Watching KVille

The FBI announced today that New Orleans no longer has to worry about the potential destruction of new condos.

Huh? Oh, let me provide a little backstory. Back in December (that’s 2007), some threatening posters started showing up around the central business district. These posters had a picture of a burning building as the background and signed “The Angry & Powerless.”

Both the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and the New Orleans PD worked on the case, and as of today, NOLA is safe from the Angry & Powerless.

From the FBI Press Release March 13, 2008: As the FBI takes all threats seriously an investigation was immediately launched by the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and NOPD to determine if there was any merit to the threats. Suspects were identified and agents found that no adverse action was planned. The FBI has concluded after its long and arduous investigation that there is no threat to public safety as it relates to the above threat.

These posters started popping up after some demonstrations in New Orleans in early December. Seems that developers are looking at New Orleans as prime real estate now that the poor (read Angry & Powerless) have been effectively kicked out of town with the help of a hurricane.

So with the rest of the country having housing problems, double that problem for New Orleans. Buildings that are damaged are being slated for demolition, rather than repair. The issue is that many of these buildings are apartment buildings for low-income residents. You know, the projects. Sorry, that may be unfair to call all of these buildings “projects”, but I am using that term ironically, as who knew that poor people would ever protest against the demolition of the low-income housing units that are usually not much more than the bare minimum when it comes to living space.

Still, these buildings are home for some people. And now those same people are concerned that as low-income housing is torn down, the new units will not be so cheap. First, Mother Nature (with the fury of fossil fuel-derived elevated atmospheric heat, which equals energy, which in turn equals force and ferocity) comes along and displaces the New Orleans poor, and now the Government is backing development plans which don’t figure in the appropriate amount of low-income housing units. All this after years of corrupt city and state, along with the federal, government ignoring the impending doom coming at New Orleans from the Gulf. Engineers, scientists, and conservationists had been warning that Louisiana’s shrinking wetlands buffer meant that a Class 4 or 5 hurricane could and would decimate the city.

New Orleans, FBI, NOPD, Angry & Powerless, Anti-Demolition, Protests, low-income housing, hurricanes

Cole Hauser plays Trevor Cobb, new partner to Anthony Anderson’s Marlin Boulet. Trevor escaped from a flooded prison and joined the army before joining the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) and becoming a cop. Cole is working hard to play an authentic NOPD officer.

According to this article at CanMag.com, Cole has been spending time with the real NOPD as research.

“They do things differently in New Orleans, different than around the country as far as the cops I’ve been around, whether it be New York or Los Angeles,” said Hauser. “It’s just a different style. As far as playing characters that are cops in New Orleans, it’s the best kind of cop you can play. The fact is that in doing things different and being around and just the actual place that we’re at in the French Quarter and dealing with Louisiana and Ninth Ward, New Orleans East and seeing the things that these guys go through.”

Some of the actors have been allowed to travel with the police, even with SWAT, and get to see how the officers work and what it is like to arrest someone. In addition to getting a close-up introduction to the criminal element in New Orleans, the actors are getting to know the freakshow that is night-time New Orleans (and I say that affectionately).

Even in good times, New Orleans presents a different kind of perp. “It’s the people they’re dealing with. You have to understand like the French Quarter, everybody thinks New Orleans is the French Quarter. You go down there, everybody is drinking, you’re talking about a city that is partying 24/7 and the people that they’re dealing with, the perps that they’re dealing with, most people are either on drugs in that quarter or drinking out of their mind. So the people that they’re dealing with are just, pardon the expression, but out of their minds drunk.”

I’m glad these guys are in New Orleans making this show. The NOPD has had some bad publicity, some of it very much deserved, but they cops in New Orleans are mostly good people with a really hard and dangerous job. I’m hoping K-Ville with shed a little light on the real NOPD just as much as I hope that K-Ville will shed some light on the real NOLA.