The Bridge To Gretna

Why Did Police Block Desperate Refugees From New Orleans?

(CBS) 
Oliver Thomas, president of the New Orleans City Council, calls that a “lame excuse.”

The day the Gretna police put the ban on pedestrians crossing the bridge into effect, he says, he was watching from his car.

“Hold on a second now. I can't walk across the bridge? And that's the state's bridge. Let's just get at the basic human rights. You got on the governor's bridge and stopped a Louisiana citizen from walking on the state's bridge. So who gave you the authority to stop that walk? It was non-violent. There weren't people walking with shotguns and rifles. They had to walk through shotguns and rifles,” says Thomas.

“It's not humane to intimidate women and children, old people, many who were on their last leg. If you could see the condition of people walking across the bridge, it was, literally the only way you could walk is one step at a time. But it was one calculated step at a time,” says Thomas.

Told that Gretna police felt they were facing an unruly crown and felt threatened, Thomas says, “They felt threatened by dehydrated, starved, tired people. Sounds like they need a new police force.”

“I'm sure that there were very good people. There were scared people. There were desperate people. And, unfortunately, contained within that crowd was a criminal element. That criminal element burned, looted, stole, threatened and terrorized,” says Mayor Ronnie Harris.

Thomas says people took advantage of the catastrophe throughout the region. “Guess what? There are people who do that. But do you penalize and victimize everybody else because of it?”

Chief Lawson had said: "We had no more to offer here than they did in New Orleans. We did not have food. We did not have water. We did not have shelters here."

Bradshaw's response: We weren't asking for food, water or shelter. We were asking for the ability to walk out of New Orleans."

“We did secure our community. I do not apologize for shutting the bridge down. You know my job and responsibility to this community is to make sure that it's safe, the people and their property are safe in this community,” Chief Lawson told the CBS News reporter after the incident.

People in Gretna aren’t apologizing either. Signs thanking the police chief and his department have sprouted in many of Gretna’s front yards. And the city council unanimously passed a resolution saying that “Allowing individuals to enter the city posed an unacceptable risk to the safety of the citizens of Gretna.”

The people of Gretna seem to be saying that there's a limit to compassion, that there is only so much you can do in circumstances like this to help people.

“Well, I think we're finding that out. I think we're finding that out in America right now, today,” says Thomas.

Does this say something about America?

“Katrina washed away a lot of veils and took a lot of face masks off. Your politics cannot be bigger than your humanity. And in this case, we didn't need politics. We needed humanity,” says Thomas.

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The Louisiana attorney general’s office is investigating whether laws were broken or civil rights were violated on the bridge to Gretna.