T-shirts on Magazine Street: Defend New Orleans

So, yesterday, on our last day in New Orleans, we ventured to the Garden District, hunting tee shirts that said something different than the ones on Bourbon Street whose best attribute tends to be a sometimes clever use of expletives. (New Orleans may be one of the few places where women on St. Patrick’s Day have no shame wearing green tees that say “F**k me, I’m Irish”). Emblematic as that spirit may be of some people’s experience of Bourbon Street, we were looking for something a little different and a lot more wearable.

We entered a husband-and-wife-run store on Magazine Street that sells hand-screened tees. It’s in an old, former watering hole, and the long, oaken bar that operated right on through Prohibition serves as the sales counter. Maryanne and Chris had found the shop earlier in the week with the help of Chris’ buddy from college who lives in the Garden District. The husband hand-screens all the tees, from the baby sizes to the adults. Among the tee designs were a simple fleur-de-lis, cartoon red beans and rice dancing together, and a “girls gone wild” tee, where little red hurricanes, Katrina and Rita were sitting down at a table together drinking cocktails. However, two tee designs stood out for their dead-on frankness:

“Make Levees, Not War.”

“Let’s mess with Texas.”

I can’t say I disagree with either sentiment.

Across the street, Josie found a shirt that certainly summarizes our best wish for the city by encouraging the reader to “Defend New Orleans.”

Defend New Orleans.

Yes, please. It’s a national treasure. It’s a paradoxical city of great culture and degradation, of sincere community and isolating fragmentation, of hospitality and racism, of redemption and sin. But really, how does anyone begin to defend New Orleans?

The stories on the morning news had some ideas. First up was a story about concern that the rise in graffiti warns of an influx of gang members. Latino gang members, the broadcast underscores, implying that there should be a crackdown on any new or old Hispanics in the area. “They’re marking off territory,” says one law enforcement official, interviewed by channel six. In an attempt to be balanced, News 6 shows a sheriff from another parish who suggests that the guys graffitiing are probably just wannabees and that the real indication of gang activity is an increase in crime. Ah, a voice of reason. While graffiti is a problem and could be a harbinger of bad things to come, keep in mind that virtually every house and building in New Orleans has had or more likely still has hurricane and FEMA “graffiti” all over the front in bright orange or red or black. There are still notes about what pets were found inside, whether or not they were taken to a shelter, given water, etc. And there are notes about more gruesome things, about how many bodies were found inside. Please for help were spray painted, too So, maybe, as the sheriff suggests, the time for concern is when things actually start happening, not merely when spray cans are lifted.

Next in the news line up is the immigration bust of the migrant workers (predominantly Hispanic, of course) that hang out at Lee Circle, and that Laureve and Chris have been working with this week. It’s somewhat difficult to understand the logic behind the bust. I guess it’s a no-brainer for ICE, the immigration service’s enforcement wing. There has been a great influx of Latin and South American labor since the hurricane. While many are legal, some are not. But why ICE should pick a time when labor is in shortage because of a disaster to strictly enforce is a bit puzzling. Perhaps ICE is concerned with the protection of the migrant workers rights, and believes that by detaining and deporting them, they will discourage employers from hiring people without immigration status. Or perhaps they’ve been convinced by the law enforcement folks who think there’s about to be an epidemic of gang violence, and that the same workers putting in 16 hour days to send some cash back home so junior can go to school are graffiti artists in their spare time.

The thing is, there are numerous other sorts of labor violations going on. On my flight back to NY via Detriot, I sat next to an all American, blue-eyed, blond 25-year old plumber with a Mexican last name who had been laid off in Detroit, was collecting unemployment and was getting paid under the table by a well-established pluming company in NO so that he could continue to collect in Michigan. The plumber was on his way back to Detroit for a court appearance on felonious assault charges. The fact is skilled, hard-working labor is needed. Details about their past work history aren’t so important. Every building sustained some kind of damage. Some are salvageable, some not. But everything needs work, and needs workers. If the powers that be can look the other way and refuse to release people who shouldn’t be in jail and keep them inside on the state and national government’s tab, if contractors don’t care about their employees being paid under the table, why should ICE crack down now? Why not have Congress sponsor a temporary bill to set up a limited guest worker project for those currently on the ground in the hurricane zone to help rebuild the areas destroyed by the hurricane? Instead the 40 or so workers without status netted in this bust will be transported to Tennessee for processing and hopefully at least hearings before they are deported and forbidden to return for several years or perhaps permanently. They won’t be rebuilding. Maybe they shouldn’t have in the first place. But they were helping to rebuild the city.

Finally, the morning news reported that gun sales in the city of New Orleans had increased markedly. This was not so surprising, as on the way to the airport the day before, Kesav had seen a big billboard that was advertising the biggest gun show ever, going on this weekend. So, perhaps there were those in the city who felt it could best be defended with guns. No doubt judges have heard similar reasoning when defendants stand before them, trying to explain their illegal possession charges.

Defend New Orleans.

Can New Orleans be defended with guns? By tossing out the migrant workers who came to help rebuild? By promising an increase in gang violence that presumably would allow for even greater police discretion?

Can the city be defended with levees? Absolutely, if they are strong enough. With competent and non-corrupt national, state and local leadership? I bet most New Orleans residents would settle for some increased level of competence and leave it at that.
But can the city be defended by what is left of a previously inadequate criminal justice and public defense system, now in abject crisis? Can it be defended by the rule of law, as conceived by the framers?

It MUST be, if we believe that the United States is a democratic nation under the rule of law. To allow one state’s system of justice to erode to such a degree of disfunction weakens the framework of the union itself.

There are engaged, concerned, dynamic defense attorneys, district attorneys, and judges who are fighting to defend the rule of law in New Orleans, but they face near-overwhelming odds. They need help. Lots of help. And one way to help is to be outraged and let everyone you know what is going on in New Orleans.

The state courts are a mess, barely functional and working in shifts in the federal court house. The federal courthouse, which, by the way, seems and is eerily empty, is housing the parts of criminal court in a rotating schedule where each part gets to function about once or twice a week for half a day. The New Orleans Sheriff holds the only database complied on who is in the Orleans Parish Jail and where the inmates were sent during the hurricane (eventually), it flatly refuses to share the electronic format with the defense bar. There was class action by 94 female inmates who were in the parish jail on misdemeanor charges, sent to the maximum security Angola prison. Eight of the women were pregnant and there is no gynecologist at Angola (the idea that there would be is laughable, in fact). Thankfully, they won their case and have received process. But few of the mentally ill inmates, perhaps as much as 2/3 of the incarcerated population, who have been spread out over the state's prison system, have been receiving treatment. It must be equally delightful to share a cell with an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic, as for the ill inmate to be sick and not get help. The same goes for inmates sentenced to non-functioning drug treatment programs. They’re sitting there, instead of receiving treatment, and can’t complete their sentence until they’ve gone through the treatment program. In the courthouse, the evidence room was 2/3 under water and was next to the coroner’s office. In the court’s temporary digs, defendants are often not brought for appearances. Judges repeatedly question the sheriff’s office, practically begging for them to FIND the inmate to bring them to court. Service of process through the mail can take months.

It’s unbelievable. Not because there was a disaster that wiped out the infrastructure of a city and that city is struggling to recover, but because there was a such a minimal plan for a city that lives in the face of oblivion. It’s unbelievable because it’s seven months after the hurricane and there’s no functioning state court house. Defendants are lost in the system. The sheriff’s office seems more concerned about holding on to its power than in promoting justice. As do wardens who receive judicial release orders for prisoners and choose not to implement them until there’s a full bus to leave the jail or prison. It’s shocking because this is America. And the version of America currently extant in New Orleans jives neither with what I’m told to believe is America nor with what I believe it should be.

Federal courts won’t step in until the state courts have been given a chance to fix the problem (though I suspect that the period of leeway the federal courts might give is beginning to run short). Congress won’t move until there’s such a national uproar that representatives are confident they are sustained by constiutent support to act definitively.

So, let’s raise a ruckus. Elections are coming. Let’s demand justice for all, including the victims of Katrina and Rita. Let’s write our representatives. Let’s learn more. Let’s learn the lessons that Katrina has to teach in preparing the bar and the justice system for disasters and providing for the continuation of the rule of law in the most trying of circumstances.

Defend New Orleans. Defend the Constitution. Defend that which we take for granted. It can all be blown away by swirling, excessive hot air.