FIRE ON THE LEVEE

A winding account of a notorious murder in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

In 2005, the mega-storm famously destroyed low-lying Black sections of New Orleans, mostly due to failed infrastructure. Across the Mississippi River, the “often-overlooked” Algiers community was on comparatively high ground and isolated by floodwaters. When looting broke out, the police responded with violence, writes Fishman, a former federal prosecutor and founder of Justice Innovation Lab. In one instance, an officer shot a 31-year-old Black man named Henry Glover as he approached a store. Glover’s body, in the absence of mortuary services, was put in an abandoned car that was torched alongside the river: “All that remained was a skull, some ribs, and a leg bone.” The police closed ranks to cover up involvement, and a long series of hearings and trials, which Fishman recounts with too much detail, did not deliver the desired outcome for all involved: Some officers went to jail, but some walked. Going on the ground to interview witnesses, the victim’s family, some perpetrators, and the poor fellow who had to keep making payments on the burned car, Fishman constructs a careful case of his own. In the end, he warns, the Glover case shows “what can happen when our institutional systems fail, and the worst impulses of humanity spin out of control.” In closing, the author notes that New Orleans has since reformed some of its police procedures to the point that it is now proselytizing for more humane, less violent encounters and more community policing. Ironically, however, this reform affects a city that is substantially less Black than before Katrina, and there remains plenty of police resistance to the mandated constraints. Retired officers, notes the author, often complain that “if we want to stop crime…unshackle the police and let them police the way they want to.”

A cautionary tale of unchecked police power and failed justice.