posted on Sep, 20 2005 @ 09:55 PM
Whatever else he may have done before or since, Chief Pennington made great strides in rehabilitating a very corrupt police department in New Orleans.
The former mayor Marc Morial pushed through a law in the early nineties that made it mandatory for NOPD officers to live in the NO city limits. This
was a blatant racist action designed to limit the pool of prospective officers to blacks, because most of New Orleans is not safe for whites to live
in, especially when they live on a police officer's salary and have to enroll their kids in the notoriously egregious NO public school system. That
one law made certain that the vast majority of NOPD officers would lose their homes in a catastrophic storm and levee breech. Given the magnitude of
the personal loss for some officers, I'm sure that the choice of abandoning their jobs was justified. However, one source has reported that NOPD
cars have been found in Texas, Georgia and other states, some with the officers still in them. There won't be much in the way of justification for
that kind of action.