Saturday, September 03, 2005

Nagin: Uh, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Uh, but we called for martial law when we realize that the looting was getting out of control. We redirected all of our police officers back to patrolling the streets. They were dirt...dead tired from saving people but they worked all night because we thought this thing was gonna blow wide open last night. And so we redirected all of our resources and we held it under check. I’m not sure if we can do that another night with the current resources. And I am telling you right now, they’re showing all these reports of people looting and doing all that weird stuff and they are doing that, but people are desperate and they’re trying to find food and water. The majority of them. Now, you got some knuckleheads out there and they are taking advantage of this lawless...this situation where we can’t really control it and they are doing some awful, awful things but that’s a small majority of the people. Most people are looking to try and survive. And you’ve gotta, one of the things, nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me. And that’s why we were having an escalation in murders. People don’t want to talk about this but I’m going to talk about it. You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix. And that’s the reason why they were breaking into hospitals and drug stores. They’re looking for something to take the edge of their jones, if you will. And right now they don’t have anything to take the edge off and they’ve probably found guns. So what you’re seeing is drug starving crazy addicts. Drug addicts that are wreaking havoc and we don’t have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we are not overrun.

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