New Orleans Finest turning themselves in for murder charges.
Admitting a cover-up of shocking breadth, a former New Orleans police supervisor pleaded guilty to a federal obstruction charge on Wednesday, confessing that he participated in a conspiracy to justify the shooting of six unarmed people after Hurricane Katrina that was hatched not long after police stopped firing their weapons.
The guilty plea of Lt. Michael Lohman, who retired from the department earlier this month, contains explosive details of the alleged cover-up and ramps up the legal pressure on police officers involved in the shooting and subsequent investigation. It’s unclear when Lohman’s cooperation with federal authorities began, but he presumably is prepared to testify against the officers he says helped him lie about the circumstances of a shooting he immediately deemed a “bad shoot.”
Lohman, who pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to obstruct justice, admits he failed to order the collection of evidence or canvassing of witnesses, helped craft police reports riddled with false information, participated in a plan to plant a gun under the bridge and lied to investigators who questioned police actions…
In a news conference after Lohman’s plea, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said police must be held to the law.
“Police officers are there to protect us, and to protect the most vulnerable among us,” he said. “Their jobs are to help individuals and protect us, not to hurt us. Sadly, sadly, we come across in the course of our work here…officers who violate their oaths of office, who occasionally violate their duties, violate their commitment to serve the public. And we take actions against those individuals wherever they violate federal law. We will continue to do that.”
RTFA. A long and detailed narrative of corruption, conspiracy and cronyism.
I am not a lawyer, IMO, I think that there would be mitigating circumstances in their case since it was a time of great chaos and destruction – almost a war like situation. These were no trained combat hardened soldiers and therefore were acting above and beyond their training capability. I hope that they are exonerated, maybe with a little bit of community service.
Cool, Santa, I hope that if I kill somebody in a time of stress you’ll stick up for me, too.
The NOPD has been a hot bed of really bad cops since the federal judge required them to hire two black officers for every one white officer hired.
BAU for the NOPD. No surprise here.
#3 Thanks for providing the racist viewpoint, GigG.
Welcome to the Police States of America, where the cops don’t have to obey the law, because they ARE the law.
How many of these bass turds have they NOT found yet?
Psst, GigG, if that was too obscure for your feeble brain, look at the race of the police officers and of the people they shot.
New Dick Wolf series: Law & Order, Special Unit Victims
Welcome to New Orleans.
#1 N.O. Cops and Politicians were corrupt before Katrina.
But we still sending them Billions of dollars in aid.
This is just the very tippity tip of the iceberg. unless you have experienced first hand, being on the receiving end 100% intentionally false charges, you’ll always think “ah there must have mitigating circumstances for their actions”
These type of actions are as old as civilization itself..nothing new really. -one need only look to our ancient roots of “law”, -the Roman Empire, to understand this fact.
What has helped accelerate the corruption to “ludicrous speed” today, is how easy it is to “create money” (and subsequently, buy off any position in the system coupled with the lowering of hiring standards to basically zero across *all* sectors of the economy and civil structures. this has allowed the most corrupt of elements to be maneuvered into top positions overtime ease.
The icing on the cake was long, methodical programming of the masses to care only about their immediate sphere of view and nothing more. -esp that of their local community and its associated civil structures. (ie: the me me me generation.[on steroids])
This is especially true of city dwellers… (-of which I am one)
Their are plenty of honest, morally intact people in civil employ, however, the current “script” called for those cut from the opposite cloth to be fast tracked to the top over time.
I believe what we have been seeing this past year and a half with the explosion of corruption being revealed at breakneck speed throughout all levels of civil and government structures, is the initial collapse of systems that top-heavy with corrupt individuals to ensure the manipulation and passage of various agendas sent down from the very top by those who have always pulled the strings from behind the curtain.
End result: “When you spit in the wind, it comes back at you twice as hard.”
—
Do not rest easy in thinking, “aha! -the law has prevailed in the end, Good has triumphed once again over Ebil, -so there!”
-for this may be just another distraction to replace those with a history of corruption, with new “clean” corrupt individuals with little or no background [loyal to the same puppet masters nonetheless] for which many are easily fooled into thinking, “well if they have no [bad] record, they must be good people”
Sound logic would dictate this to be done during the final phases of any such plan of this type, -whether it’s ultimate intention is good or bad.
-anyway…
“Caveat Emptor”
-s
bah! -i read through that twice and still left out words and brackets which I thought I corrected… –#%@$!! ‘xcuse the grammatical please
-s
(and why does it always screw up the formatting if you delete/edit some words, -yet still looks physically good in the comment box prior to hitting submit?
[does it double up line feeds and carriage returns on edits??] -ruins the whole “feel” of the words.
*sigh*
-s
Phydeau,
I realize that the cops in question were white. That isn’t the point. The point is that the NOPD was forced to hire a bunch of people that weren’t qualified and all of the qualified officers, both white and black, left the department in droves.
#1 “I think that there would be mitigating circumstances in their case since it was a time of great chaos and destruction – almost a war like situation.”
We had police, and firemen from all over the country plus National Guard, Army, etc. down here. One organization was involved in shootings, the NOPD.
I am grateful we have Jim Letten he has cleaned up more crap down here than a stable hand.
“New Orleans Coppers Planted Evidence, Lied About Katrina Shootings”
SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for those ass holes.
10, 11
No problem, not interested in your drivel anyway.
Just another day at the office in The Big Easy.
Hey… I have an idea.
Let’s have these guys run healthcare too!
What could go wrong?
Hey, dvorak.org
If you are going to use our servers to show your image of the New Orleans police, instead of copying the image and placing it on your servers, then at least you could put a link to the page where you found the image.
We do pay for the bandwidth you use.
We could have pulled the image leaving you with nothing to show, but we didn’t because it’s like we care that people know about these things.
There is a good in-depth report on our page on the Danziger bridge cover-up killings.
It’s included on this page here:
http://thewe.cc/weplanet/news/americas/us/new_orleans_after_katrina.html
# 3 GigG says
“The NOPD has been a hot bed of really bad cops since …” well, basically, since we started trying to treat all people as human beings. But I believe it goes a ways farther back than that. History indicates that “the NOPD has actually been a hotbed of really bad cops” since the French arrived in Louisiana.
#19, Uncle P.,
Well, for my 2 cents, I would have said ever since Grant removed all the Union troops from the South.
these government thugs (cops) claimed they were afraid for their lives from these unarmed black men, i hear the same tune everywhere i go in the United Racists States of America…
black men w/o guns is far scarier to white people than white men w/ guns
police are Armed & Dangerous…
i don’t trust any of them, b/c i never know when they will plant evidence & falsify police reports & lie for each other…
there are too many of these incidences to continue to say “most” cops are “good” cops, it’s just a few “rogue” cops that make it bad for the rest of them…not…its institutional, this is a common occurrence that is finally getting exposed…
@ any time, police will try to cover up & lie about their devious actions, cops are not intelligent if they think they are going to CONTINUE getting away with their criminal behavior…
@ least these cops can rot away in a New Orleans jail where they should be @ home b/c they will be around their own kind, probably a lot of them they lied to put in there…
i would suggest going back & checking all of these cops “arrests”, i guarantee they’ll find more cover-ups…