New Orleans and Looting

I am coming back to this issue, despite/because of the posting last week 
from James Cohen, who raised the interesting issue of the relationship 
between poverty and acceptable behaviour. (Interesting within this is the 
position of the people and institutions who define what is acceptable – 
more on that below. Who has the power and the right to decide what is 
acceptable?). I think my headline here is that in Katrina – as with 
most/all disasters anywhere in the world – you can only understand what is 
going on in the disaster event by having a very good understanding of 
‘normal’ everyday life and how people existed before the trigger hazard 
strikes.

What I would say first off is that the key issue is not to EXCUSE violent 
behaviour, but to EXPLAIN it and UNDERSTAND it. This same confusion is 
apparent in policies on what creates terrorism, and a position that simply 
says it is not acceptable ends up with a policy correlate that attempts to 
deal with the problem through reciprocal (and much increased) violence 
which fails to deal with the causes (and as in the case of the UK bombings 
makes it worse…)

I really hope that some of the NSF funding for research on Katrina goes on 
the “looting” problem. This is because it is likely to be an issue in any 
major (even some minor?) urban disaster in the USA, e.g. earthquakes in 
California. Lessons must be learned, and of course may also be helpful in 
other countries.

So some thoughts on New Orleans, based on very crude data gleaned from the 
UK media.

1. There are different kinds of looting. It is meaningless to discuss it 
under one heading. Some is benevolent – “looters” were taking orders from 
people in the convention centre and then coming back with e.g. diapers and 
baby milk. Others were apparently seeking guns – we need to understand what 
for. Others for small comforts like the cigarette guy I mentioned last 
week. Still others were stranded people who took food and water and 
otherwise would have starved and dehydrated.

2. Some of the violent behaviour and looting may have been carried out by 
drug addicts and alcoholics desperate for their fixes. I have seen scant 
mention of this in the media in the UK. Given that the left-behind 
population of poor blacks would have included thousands of people addicted 
to drugs and alcohol, we have little idea what the impact on them is of a 
sudden inability to score their hits. This is another – perhaps crucial – 
type of looting: aimless? Random? Angry at the world, authority and anyone 
who gets in the way?

3. Those who have apparently fired on rescuers or US Corp of Engineers may 
not be the same as ‘looters’. Again we need a better understanding of what 
is going on here. In the UK there have been cases of Fire fighters being 
attacked when attending events in run down poor white areas. There is a 
POLITICS to this – it is perhaps a symptom of something that is going on in 
pre-disaster New Orleans that must be understood. (We also need to have a 
more subtle understanding of the moral hierarchy that the government 
discourse is pursuing here: firefighters in the USA and other countries in 
Europe have been known to start forest fires because they then get paid to 
put them out. As regards the police, I suspect that in New Orleans the 
people’s normal everyday experience of policing is less than positive, and 
this has been reinforced by the arrival of National Guard and deputies who 
are predominantly white to control people who are almost entirely black.

4. The city was already divided between gangs, and we have of course little 
idea what the impact of the disaster has been on their behaviour, including 
looting and violence. It would be interesting to know if there was any 
incipient use of these gang structures to organise relief in any parts of 
the city. I am not saying this to support gangs or advocate this as a 
policy area, but simply we need to understand in order to devise the best 
policies for future crises.

5. Lastly back to the moral issue. Ten years ago, poor people in northeast 
Brazil in the midst of a famine famously looted supermarkets in their midst 
in order to survive. Were they right? Was this appropriate? Longer ago in 
1943, Amartya Sen (Nobel economist) as a child witnessed people dying on 
his doorstep in Calcutta as a famine (driven mainly by British war policy 
in the face of Japanese invasion). He could not understand this because in 
his neighbourhood there were also stores of food that were full. Should 
those people have looted the warehouses rather than starved to death on the 
street outside? Last week Bush said that people in the Katrina zone would 
have to rely on themselves in their plight. (Does anyone have the exact 
quote – this should be recorded for posterity!). That is exactly what some 
of the ‘looters’ did in order to survive…

Terry Cannon
University of Greenwich