Houma riot reports overblown, police say
Tags: looting, quell your fears citizenFrom "Rumors of riots, crime unfounded, officials say":
During the information vacuum following Hurricane Katrina, locals made scores of frantic calls to area newspapers and police to report the unimaginable: Evacuees from New Orleans were being stripped of loaded guns at a Houma shelter. Roving gangs from the inner city were patrolling local neighborhoods. A woman was carjacked at the mall.
From the shocking to the unbelievable, none of the anonymous rumors called in to police and other agencies over the past two weeks were true…
…crime dropped 40 percent after the hurricane…
The Courier received reports over the past two weeks alleging, inaccurately, that riots broke out in a Lafourche civic center, that an armed gunman held up a convenience-store clerk, that New Orleans residents were looting local homes and that a white woman was raped by a black man in a parking lot in broad daylight…
…In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the rumors appear to be coming from residents who are unable to grasp the experiences shared by the mostly poor, black storm victims evacuated from New Orleans, said pop-culture expert Elayne Rapping, professor of American studies at the University of Buffalo…
…"White people are starting these rumors to blame the victim," said Rapping. "They don’t understand that the citizens from New Orleans are scared to death and powerless. What’s happening is racism, the major problem of our country. These kinds of rumors are deadly…"
…Something else that could be fueling the rumors, said Stefan Schulenberg, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Mississippi, is misinformation and mistrust. Residents who cannot relate to what many New Orleans storm survivors have endured — from losing a home to struggling for survival to being without food and water for days — assume the worst…
