‘Racist’ police blocked bridge and forced evacuees back at gunpoint
A Louisiana police chief has admitted that he ordered his officers to block a bridge over the Mississippi river and force escaping evacuees back into the chaos and danger of New Orleans. Witnesses said the officers fired their guns above the heads of the terrified people to drive them back and “protect” their own suburbs.
Two paramedics who were attending a conference in the city and then stayed to help those affected by the hurricane, said the officers told them they did not want their community “becoming another New Orleans”.
The desperate evacuees were forced to trudge back into the city they had just left. “It was a real eye-opener,” Larry Bradshaw, 49, a paramedic from San Francisco, told The Independent on Sunday. “I believe it was racism. It was callousness, it was cruelty.”