apathy

i read on one of the nola.com forum posts that this guy was held up at gunpoint on st. philip near royal and that the bellhop from the hotel just up the street witnessed the crime but did nothing. he went back into the hotel without so much as calling the police and notice i did not say 911, which is still pretty much broken. later the victim was told by someone that "if you live long enough in new orleans, you learn not to see anything." ok people, i know we are all scared of retribution if we do step in but aren't we scared all the time anyway? i'm nervous to ride my fucking bike now(though i intend to do it)and since i work in the french quarter, i am now nervous to walk alone there. i can't afford a body guard for crying out loud. something has to give. we cannot stay huddled in our houses for fear of going out into the streets and we no longer feel safe in our homes when we hear devastating news like jessica hawk being stabbed to death in her own home. it is enough. fear or no fear, we are going to have to get involved. we are being held hostage in this city. we have to take a stand! if you see a crime happening, call the damn police. you don't have to tell them who you are but for crying out loud, do not let a fellow new orleanian be a victim. the life you save may be your own because unless we present a united front and fight back, it is only a matter of time before we are ALL victims. i'm sick of living in a war zone. i should be able to ride my bike at night without feeling as though i need mad max gear. damn! and we all know that the police are not helping so start raising unholy hell with the higher ups. bombard jindal and all our representatives that new orleans is in crisis and we need outside help. we need a shake down of the police force. we need a new police chief. we need a new mayor. we need some fucking help down here. i sincerely hope to see you all at the protest this friday night out front of the ritz on canal. whatever you have going on on that night, DROP it! this is more important. do it for jessica hawk. do it for shavers. do it for the guy who got his head bashed in with concrete. do it for helen hill. do it for the countless others that have died or been victimized in this endless war. rise up and make some fucking noise.

our city's finest

i went down to my district's police station to file a report on the assault in the hopes of getting more patrols in the area. instead the officer informed me that where the incident happened was out of their district. huh?? come again?? now i know damn well that it was not out of her district but she wasn't budging so i did as she instructed and went to the st. claude police station. this is not going to end well. once there, the officer refused to file a report because their jurisdiction ends at elysian fields and she directed me to the police station that i had already been to. huh?? omg!!! this is why no one ever files a police report or why they don't trust the nopd...wait, oh i remember now, that stands for "not my problem dude." indeed. i am convinced that this is how they keep the crime stats lower than we ALL know they are. half of the shit that we hear about is only because concerned citizens are telling other concerned citizens in the hopes of keeping each other safe. that's right folks, we cannot rely on the nopd for shit, so you better make nice with the neighbors because they just might save your life. take care everybody and don't forget to gear up like fucking mad max. it is one screwed up banana republic out there.

alert

this is a warning to anyone in the marigny/bywater areas. what happened to me the other night was not an isolated incident. i now know of at least 7 other incidents, so be careful. if anyone is actually reading this, please help get the word out so we can protect each other. thanks.

PISSED

spoke the cat is angry. i'm disgusted and fed up. last night i was biking home from work and when i passed two young guys, one of them threw something heavy at me. it nailed me in the spine between my shoulder blades. it hit me so hard that it almost knocked me off my bike and it certainly knocked the breath out of me. i'm grateful that it didn't hit me in the head as i am certain it would have knocked me out. now i know that kid did not think five seconds past throwing that and this is what i see as the heart of our crime problem. we are raising children who see no future. by the time most of these kids are 16, how many people have they seen gunned down? how many friends or members of their family have they lost to the violence? i believe it must be hard to see the value in life when there is so much death. i feel it is damn near impossible to opt for a different path. this is a war zone. it is a self generating cycle of violence. now, i'm not excusing that kid's behavior and if i could get my hands on him, i would kick his miserable ass from one end of new orleans to the next but what i am saying is has he learned or been taught anything different. this incident happened at 11 last night and why was he even allowed to be running the streets at that hour? where were his parents? where was anyone that might be concerned that he was not home asleep and safe? we have an epidemic of children raising children and we have to break that cycle. our schools also have to stop failing our children. stop worrying about the leap test and be more concerned that we are graduating functionally illiterate kids. what options do they have when reading on a 5th grade level? well, they can work at mcdonalds for 8 hours a day and go home the the smell of fried food clinging to them or they can start dealing like their big brother who was shot at the age of 21. the pay is not bad and the hours are flexible. just the other day a boy was caught at school with a gun and weed. this emphasizes the lack of forward thinking. i doubt he thought five seconds past taking it. there are no consequences if you live in the present only. we as a city clearly cannot count on the police. and it is too late to make a difference after the shooting when going forward with your testimony can get you killed or at the very least, get your car fire bombed like what happened to my neighbor. we as a city must start reaching the kids. we have to give them a way out. we have to give back their futures or we will continue to lose people like jessica hawk and countless children that had such potential when they came into the world. if we don't do this we will continue to be held hostage in our own communities, afraid to leave the damn house and too scared to stay in it. fuck. i still think that bastard desrves an ass kicking, a little lesson in cause and effect.

sick

spoke the cat is sick. heart sick. i think i hate the month of august.

danziger 7

it is a damn shame when our police officers can shoot someone in the back several times and get away with it. my god! there is something wrong here. there is something broken. the murder rate is soaring and yet i am more afraid of the police than i am of my neighborhood drug dealers. i used to call the police about the dealing until they pushed me up against my own house and threatened to arrest me. i used to call the police until they told the drug dealers that i was the one that called them. i love those new nopd commercials that are so slick because i think what a fucking beautiful piece of propaganda! such bull shit. and now another beautiful person is gone, the victim of our broken society. do you remember when we all marched on city hall? we were fed up. we were sick of the violence. we were tired of the blood in our streets. horrified by the images in our heads. well how many bodies later is it?? how many more murders have there been? and we have all settled back into our complacency, myself included. fuck. this city is broken. this fucking city is broken. and all we get for our trouble are platitudes the comforting knowledge that the police can shoot you in the back and walk away clean.

freaking out in august

does any one else have a bad case of the jitters? i know summer in new orleans is damn near impossible and this malaise settles over the city like los angeles smog but i have been way more out of sorts. i can't sleep and when i do, i have horrible dreams. i am walking around like a zombie. i'm fucking things up left and right...just ask my girlfriend, if she's still my girlfriend and god i hope she's still my girlfriend. i don't think i made the connection until i began talking with several of my friends, none of which have been sleeping, and one person mentioned the approach of the dreaded anniversary of the disaster. you can't help but think what you were doing this time in 2005. who your friends were. where you worked. where you lived. decadence was coming as was the promise of cooler weather. the heat can't last forever right? and then august 29th and BAM, the world as we knew it ended. i still have missing friends and i don't know if they moved away or drowned. i doubt i will ever know but i think about them a lot this time of year. i think about all the ones we have lost since then as a result of violence, stress, or depression. the ones that over dosed or killed themselves and others. sometimes i think that it's not even right to be here in the month of august, that maybe the whole city should just shut down and remember but we don't ever forget, do we? we go on and we do it with style. we will dance half naked in the streets during decadence. we will dance because we can. we will dance because so many of us can't. because the streets are no longer flooded. see ya there.