Recently, former residents of New Orleans now living close to my town were interviewed for the newspaper. http://www.bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=120816&z=177. The husband had been an assistant DA in New Orleans. I knew that New Orleans had a lot of crime because I had considered moving there to do tax work several years ago and researched the area. But, I was still shocked to learn that, according to this prosecutor, they averaged almost a murder a day, plus daily rapes and robbery. I’m wondering if the kind states and people who took refugees in realize that lurking in those groups are probably a large number of violent criminals, and they are now let loose on these communities and are taking advantage of taxpayers help for housing and jobs. And today, on TV it was reported that numbers of dogs that had to be left behind in two schools were discovered shot and that it looks entirely possible that they were shot by the police based on ballistic evidence. In interviews police representatives tried to say that some of them were blindfolded and probably shot by owners, but the reporters had a chance to get on the scene before the authorities and take pictures and there was no evidence of any blindfolds. So, they were apparently lying to cover their asses. I have also heard that the police department was blantly corrupt but I don’t have any cite for it. Maybe in the end, it’s good riddance for a crime-ridden, corrupt town, but unfortunately bad luck for those who will suffer the consequences of rising welfare and crime in their states.
I went to college in New Orleans (Tulane) during the height of its murder and violent crime rate. I loved (and still love) the city but that was the only place that I have been truly afraid on a daily basis even after traveling the world.
I live in Masschusetts now and people ask me a lot about New Orleans these days. I always start by saying “Try to understand that poverty like that doesn’t exist here and those types of criminals aren’t common here. It is like a 3rd world country in many regards”.
Many if not most of New Orleans poorest and most violent population won’t be able to move back. They won’t be able to afford to rebuild their plywood and tin roof shotgun houses to modern standards. They will just merge into the population of wherever they are now. I have no doubt that most of the more affluent population isn’t secretly happy about that silver lining.
They flew a planeload of (black, poor) people here to Cape Cod. I tried to explain to people how different their culture is to here. The kids in particular are going from a horrific school system to one with standards. Plus, the Cape Cod culture is all white. I don’t know how well that will work out.
Agree with **Shagnasty ** (Newcomb '92, how 'bout you?)
One thing I would add it that the murders were concentrated generally, but not totally, within the criminal community. That is, criminals were killing other criminals, not wiping out one of the general law-abiding population every day. When I was back about 5 years ago, though, things seemed to have improved somewhat. The assistant DA should be up on the recent trends.
I am tempted to give the OP a roll-eyes, for the general “Oh, I thought we were helping **good ** people” tone of the post.
All I can say in resonse to the OP is that it’s worked out for Australia OK.
Cool! I am class of 1995. We overlapped by a year.
I gave up helping bad people about 12 years ago when I found out it never works. Never. No matter what anyone else says. Just my opinion, which I am entitled to of course.
Some time back I drove to New Orleans to see what the place was like as I was considering relocating. But as I drove through (the toilet) I kept changing stations on my radio to pick up what was being said on the talk shows there, to try and get a sense of the place. And all I heard was this “Whities trying to keep us down” stuff on all the stations, and so I kept driving and never looked back.
Yes, but it took a couple of hundred years. Meanwhile, it was brutal and people, convicts and regular immigrants both, lived in a very scary and violent land.
Actually, no one is entitled to an opinon. It is just that any action that the state or a person might take to remove an opinion would be immoral.
It is true that in the U.S. (and most free nations) you have a right to express opinions free from government coercion, but then every other citizen has the right to laugh at those opinions. For example, if I found someone who based their entire view of a metropolitan area on one afternoon’s survey of talk radio, I would be inclined to dismiss any opinion ever expressed by that person, again. Similarly, I do not find any reason to put much credence in a belief that if I found people in a location where their poverty was endemic and where the police had a history of corruption, (so that many people might resort to crime as a survival mechanism, generally preying on one another in the process), and I scattered that populace across many other communities where the opportunities for honest labor were greater and law enforcement was less likely to be corrupt and where gangs and other criminal reinforcing social systems were broken up by the scattering, that all those people would resort to crime. (Some clearly will, but then their new neighbors and new law enforcement agencies would probably be less tolerant of criminal activity, providing another social pressure against crime.)
A couple of hundred years? The First Fleet sailed in 1787. In 1838, based on a combination of changes in attitudes toward imprisonment in Britain and reports from Australia, Britain changed its policies regarding Transportation. Meanwhile, the original Australian inhabitants had never had the political organization comparable to the Aztec or the Iroquois, over even the Dakota, and Australia was settled with rather little of the warfare that characterized the Americas or even New Zealand.
So, rather than “couple of hundred years” in a “scary and violent” land, we’re talking just over fifty years in a land that was only frightening by its strangeness to the British, Scots, and Irish settlers.
Looks like the states realized the kind of people they may be having to deal with: http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/breaking_news/12789562.htm
I’m a little bothered by the “easier access” to FBI criminal records, but it expires Nov. 7.
Okay, they were transported for almost 200 years. "From the middle of the 17th century until 1867 convicts were transported to the colonies. In the 18th century many were sent to America but after US independence Australia became the main destination. Over 150,000 (mainly men) were transported to Australia. In 1865, In New South Wales, Emancipists (freed Convicts) and their offspring were considered inferior human beings. They were denied equality of rights and were powerless against the troopers who would “taunt the native born with ‘torrents of abuse’, saying they were ‘wretched’ and the lowest class’ because their parents had been convicts.” Convicts formed the majority of the population at almost any point of course, so in the end, it became their land and they developed it into the modern Australia of today. Of course, a lot of them were not real criminals; having been sentenced for very petty “crimes”.
I’ve forgotten how this even applies to the situation with hurricane Katrina. Oh yes, you were saying they were only transported to Australia for x years, so, whatever. What was your point about “real” criminals being foisted on unsuspecting communities in Texas, etc? Apparently the FBI is now allowing the states to do background checks on the refugees, so that will hopefully help.
You made the wild claim that it took Australia 200 years before its citizens could get past living in a “scary” land filled with convicts. I provided the information that the significant Transportation lasted just over 50 years (not 200) and you have now provided the information that it was the convicts and their children, not the law-abiding citizens. who were harrassed and kept as second class citizens rather than bringing fear to the other Australian settlers. Between your information and mine, we have demonstrated that fears such as those expressed in the OP are often the result of ignorance rather than fact.
My point was that creating conditions in which people did not feel the need to resort to crime along with a less corrupt police force would tend to result in more safety for both the evacuees and the people among whom they are lodged. The background checks, (if used wisely to identify violent criminals and not simply to treat all evacuees as criminals) would be part of my suggestion for effective law enforcement.
It would appear that your primary expression in is that terrible people are being scattered across that country with the result that their evil ways will instill fear throughout the rest of the nation.
I suspect that you are simply allowing your own desire to categorize some large and ill-defined group as evil, in conjunction with a certain amount of historical ignorance, is overwhelming your powers of rational thought on this topic.
Not transported to Australia for two hundred years - if that was the case, the last boatload must have arrived in 1988 because that was the year of our bicentenary. The very first settlers (Aboriginal Australians aside) arrived on the First Fleet on January 26th, 1788. Australia wasn’t even discovered by the English until 1770, so I strongly doubt convicts were sent here from “the middle of the 17th century”. The last convicts arrived in Western Australia in 1868 (80 years after the First Fleet but only 18 years after the first convicts to arrive in that part of the country). The Eastern states had not taken convicts for more than 16 years, the last boatload arriving in Tasmania in 1852 - 64 years after the First Fleet.
Furthermore, the convicts sent to Australia weren’t bloodythirsty murderers to a man. People were sent here for the most minor crimes - my own great great great grandfather was deported for seven years for the theft of a watch. A list of crimes punishable by deportation is available on this site; they include:
All theft above the value of one shilling.
Thefts under the value one shilling.
Stealing fish from a pond or river.
Bigamy.
Clandestine marriage.
Australia’s early population was not made up entirely of violent criminals. Deportation was an easy answer to the problem of overcrowded prisons in England and as such was applied at every opportunity for the most basic and minor of crimes.
How did my statements about criminals from New Orleans being moved to other states and endangering their populace turn into my making WILD statements about transporting criminals? This has turned into some kind of meaningless blah, blah, blah unrelated to the original topic. I could continue to pick apart your arguments but let’s just let you win, okay?
It’s that you basically said the city of New Orleans was comparable to a penal colony filled with the worst of society’s criminals – criminals who have now been let loose on an unsuspecting populace. You then (erroneously) compared this situation to Australia using facts about Australia’s history that simply weren’t true.
Crime is often the result of poverty. New Orleans had a lot of poverty and a lot of criminals. Now that many of the citizens are in areas that are not poor, that are offering them assistance, and that have job and educational opportunities available to these transplants, it is not reasonable to assume that they will turn on their host cities like caged wild animals.
A planeload of poor black people flown to liberal white Cape Cod?
It sounds like the next big hit on Fox!