New Orleans

Well it appears Matt Welch was right — many of the initial reports of murders and rapes coming out of New Orleans were exaggerated, according to the Times-Picayune. But it’s also worth noting many of these media reports came from the “official word.”:

In many cases, authorities gave credibility to portraits of violence broadcast around the world.

[New Orleans Police Chief Eddie] Compass told [Oprah] Winfrey on Sept. 6 that “some of the little babies (are) getting raped” in the Dome. [Mayor Ray] Nagin backed it with his own tale of horrors: ”They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”

But both men have since pulled back to a degree.

“The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible,” Compass said, conceding his earlier statements were false. Asked for the source of the information, Compass said he didn’t remember.

Nagin frankly acknowledged that he doesn’t know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Dome and the Convention Center – and may never.

“I’m having a hard time getting a good body count,” he said.

Compass said rumors had often crippled authorities’ response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to respond to situations that turned out not to exist. He offered his own intensely personal example: The day after the storm, he heard “some civilians” talking about how a band of armed thugs had invaded the Ritz-Carlton hotel and started raping women – including his 24-year-old daughter, who stayed there through the storm. He rushed to the scene only to find that although a group of men had tried to enter the hotel, they weren’t armed and were easily turned back by police.

Compass, however, promulgated some of the unfounded rumors himself, in interviews in which he characterized himself and his officers as outgunned warriors taking out armed bands of thugs at every turn.

“People would be shooting at us, and we couldn’t shoot back because of the families,” Compass told a reporter from the (Bridgeport) Connecticut Post who interviewed him at the Saints’ Monday Night Football game in New York, where he was the guest of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. “All we could do is rush toward the flash.”

Compass added that he and his officers succeeded in wrestling 30 weapons from criminals using the follow-the-muzzle-flash technique, the story said.

“We got 30 that way,” Compass was quoted as saying.

Asked about the muzzle-flash story last week, Compass said, “That really happened” to Winn’s SWAT team at the Convention Center.

But Winn, when asked about alleged shootouts in a separate interview, said his unit saw muzzle flashes and heard gunshots only one time. Despite aggressively frisking a number of suspects, the team recovered no weapons. His unit never found anyone who had been shot.