Better late than never

LITTLE ROCK — Avan full of police screeches to a halt on a New Orleans bridge, just days after Hurricane Katrina has devastated the city. The officers open fire on civilians, killing two and seriously wounding four. They and fellow officers try to cover up the crimes by planting guns at the scene, fabricating witness statements and falsifying police reports to claim that the civilians shot first.

This series of events is almost beyond belief, yet a recently unsealed federal indictment claims that this is exactly what a crew of New Orleans police officers did. If true, these are crimes for which the defendants should be sentenced to the maximum penalty.

The officers had been charged by the state several years ago with murder and attempted murder, but the charges were dismissed in August 2008 after a judge concluded that prosecutors illegally shared secret grand jury testimony with a witness. New Orleans U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, a Bush appointee, deserves credit for pressing forward with a federal investigation after the dismissal.

The violence on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge garnered insufficient attention in 2005, when most of the country was focused on broken levees and bloated corpses. It’s a fair bet that claims of a massacre would have been taken more seriously had the victims not been people of color and the shooters not worn badges.

Others tried to shrug off the episode as a sad and inevitable consequence of a flood-ravaged and chaos-laden city. But the police department in New Orleans has been a locus of corruption since long before Katrina. It is long overdue for a shakeup.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu wisely reached out to the Justice Department this year and all but implored it to conduct a top-to-bottom review of all functions and policies. The department is conducting such an investigation. The probe should be thorough and uncompromising. The residents of one of this country’s greatest cities should not have to live in fear of the men and women paid to protect them.