NEW ORLEANS -About 250 police officers – roughly 15 percent of the force – will be investigated for leaving their posts without permission during Hurricane Katrina and the storm’s chaotic aftermath, a deputy police chief said Tuesday.
Deputy Chief Warren Riley said each case will be investigated individually to determine which officers were truly deserters and which had legitimate reasons for being absent.
“Everything will be done on a case-by-case basis. The worst thing we could do is take disciplinary action against someone who was stranded in the storm or whose child is missing,” Riley said.
The officers who are on a list will be investigated by the department’s internal affairs bureau and then referred to a review board that will likely include police commanders and civilians, Riley said.
Also on Tuesday, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals said 885 bodies of Katrina victims had been recovered, up from 841 as of Friday.
Mayor Ray Nagin told The Times-Picayune, which first reported the plan to review the missing officers’ cases, that the city attorney’s office will ensure that it falls within civil service regulations. The department has about 1,700 officers.
Lt. David Benelli, president of the Police Association of New Orleans, the union for rank-and-file officers, said true deserters should be fired.
“For those who left because of cowardice, they don’t need to be here,” Benelli told the paper. “If you’re a deserter and you deserted your post for no other reason than you were scared, then you left the department and I don’t see any need for you to come back.”
But Benelli said he believes only a small fraction of the officers will wind up being deserters.
“We know there were people who flat-out deserted,” he said. “But we also know there were officers who had to make critical decisions about what to do with their families.
Telephone calls from The Associated Press to the police department, the mayor’s office and the police union were not immediately returned on Tuesday.
Some lost their homes and some are looking for their families. “Some simply left because they said they could not deal with the catastrophe,” Riley said.
Tuesday marked the second day of the official reopening of New Orleans, which had been pushed back last week when Hurricane Rita threatened. Nagin welcomed residents back to the Algiers neighborhood on Monday, but imposed a curfew and warned of limited services.
A steady line of cars waited 20 to 25 minutes Monday to get through police checkpoints into the neighborhood of 57,000 people that largely escaped Katrina’s destruction, said police spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo. Defillo had no estimate of how many people had returned.
Only scattered handfuls of people even bothered to return to neighboring St. Bernard Parish. They came to salvage what they could from homes where the waters from Hurricane Katrina topped the attics, where mold is blooming on the walls and toxic sludge covers the floors. Many said they wouldn’t be back, not after the double blow of Katrina and Rita, which reflooded parts of the parish.
“There’s just too much devastation,” said Dionne Thiel who wept in the middle of her block. “There’s no way we could rebuild all this.”
Nagin also invited business owners in the central business district, the French Quarter and the Uptown section to inspect their property and clean up. But he gave no timetable for reopening those parts of the city to residents.
Power has been restored to portions of New Orleans, including Algiers, the French Quarter and the Central Business District, said Entergy Corp. spokesman Chanel Lagarde. The utility planned to restore power to parts of Uptown on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, pumps were draining water from the Ninth Ward, an area reflooded by during Hurricane Rita. The water receded to 2 to 4 feet in the neighborhood by Tuesday, said Mitch Frazier, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
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Associated Press writers Michelle Roberts and Dan Sewell contributed to this story.
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