This may seem a little off topic, but bear with me; it is relevant.
In my essay about "The Titanic the Internet and Cold Fusion" I described how people hang on to initial impressions formed soon after a major news event. Facts revealed later are often ignored. Yesterday, I spoke for a long time to a reporter from Salt Lake City, who called me for an update on cold fusion. His information and his impressions seemed to be based entirely on news reports from 1989. It was like talking to a time traveler.
Many of the news stories that circulated during the Katrina disaster were false -- some egregiously false. This is not anyone's fault. During an event of this nature, rumors fly, and reports are distorted and exaggerated. This is unavoidable, but a journalist or historian should be very careful to take the stories with a grain of salt, and to go back and re-examine the claims later on. Beware of jumping to conclusions.
Here is one example of what I mean. As everyone now knows, during the disaster, tens of thousands of people were crowded into two refugee centers within the city, the Dome and the Convention Center. During the event, there were repeated news reports of violent chaos within these centers. Gangs were supposedly rampaging through the centers; murders and rapes were being committed openly; the police were "retreating" every night; and there were no national guardsmen on duty there. This seemed extremely unlikely to me. It reminded me of the claims that when the survivors of the Titanic were taken aboard the Carpathia, many were hysterical with grief, and uncontrollable. In point of fact, crowds of people in a situation like this usually behave in an exemplary manner. Crowds are also usually self organizing, and most individuals are too exhausted to make trouble. (By "self organizing" I mean, for example, that ~80% of rescues are performed by civilians, usually neighbors or friends. This has been shown in the US, Japan and China, for earthquakes, fire, floods and other natural disasters.)
I have scoured news reports and watched interviews on CNN with people were in these centers, and with police officers who were assigned to the centers, both white and black, in case racial stereotypes cause any of these stories to circulate. All sources agree on the following:
1. Conditions were miserable and the crowds were upset, of course, but they remained orderly, and self-organizing.
2. The police were present in the centers at all times, along with at least a hundred national guardsmen. A policeman did say that he had to "sleep with one eye open" to crack down on troublemakers quickly.
3. Few crimes were committed. No murders were reported and no corpses found, except for people who obviously died of natural causes. No rapes were reported, and no one has come forth after the event to report one. Two attempted rapes were reported, and the suspects were arrested immediately by police officers. The officer in charge of the Convention Center happened to be the head of the Sex Crimes Division, so he knows a rape when he sees one, as he bluntly put it.
It is possible that these police officers are lying, but it seems unlikely that the civilians who confirmed their accounts would cover up for them.
- Jed
