Jack Dunphy, a pseudonymic contributor to National Review Online who is a member of the Los Angeles PD, rips a Lieutenant who failed to man his post when the levees broke, and contrasts him with an officer who would not have been out of place with the NYPD first responders on 9-11-01:
The topic under discussion [on the Laura Ingraham show he listened to] was a segment from the previous evening’s edition of CNN’s Newsnight, in which a lieutenant from the New Orleans Police Department explained his decision to stay home with his wife rather than report for duty as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the city.
“I left [my fellow officers] in a bad situation,” Lieutenant Henry Waller told Anderson Cooper, “but I would have been leaving my wife in a worse situation.”
It’s galling enough that this man dishonored himself and his badge by shirking his duty, but it’s almost beyond belief that he would try to justify his decision on national television. “We listened to the radio,” Waller said, “we’re hearing the things, the water’s still rising, the water’s still rising, the water’s still rising. The looting is this, the looting is that. I started thinking, I said, well, you know, we’ve been hearing this story about the levees breaching all day. What if they’re right and I get stuck in this car? I’m no good dead.”
Well, maybe not. But as far as his fellow officers and the citizens of New Orleans were concerned, he was no good alive, either. So said one of Waller’s colleagues who made the opposite choice. “Everybody had a wife,” said Lieutenant Troy Savage, “everybody’s got families, everybody needed to see them. But we didn’t. We didn’t all flee. We all didn’t run in a time of crisis. And, you know, [Waller] did that.”
Have pride in your blue, NY.
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