This is the second comment below a rather threadbare dressing down of former NOPD officer Jeffrey Lehrmann by T-P reporter Terri Troncale. I wish I could link directly to it but NOLA.com is stupid. Troncale's blurb is today's "Monologue" on the Monday T-P "Viewpoint" sheet which is what remains of a once robust opinion page. The comment by NOLA.com user "joidevrai" reads,
Troncale:
First, it's taken almost 5 years for the T-P to demonstrate any compassion for the victims of this police action. There were plenty of red flags back in 2007 when these cops were first indicted, but the media dismissed the original indictment as politically motivated. For example, we knew then that one of the persons killed on the bridge was mentally handicapped with a childlike mental capacity. He had bullets or pellets in his back. This is not consistent with the cops' version of the so-called gun battle on the bridge. Second, the cops never claimed that the woman with the destroyed arm had a gun. So even under the cops' lying version of the facts, it was not right for them to severely injure her. But there's never been the least bit of concern for her welfare until now. No apology. No effort to comfort them. No amends. Now you can't stop writing about this horrific tragedy. A day late and a dollar short.
Second, your editorial today is premised on naivete and a total failure to use just a little common sense. You suggest that Jeffrey Lehrmann started off showing compassion for the crime victims and then like Anakin Skywalker transformed into Darth Vader, Lehrmann somehow turned to the darkside. Totally ridiculous! It's more likely that Lehrmann coerced and intimidated those poor victims as he "made sure they got to the hospital." I can only imagine what he told those people in the hospital as they suffered in silent terror. They ultimately lied for the cops, claiming that one among their group shot at the cops. Second, you assume that a cop who is this depraved and who has handled other murder investigations for the corrupt police department, has never lied or covered up before. How spectacularly detached from the real world! Given the outlandish actions he took in this cover-up, it's likely that he's had tons of experience.
The bottom line is that you at the T-P still don't get it. There is a culture of corruption at NOPD that spawns the kind of mentality that made it possible for otherwise normal human beings to become Nazi storm troopers. Guns are routinely planted by New Orleans police officers to justify their actions. Lehrmann and the other cops in the Danziger case don't have bad records as cops, as far as I know. They are average every day blokes who somehow became monsters. I suspect they've slept well the last 4 and a half years while the victims have grieved over their losses, convalesced and suffered in absolute terror.
When will you get it. This is so much bigger than Lehrmann or even our completely ineffective police chief, Warren Riley. This is about the heart and soul of our most powerful local government agency in the city, the police department. The heart and soul of the police department reek of corruption
For the longest time, I've found the T-P's silence on police abuses curious. I don't buy the argument that they're only now reporting incidents like this one as thoroughly and as prominently as they are because the facts haven't been available to them all this time. Just take a look at Gordon Russell's reporting on his own personal experience with an NOPD incident a few days after the levee failures back in 2005.
(Russell and his cameraman) saw a man, clad in a white T-shirt, down on the pavement, hands behind his back, not moving. We were both sure he was dead. A lot of agitated police officers hovered around.
It seemed no one noticed, though we were less than 50 feet away. Georgiev shot off a few frames, then started to drive away. As he passed through the intersection, the cops yelled at us to stop. Some had their guns raised. I shouted to stop, and Georgiev did, not as quickly as I would have.
A few cops rushed over and stuck their guns in our faces. I said I worked for the Picayune. I was told to shut up and get out.
They threw us up against a cinderblock wall and frisked us. There was a lot of cursing, and one of the officers mentioned a shootout.
One of the cops grabbed the notebook out of my shorts. They also snatched one of Georgiev’s cameras.
After a couple of minutes, the cops told us to leave. One of them skidded Georgiev’s camera back to him from across the street, like he was bowling. I still didn’t have my notebook and argued that they needed to give it back. I was told, again, to leave.
I took a quick peek around and saw my notebook on the back bumper of our SUV. I grabbed it, and off we went.
These events transpired in September of 2005 but Russell is only telling us about them in December 2009. His account appeared in the paper as part of the T-P's "Law and Disorder" series on police misconduct after the flood which itself was put together in a cooperative effort with PBS' Frontline and Pro Publica. To me, this looks suspiciously like no one at the T-P thought it was okay to print any of this stuff until it was clear that there might me interest from outside media. If Frontline didn't want to do the story, would the T-P have just kept quiet? Russell writes,
Later that day, I filed a story online about what I had seen, most of it involving the Superdome. This is what I wrote about the incident on Religious Street: “Near the former St. Thomas housing development, a squadron of police, some in tactical gear, were clustered in an intersection. A Regional Transit Authority bus was nearby, and a man who appeared to be dead from a gunshot wound lay on the ground.
“It was unclear what had occurred. Police said there had been a shootout as they forced a reporter and a photographer out of a passing car at gunpoint, pushing them face first against the wall. They took away a reporter’s notebook and tossed the photographer’s camera on the ground before returning them and telling the pair to leave.”
Maybe a month later, a police reporter at the newspaper talked to some NOPD officers he knew, and they told him the guy we had seen wasn’t dead.
We had no proof that he was — we just thought he was based on the confluence of circumstances. And there was no autopsy of a dead man who seemed to match our situation, though the cataloging of the dead was hardly done in a way that inspired confidence.
I put the Religious Street incident away, chalking it up to the fog of Katrina and figuring I would never know what really happened.
Until the Feds began probing the Danziger incident, and Frontline decided to run with these stories, it looked as if the T-P was content to just assume no one would ever know what really happened in a lot of these cases. But now that those things have happened, it's time to pile on. Two questions spring to my mind here.
1) Given that the reporting (now that it's getting done) is of such good quality and follows a well-marked trail of facts, what does this tell us about the editorial priorities of a paper that has been so cautious in waiting until four and five years after the fact to fully pursue these issues?
2) Does this cautious reluctance tell us something about the T-P's relationship with NOPD brass? One could argue that the paper has been unduly reluctant to take on a clearly incompetent and corrupt command structure at NOPD until the lame duck months of its appointing administration. Are they afraid to burn bridges with sources in the department? Or are they just not interested in rocking the boat at all?
Update: OR maybe they were just intimidated.
New Orleans police officers have engaged in a pattern of unlawfully arresting or harassing journalists and bystanders who tape or photograph them in public, a lawyer for two men suing the city told a federal jury Monday.
A lawsuit, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, claims police officers violated the constitutional rights of plaintiffs Greg Griffith and Noah Learned, who were arrested at a 2007 Carnival parade.
The plaintiffs cite 11 other incidents since 2005 in which people were arrested or allegedly threatened while videotaping, photographing or merely observing police officers. The list of potential plaintiffs' witnesses includes Times-Picayune city editor Gordon Russell and Associated Press Television News producer Rich Matthews.
Upperdate: Oyster correctly guesses at the title reference. Well, at least, guesses it to the nearest band and there are usually good odds with that guess but still it's something. So here's the damn song.
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