Order Out Of Chaos

Ed Bradley Speaks With New Orleans Police Chief Compass

(CBS)  Bradley asks how many of Compass' officers have not been accounted for.

"There's about 500 that haven't been accounted for," the chief responds. "Whether they have quit, whether they have perished in the storm. Whether they're with loved ones, you know. But we have 1,200 that we can account for."

Could one of those missing officers come to Compass and say, "Chief, look, I had to take care of my family." Or, "This is why I wasn't here." And could that person still be a part of the New Orleans Police Department?

"I can understand taking care of your family, and coming right back," says Compass. "I can understand that. But I cannot understand staying with your family while we were going through these conditions, and not backing us up."

He has called some of them cowards.

"I've called individuals who have shirked their responsibility to duty cowards," the chief says. "I wish I possessed a vocabulary large enough to find a word that depicts something worse than a coward. Because, when you look at the sacrifices that the men and women of this police department made that stayed. And for these individuals, not only did they not stay, they talked to the media and criticized the brave men and women that were standing tall and standing strong. Not only are they cowards, they're less than a coward."

To partially make up for the manpower shortage, Chief Compass is swearing in police academy cadets after only 10 weeks of training -- swearing them in wherever he finds them.

Although the rookies are welcome, veterans like Bruce Adams say that the New Orleans Police Department needs more than new recruits; they need something to identify themselves as police officers. Adams says none of them expected the crisis to last as long as it did. "So," he explains, "a lot of us had that one police shirt."

He could hardly believe it when he was told he had been wearing that shirt for 10 days.

"It's 10 days? … What day of the week is it? It's been 10 days?"

During those 10 days, most of the 480,000 people of New Orleans had been replaced by 14,000 people from police departments, state and federal agencies, and the U.S. military, in what looks like an occupation.

The city has been divided into grids so they can conduct a systematic search. An officer from the New Orleans Police Department explained the system to 60 Minutes which then went on a rescue mission with two trucks filled with National Guardsman and New Orleans vice cops who usually go after pimps and prostitutes.