Original at Booman Tribune.

Yesterday, January 11, between three and five thousand residents converged on New Orleans' City Hall, fed up over what they perceived as Mayor Nagin's, NOPD Superintendent Riley's and Orleans Parish DA Jordan's laissez-faire leadership regarding the burgeoning, almost unstoppable murder rate that claimed the lives of nine people, including Hot 8 Brass Band snare drummer Dinerral Shavers and filmmaker and mother Helen Hill who were murdered in front of their own families.

However, NOPD police shouldn't see this rally as support for some of their most egregious actions both before and after Katrina.  And while many blacks were among the protesters, the ones that truly needed to hear the revulsion and anger of their neighbors weren't there.  

No, not the murderers.  Of course, they don't give a shit.

It's the witnesses who refuse testify--or snitch--against them.

"Do you like my cowboy hat?"

The woman at Louis Armstrong Airport was heading back to Oregon, but right now she was beaming, holding out her camera to me. "I was just inside, admiring it on some guy, and he insisted I take it."

I snapped her photo, and she told me about her trip, the fun she'd had, the people she'd met, clearly intoxicated on the city, the experience, and perhaps a midday brew or two. "New Orleans people," she concluded, "are all so nice. They are the nicest."

She was on my flight, along with a member of the Portland Trail Blazers and an Oregon family who had come up for the LSU/Notre Dame game. As we were getting ready to deplane, they were talking: "The only thing that could have been better," one of them said, "was if the Irish had won."

"Well, look at the good side," somebody else said. "At least we didn't get shot at or murdered."

Original at Booman Tribune, with photo.

Dinerral Shavers is dead.

Hot 8 Brass Band drummer Dinerral Shavers, 25, was gunned down Thursday (December 28) while driving in Mid-City with his wife and two children.

[...]

He is the second member of the Hot 8 Brass Band to die a violent death in recent times. Bandmate Joseph "Shotgun Joe" Williams was gunned down by New Orleans police in Treme after he was stopped in a stolen truck en route to a funeral second line. That shooting angered community residents and Shavers was arrested after a confrontation with police.

No.  I'm not switching holidays.  This is not Hallowe'en night masking on New Year's.

Several people have spoken of this phenomenon, most notably former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia on an episode of Bill Maher's Real Time.  Smoke and Mirrors pointed this out thusly on October 17:

It's reported that there is a warehouse of bodies recovered, after being delivered at Charity Hospital in New Orleans with bullets to the back of their heads. The discovery has lead to former Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Foti - mentioned in these pages in past articles - who is now Attorney General of the State of Louisiana, asking for an independent investigation.

Well, now the curtain is rising on those 21 bodies.  And wouldn't you know that only some backwater newspapers are reporting it via the Associated Press?

And from what I have tried to ascertain (12/31), not WaPo, not the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times have brought this up.