New Orleans Leaders Confident Police Won't Repeat 2005 Exodus

NEW ORLEANS - New Orleans' police superintendent pledged Sunday that his officers would stay at their posts through Gustav, expressing confidence that the force would not repeat the desertions and breakdowns that scarred the department during Katrina.

About 200 officers — roughly 15 percent of the force — abandoned their posts or simply vanished during Katrina, some later found to have joined in the looting themselves. The images of police watching as stores were stripped bare humiliated the city.

"Every officer has an assignment, every officer knows where they're supposed to be, and the rule is simple: you desert, you go to jail," Superintendent Warren Riley said.

The department, still smaller than its pre-Katrina strength, was reinforced by National Guard military police and state troopers. Convoys of camouflaged trucks rolled through the empty French Quarter on Sunday afternoon.

Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew and warned that anyone caught looting would be booked directly into the city's jail — which itself was evacuated to higher ground.

Officers worked 12-hour shifts with orders to sleep at stations stocked with cots, food and generators. The city also established a special booking process so that arrests would not take officers off the street for long.

___

Associated Press writers contributed to this report.

RECOMMEND THIS STORY