|
Who
Are the Looters?
A year after
hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans we look at what was a media
obsession at the time.
|
What is the first priority of government in
the wake of disaster? Saving lives? Looking after the survivors?
Disposing
of the dead and preventing epidemics? Think again. At best these things
come second. The first priority of government
in the wake of disaster is exactly the same as its first priority at
other times: maintaining or restoring "order" - that is,
its powers of coercion. Moreover, the first purpose of "order" is to
protect and enforce property rights. From this point of view,
the main threat posed by disasters like Hurricane Katrina is not the
threat to human life and health, to the environment,
or even to the economy. It is the threat of "chaos," the threat to
"order" and "civilization," but above all to property, arising
from the temporary breakdown of government.
The "looter" symbolizes and dramatizes this threat, conjuring up
images of Viking warriors on the rampage, barbaric
violence, evil incarnate. Of course, these particular "Vikings" were
all the more terrifying for being black. In the days that
followed the hurricane, the media stirred up racist fears of the poor
black people ofNew Orleans, spreading rumours (the fashionable
expression is "urban myths") later shown to be exaggerated out of all
proportion, if not completely unfounded. For
example, in the week following Katrina the number of murders was
average for the city (four) (see Ivor van Heerden and Mike
Bryan, The Storm, pp. 124-8).
All in all, we shouldn't be too shocked or too surprised to learn
that at 7 p.m. on Wednesday August 31, 2005 martial
law was declared in the flooded city. Mayor Ray Nagin told police
officers to stop rescuing people and focus solely on
the job of cracking down on looters. This was just two and a half days
after the hurricanemade landfall and with thousands of
people still stranded in attics and on rooftops.
In one typically heroic encounter, police officers chased down a
woman with a cart of supplies for her baby, handcuffed
her - and then didn't know what to do with her. All the jails were
flooded. By the end of the week that problem was solved. A
new makeshift jail was set up at the Greyhound bus terminal, with
accommodation for 750 prisoners. This was the first institution in the
city to resume normal functioning.
True, it could have been worse. After the San Francisco
earthquake of 1906 people were shot dead as looters while foraging
in the wreckage of their own homes (see G. Hansen and E. Condon, Denial
of Disaster, 1989). .
Why did people loot? Or to use less loaded language, why did they take
things that didn't belong to them without paying
for them?
One man answered a TV interviewer who had asked him why he was
looting by asking in turn: "Can you see anyone to
pay?" The stores had been abandoned by their operators, but people
still needed the things stored there. They needed food and
fresh water, dressings for their wounds, new clothes to replace those
ruined by exposure to the "toxic gumbo" of the
floodwaters. Most of the so-called looting was of this kind - for the
satisfaction of desperate need. In any sane society that
would be a good enough reason for taking things.
“the looters of New
Orleans are keeping
up an old American
tradition and should
receive credit as
good patriots”
|
Two paramedics from San Francisco who found themselves trapped in
New Orleans wrote about the Walgreens store
on the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the French quarter. The
owners had locked up and fled. Milk, yogurt, and
cheese could be seen through the window in the dairy display case,
spoiling in the heat.
Should we expect the parents of hungry and thirsty children not
to break in, even at the risk of being pursued by the
police? Would they have been good parents had they failed to do all in
their power to see to their children's needs? And what of
storeowners who choose to let food go to waste rather than give it to
needy neighbours?
My first impulse is to wax lyrical about the sheer meanness of
their behaviour. But probably they made no such conscious
choice. As businesspeople they must have thought of the food and drink
in their store not as products for assuaging hunger
and thirst, but merely as commodities for profitable sale. If they
could no longer be sold they might just as well go to waste.
There were looters who acted not just for themselves and their
families but for the benefit of the local community. For
instance, the young men who collected medical supplies from a Rite Aid
for distribution among elderly neighbours. Or the
man who distributed food from a Winn- Dixie store to the 200 or so
people holed up at the Grand Palace Hotel. "He was trying
to help suffering people, and the idea that he was looting never
crossed his mind."
|
“Looting
is as
American as
cherry pie”
|
Socially responsible people
of this kind are sometimes described as
"commandeering" or "requisitioning" the goods they seize. That may well
be how they view their own actions. In legal terms, however, only
government officials, as representatives
of duly constituted authority, have the right to commandeer or
requisition property in an emergency. Private citizens who
do so, whatever their motives, are engaging in theft and may be
penalized accordingly.
Consider the feat of Jabar Gibson. This resourceful young man,
purely on his own initiative, found a bus that was still in
working order (the city authorities assumed that all buses had been
ruined by the floodwater), took charge of it, filled it
up with evacuees, and drove them to Houston.
This was the first busload of evacuees to reach Houston after the
storm (at 10 p.m. on Wednesday August 31). The police
were forewarned that a "renegade bus" was on its way; if they had
intercepted it Jabar might have been arrested and charged with theft.
Fortunately he was in luck: he got through to his destination, to be
greeted by Harris County Judge Robert Eckels. Presumably his crime has
been forgiven.
Of course, not all looters were responding to real personal,
family, or community needs. Some were simply taking
a rare opportunity to acquire coveted though non -essential consumer
goods. For others looting (and shitting in) fancy stores
was a form of social protest or "empowerment," an outlet for pent-up
anger against the endlessly advertised world of affluence
from which they felt excluded. Finally, there was a phenomenon
that I propose calling "entrepreneurial looting."
Entrepreneurial looters gathered assets with a view to later sale. As
they got stuff for free, they could sell at any price and
still make a profit. For
example, "urban foresters" went after valuable lumber. Other
entrepreneurs sold looted liquor. The
cases of large-scale organized looting by armed groups (their weapons
also probably looted) that received so much publicity
must, I think, have been of this character. Brinkley reports an
interesting conversation between Lieutenant Colonel
Bernard McLaughlin of the Louisiana National Guard and a man selling
liquor at a makeshift bar. When McLaughlin tells
the bartender he is shutting him down, the man replies that he is "just
being entrepreneurial."
Why shouldn't he make some money? McLaughlin gets angry at this
appeal
to "true American" values. "This is looting. You looted that... That's
a 15-year felony. That's a 3-year mandatory minimum sentence." The man
submits and McLaughlin proceeds to smash his bottles one by one. And
yet the preceding account makes clear that McLaughlin's real objection
to such bars has nothing to do with the provenance of the alcohol. He
doesn't want the locals drinking alcohol because it
makes them more quarrelsome and disorderly as well as further
dehydrating their bodies. Would he have allowed the bar to
stay open if it was selling - or giving away - only looted fruit juice,
soda, and bottled w
ater? Legally, however, looting remains "a 15-year felony," be its
social consequences good or bad. Property is sacred.
The bartender might also have tried to point out in his defence
that
historically all capitalist enterprise is based on looting.
Early capitalism looted land
and other resources from peasants (in Europe) and from indigenous
peoples (throughout the
Americas and other colonial territories).The looting even extended to
the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of
human beings, such as the ancestors of most victims of Hurricane
Katrina. Marx called it the primitive accumulation of capital.
Looting is as American as cherry pie; the looters of New Orleans
are keeping up an old American tradition and should surely
receive all due credit as good patriots. But... it depends on whose
possessions you loot, doesn't it?
STEFAN
(Sources: Douglas Brinkley, The Great
Deluge (New York: HarperCollins, 2006);
Understanding Katrina website (understandingkatrina.ssrc.org), Kaufman.)
|
|