Some say

Last updated on: October 12, 2005 at 5:30 pm by Fred Clark

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Some say 2005-10-12T17:30:07-04:00 Fred Clark

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The New Orleans police are under a lot of stress. As the AP's Mary Foster reports:

Their homes are gone, their families scattered, their reputations sliding by the day.

Home for most New Orleans police officers is a cramped cruise ship, and work is 12- to 14-hour days in a wrecked city. When time off does come along, there is nowhere to go and no one to spend it with.

Experts say the personal and professional upheaval is catching up with the New Orleans police force in the form of desertions, suicides, corruption and the videotaped beating over the weekend of an allegedly drunken man.

So they're under a great deal of stress. I get that.

What I don't get is this: Why is it that white cops under such awful stress never seem to blow off steam by beating the shit out of a white guy?

Stress isn't the only, or even the most important, motive at work in this beating. (CNN has video here.) But the AP report offers only a vague, sideways hint at the more important factor — all the way at the end of the article:

[The victim] is black. The three city police officers are white. The U.S. Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation Monday.

On CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," Alina Cho pondered "what role race may have played in this incident."

Alina Cho, of course, is just a reporter — a fact-and-value-neutralsponge — and therefore cannot speculate on this subject herself. So instead she presents two opposing views. Sort of:

Now, there has been a lot of talk around here and around the country, for that matter, about whether race was an issue in all of this. After all, the officers involved were white and the suspect was black. The police chief, Warren Riley, tells me that he has no evidence to support that.

Reporters have become reluctant to state the obvious. They can't even tell you what they just witnessed with their own eyes without pretending to attribute this "opinion" to someone else — even if that attribution is as ridiculously vague as "there has been a lot of talk" or "some have said."

A bunch of white cops beat an unarmed black senior citizen to a bloody pulp on national television. Some are saying racism may have been a factor.

A man jumps from a bridge and falls to his death. Some are saying gravity may have been a factor.

P.S.: The victim, Russell Davis, is a 64-year-old retired schoolteacher. Davis has been charged with public intoxication.

Public intoxication. On Bourbon Street. That's not a misdemeanor, it's a $1 billion/year industry — a pillar of the city's economy.

The residents of New Orleans, like the police, have also been under a great deal of stress during the past six weeks. Getting buzzed seems like a reasonable coping mechanism for these stressed-out residents. It's certainly a better way of blowing off steam than, say, beating the holy hell out of a retired schoolteacher. (A retired schoolteacher whose lawyer, by the way, insists that his client had not been drinking.)

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