The Big Easy - Easy On Rapists. Police Execution in El Paso.

There's always been a seedy undercurrent to New Orleans - everything from street hustlers to corrupt politicians.  It's part of the flavour of the place.

Now it turns out the Big Easy has been going easy on rapists thanks to a municipal detective squad that couldn't care less.

... a city inspector general’s report claims five detectives failed to do substantial investigation of more than 1,000 cases of sex crimes and child abuse — with one detective being cited for stating a belief that simple rape should not be considered a crime.

The US Justice Department previously investigated the scandal-plagued police force and in 2012 the city agreed to a host of changes in its policies. Among the federal probe’s major findings were that the police force was rife with corruption and had numerous instances of excessive use of deadly force, discrimination and problems with its sex crimes unit. A federal monitor is overseeing compliance.

The latest city report charged that a detective handling child abuse failed to investigate a case involving a three-year-old brought to an emergency room due to an alleged sexual assault, closing the case without any charges even though the child had a sexually transmitted disease. The same detective closed the book with minimal or no investigation, and again with no charges, on two cases involving children brought to the emergency room with fractured skulls, the report said.

Another detective, this one assigned to handle sex crimes, allegedly told several people that simple rape should not be considered a crime, the report charged. Simple rape happens when a person has sex with someone without their consent.

When you consider the number of officials, other than these detectives themselves, who must have had some notion of what was going on or not going on, it makes you wonder if this isn't a sign of a general descent into chaos.  

Vice News brings this story of an El Paso cop shown on video as executing a handcuffed man.



The relevant part of the video begins around the 18:00 mark.  To compound this blatant police killing, the department set up a wall of obfuscation.

 The bullet went through Saenz's left shoulder and into his chest, piercing his heart. The authorities called it an accident. They said that the guard knocked Flores as he pointed his drawn weapon, causing it to fire. They said that Saenz could have moved his cuffs to the front of his body and, with his strength, use them as a weapon. They said a taser would not suffice to subdue him. 

Always Wanted to Visit "The Big Easy"?

Many of us have at one time or another wanted to visit New Orleans, The Big Easy.  If you still want to go, you might want to go sooner rather than later.

Louisiana, you see, is experiencing a major problem with sea-level rise, far more than state officials expected.

Stunning new data not yet publicly released shows Louisiana losing its battle with rising seas much more quickly than even the most pessimistic studies have predicted to date.

While state officials continue to argue over restoration projects to save the state’s sinking, crumbling coast, top researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that Louisiana is in line for the highest rate of sea-level rise “on the planet.”

Indeed, the water is rising so fast that some coastal restoration projects could be obsolete before they are completed, the officials said.

When new data on the rate of coastal subsidence is married with updated projections of sea-level rise, the southeast corner of Louisiana looks likely to be under at least 4.3 feet of Gulf water by the end of the century.

That rate could swamp projects in the state’s current coastal Master Plan, which incorporated worst-case scenarios for relative sea-level rise calculated two years ago — which the new figures now make out-of-date.

Even heavily populated areas, such as New Orleans, appear to be sinking faster than expected, in fact even faster than some areas along the coast.

Southeast Louisiana — with an average elevation just 3 feet above sea level — has long been considered one of the landscapes most threatened by global warming. That’s because the delta it’s built on — starved of river sediment and sliced by canals — is sinking at the same time that oceans are rising. The combination of those two forces is called relative sea-level rise, and its impact can be dramatic.

It's a Trifecta - subsidence, coupled with sea level rise and then hit with hurricanes and storm surge.   After Hurricane Katrina some experts recommended that New Orleans simply be abandoned, surrendered to the sea and storms.   It's starting to look like they were right.  This guy probably still won't agree.