NOLA.com has a rather detailed report about some of the outrageous and incredible - too incredble, in many cases - incidents of violence that were reported to have occured at the Superdome and the Convention Center in New Orleans.
I have been interested in this story since the beginning, or at least pretty close to it. One reason I find the apparent exaggerations interesting is because I am very much concerned about how we can get accurate information. This is unfortunately another case where accurate information was hard to get - or maybe is now.
Basically, this is the situation as it stands: Despite the original reports of murder and rape (and the combination of the two) being common in both locations, there is no empirical evidence now, according to official sources as reported in this case by Times-Picayune writers, of any murders beyond possibly one. The article addresses the problem of establishing the prevalence of rape, but as for the murders, at least in the assesment of these authors, there is no support for several of the most widely repeated stories. There is also apparently disagreement between some of the actors in the events as to what happened, which may be in part due to another effect, which is that some of those same actors, notably Mayor Nagin and police chief Compass, seem to have said different things at different times. I will not at the moment speculate as to the source of those inconsistencies, though it is not hard to imagine reasons, some less generous than others. We also know that the state of empirical evidence, as reported by the authors, conflicts with quotes reported by journalists of evacuees and others (the article gives several examples, so I will skip citing examples here). Whether the innacuracy is due to the journalists or their subjects becomes the question; I would be surprised if it was due entirely to the journalists, but that is merely a guess, not a fact. Of course, in this case we are relying on journalists to report on mistakes made by journalists - which is not to throw all journalists together, but as an aggregate media television, newspaper, and Internet news does not have some sort of consistent and authoratative take on the whole matter, so if we were not inclined to accept the new reports as more readily substantiated, we would not have any reason to trust one journalist over another (though we might have reason to be more inclined to accept more recent reporting by a journalist than older reporting by the same journalist, at least in a case such as this).
Some questions this raises for me:
All of this time, I have been talking about the storied of violence. But what about the stories of people dying of dehydration, etc.? Again, a low number. Not many more than 14 for the two sites put together. The Convention Center had 4. How many people died because of slow action on the part of the government for evacuating people from these places? We don't know the exact number, but we may have just found an upper limit. We would do well to examine more the effects elsehwere in the city and the effectiveness of rescues from flooded areas. (In the interest of full disclosure, I believed there should be more, say maybe tens of people, to have died from natural causes. My ideological bias should be clear.)
(I saw the NOLA.com article thanks to a post on a blog titled "Adam Smith Lives!" by a Sandra Peart. She has links to more stuff on this, saving me the work of looking for it, or in this case, reading it. What a scary title! I must add.)
