After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Community Groups Are Winning Progressive Victories

The best and worst sides of humanity are magnified in a time of crisis. For New Orleans, August 29, 2005 marked the beginning of this brand of paradox, and it has yet to reach its end.

The federal government that failed to act in time hasn’t fulfilled its promise of reconstruction, leaving more than 800,000 displaced citizens of this iconic American city to rely on the charity of Hollywood stars in order to rebuild their damaged homes. Equally appalling are the stories of police misconduct that brought indictments against individual officers and an intensive Department of Justice investigation of the New Orleans Police Department as a whole. Although accusations of corruption, discriminatory policing and excessive force did not begin six years ago, it is possible that the continued spotlight on New Orleans’ criminal justice system will help bring its wrongdoings to an end.

This month has seen the preliminary mending of atrocious acts of law enforcement injustice, such as the deaths of two civilians at the hands of police officers on the Danziger Bridge and the subsequent five-year coverup. Meanwhile, a 158-page DOJ report released in March has activists feeling hopeful about the troubled agencies’ capacity for change. In a place where 1 in 26 adults are currently under correctional control, the rigor of passionate individuals who believe they have the power to make their city safer and more just is beginning to turn things around. The national attention their city receives reinvigorates their faith that they will eventually restore New Orleans as a place of splendor.

LGBT Youth Are Experts on Their Own Experience

While investigating the conditions of youth prisons as the project director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), Wesley Ware was told by a number of LGBT young people about being prejudicially treated in local detention centers and by the courts and police in their hometowns. Although Ware’s focus at JJPL was to influence juvenile justice reform throughout Louisiana on behalf of all incarcerated youth, he also recognized there were LGBT youth in New Orleans with a strong desire to organize. So, when the DOJ was investigating the NOPD, he and a handful of young LGBT people attended open hearings to share their dubious experiences with the police.

“We are really glad that one of the top concerns the DOJ named in its report is discriminatory policing,” said Ware. “They made it clear that the problem is institutional and made deliberate efforts to get community involvement in their research. That gave a lot of people faith in the DOJ again after they were slow to act on other problems in the Orleans Parish Prison, like poor conditions and the 13 deaths in OPP since 2009.” In order for some of the most egregious incidents of police brutality during and after Katrina to have happened, there had to have been a systematic process of discrimination in place. The DOJ report’s findings make that explicit by pointing out a number of longstanding institutional deficiencies.

After receiving a Soros Justice Fellowship, Ware expanded the work at JJLP to start a LGBT youth organizing and drop-in center called BreakOUT! The organization’s mission is to build the power of young people impacted by the criminal justice system, many of them formerly detained, by providing personal support and space to plan youth-led policy reform campaigns. The center recently raised over $4,500 on its own and is in the middle of a book drive to benefit LGBTQ youth in detention. (Incidentally, the policy for LGBT books at youth detention centers is part of a mandate instituted by Ware’s work at JJLP.)