New Orleans crime scene

Much has been made about the recent shootings in New Orleans and the crime spike that the city has seen since the New Year.

I don't think that calling in the Guard is a good idea. Military policing and civil policing are two different topics. Many of our good military police troops are also civil police officers, so they know the difference, but having mulitiple chains of command in a civil operation is never a good thing. It's not that I don't think that the Guard can handle the job. Quite the contrary. They'll do a great job. My complaint is that they shouldn't be asked to do the job that the civil authorities should have done all along.

A couple of summers ago, my last summer on the line, Toby Keith's song Beer for my Horses was in the top 40. The lyrics are applicable to the situation in New Orleans today:

We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds.
We've got too much corruption, too much crime in the streets.
It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send 'em all to their maker and he'll settle 'em down.
You can bet he'll set 'em down. cause

Justice is the one thing you should always find.
You got to saddle up your boys,
You got to draw a hard line.
When the gun smoke settles we'll sing a victory tune.
We'll all meet back at the local saloon.
We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces,
Singing whiskey for my men, beer for my horses.

During my trip to the Gulf Coast this spring, I was struck by how much damage had been done to the infrastructure, to the physical assets that make us a civilization. In parts of New Orleans, the devastation was total. Places along the Gulf Coast looked like a frontier, with folks living in tents and trying to get electricity back to their property. They were living like pioneers lived in the 19th century.

Life is rough in some of those places. It should come as no surprise that criminals have entered in to those places, taking advantage of the disarray. Ray Nagin and Chief Riley should deal with the criminal element simply, unambiguously, and ruthlessly. This is no time for giving criminals the benefit of the doubt. It's time to saddle up the boys and draw a hard line.