, where they confronted Ronald and Lance Madison, who were going to check on the dentist office of their brother, Dr. Romell Madison. The indictment claims Officer Faulcon shot Ronald Madison with a shotgun, and that St. Bowen then kicked and stomped him as he died.
Two other officers named in the indictment, homicide detectives Sgt. Arthur Kaufman and Sgt. Gerard Duge, who were assigned to investigate the shootings, were also charged Tuesday with helping the four officers arrange a cover-up in a meeting at a precinct house. Sgt. Kaufman is also accused of creating fictional witnesses and putting a pistol at the scene of the shooting.
The case was not a surprise. The Orleans Parish district attorney attempted in 2006 to bring a case to court against the four men indicted Tuesday and three others on charges of murder and attempted murder. The case was dismissed in 2008 by a judge who ruled the case was handled improperly.
The Justice Department revived the case in 2009 amid other evidence that the New Orleans police department was infected by rogue officers and needed a systemic overhaul.
A similar case, for example, led to the indictment last month of five officers for the alleged murder of a 31-year-old man, Henry Glover, who was shot in the Algiers neighborhood just after the hurricane. His body was found behind a police station in a burned car.
The two cases that have been brought to light so far are among at least eight incidents that are now being investigated by federal agents, and more may yet shake out.
Pursuit of the Danziger Bridge shootings and other investigations by the Justice Department is important for several reasons. One is that the New Orleans’ police department has been notorious for years for racial bias, corruption and tainted justice. It clearly needs, and the city’s residents deserve, a police department which operates with integrity and which can be trusted by its citizens to ethically discharge its law enforcement duties.
The city’s new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, agrees. He invited the Justice Department to perform a comprehensive review of the police department after he assumed office in May. The process may well result in a legally binding consent decree by the city for systemic reform. Given the police department’s reputation, that’s the best thing that could happen. Without a Justice Department that is, again, focused on justice at the street level, however, such a change would be unlikely to occur.