From Scout:

Heather Allan was the lead troubleshooter for NBC in NOLA in the days after Katrina struck. She had 25 years of experience at this in war zones and disaster areas. When trouble breaks out somewhere NBC sends Allan. Or as she put it in “The Great Deluge” by Douglas Brinkley…she was the “queen of the shitholes.” Here is Allen on the NOPD from Brinkley’s book…

Her real ire, in the looming hours, would be directed at the NOPD. Virtually all of them were “cocky, arrogant, and cruel,” she said. “Virtually none showed an act of human kindness.” During the 25 years she had been traveling in the world’s hot spots, she had seen such things as police beating women in Dakar and a man executed in Tangier, but never had she witnessed hundreds of police so callous in the face of human suffering, refusing to shift gears and place a priority on compassion and rescue work. The NOPD’s mode was singular: self preservation. “I saw a 98 year old man paralyzed in a wheelchair ask for help and they just scoffed at him,” she fumed. “They kicked 3 little huddled women with nowhere to go out of the Marriot because that was where the NOPD was sleeping….just tossed them on the street. We took them under our wing at NBC. They wouldn’t even answer questions of people who asked which way the Superdome or Convention Center was. They basically mocked all the homeless. I have never, ever, seen such a cold, I-don’t-give-a-shit- attitude from cops in my life.” (p. 204-205)

Today CNN reports on a mentally disabled man, Ronald Madison, (below) who was shot in the back 5 times by the NOPD, 6 days after Katrina hit….

(Continues…Click Read More)

From Scout:

Madison’s older brother, Lance, said he and Ronald were walking across the Danziger bridge toward another brother’s dental office when teen-agers ran up behind him and opened fire that Sunday morning.

By his account, he and Ronald were running away toward the crest of the bridge when a police team, responding to the report of gunshots, arrived in a rental truck and opened fire on people on the bridge.

SNIP

Lance Madison said a policeman pointed a rifle at Ronald and shot him as the two of them were running up the bridge. Lance said he helped carry his wounded brother to a motel on the other side of the canal and left him there as Lance kept running to seek help.

The Police Department said in a press release last fall that Ronald Madison, whom it called a second unidentified gunman, “was confronted by a New Orleans Police Officer. The suspect reached into his waist and turned toward the officer who fired one shot fatally wounding him.”

Testifying in a preliminary hearing last fall, Police Sgt. Arthur Kaufman said much the same thing: “One subject turned, reached in his waistband, turned on the officers.”

Autopsy results, made available to CNN by a source involved in the investigation, directly contradict that police account.

The findings list five separate gunshot wounds in Ronald Madison’s back. Three went through the body and exited in front. There were two other wounds in his right shoulder. None of the shots entered his body from the front.

Snip

No weapon was found on or near Ronald Madison’s body.

Assistant District Attorney Dustin Davis, testifying in the same court hearing on the CNN lawsuit, said a grand jury has been assigned to investigate the Danziger Bridge shootings. However, the grand jury has not yet met on the case because the New Orleans Police Department has yet to complete its final report, eight months after those deaths.