http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-5/113972803522690.xmla good report by trymaine lee at nola.com/new orleans times-picayune called "haven and hell" abt new orleans evacuees being falsely accused for crime problem in houston:
The 15-year-old girl told police the men who raped her had New Orleans accents. No mistaking it. She said she recognized it the moment one of them jammed a gun in her face that day in mid-January and barked an order: Get in the van. She told police they drove her to a secluded area in southeast Houston and raped her until the sun came up.
Her story seemed to burst like a napalm bomb over a city already seething with months of tension since more than 150,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees arrived.
Radio and television programs were jammed with angry callers lambasting evacuees. Police tore through neighborhoods filled with New Orleanians, questioning innocent Katrina survivors while looking for the men the girl had described -- one with dreadlocks and three teardrop tattoos under his left eye, the other with a single braid stemming from his goatee. Thousands of fliers featured police sketches and a reward.
But a week after her story shocked the city, police said it was all a lie -- a cover for a consensual rendezvous with a man she met on the Internet.
when you hear people making up excuses for rushing people back to new orleans to neighborhoods where there is no electric, no hospital services, no housing, in some places where the houses still standing are shells that may look good to the photographer from california who doesn't have to live inside a rainy structure that could collapse at any time --
please remember this articlebecause when all the excuses are made, that's what a lot of the hysteria and scapegoating is all abt in my humble opinion, chasing people back out of their new locations because of the costs a sudden spurt in population puts on police services, roads, housing etc.
if i am cynical, if i sometimes feel "right of return" is being used as code for "right to throw people who have lost everything back in the ocean," then think of this article and maybe you can understand my cynicism a bit, as i think we are being manipulated w. false reports from both sides of the political spectrum
the article is very long, but read the whole thing
it is not all gloom and doom and the war of human against human, altho there is plenty of that, there is also a cute story of a police officer called out to check on a gathering of evacuees at 2 a.m. to discover they were having a gumbo boil :-)