Black Cat wrote:

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Go Home, Troublemakers wrote:
There has been a marked increase in undesirable behavior in Hattiesburg since the refugees from the hurricane arrived. There have been reports of bad behavior at local schools, increased "drive bys" in normally quiet neighborhoods late at night, and a shooting at the IHOP that has resulted in a change in that establishment's operating hours. How long will the residents of the Hattiesburg area put up with their quality of life being reduced by such a large factor? How long before these refugees turn Hattiesburg into New Orleans North?


Enough of this fear-mongering, rumor-based, racist falsehoods! Hasn't Mississippi progressed a little since 1964?

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Whoa-you can legitamately disagree with those views but you have no basis for calling someone a racist. Whenever someone doesn't want to take responsibility for his actions,he alleges racism.

You can bet that this thread was NOT started by a USM professor. 

The Real Undesirables wrote:

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I thought USM professors were the troublemakers.  I would enjoy kicking them out for sure, well, the few remaining stragglers who haven't found jobs elsewhere.

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USM profs are a real asset to our community.All those described by Go Home are genuine threats to our way of life. We need a citizens militia to protect ourselves. A few more sidearms and a dash of fortitude.

Kudzu King wrote:

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They're for real wrote:

The Real Undesirables wrote:
I thought USM professors were the troublemakers.  I would enjoy kicking them out for sure, well, the few remaining stragglers who haven't found jobs elsewhere.
USM profs are a real asset to our community.All those described by Go Home are genuine threats to our way of life. We need a citizens militia to protect ourselves. A few more sidearms and a dash of fortitude.



I would rephrase that to say that "most" USM profs are a real asset to our community. But, some are just real asses.

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Don't let a few who don't respect the law speak for the whole group.Most are hard workers looking for a break in life and trying to stay ahead of the bill collectors.

Go Home, Troublemakers wrote:

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There has been a marked increase in undesirable behavior in Hattiesburg since the refugees from the hurricane arrived. There have been reports of bad behavior at local schools, increased "drive bys" in normally quiet neighborhoods late at night, and a shooting at the IHOP that has resulted in a change in that establishment's operating hours. How long will the residents of the Hattiesburg area put up with their quality of life being reduced by such a large factor? How long before these refugees turn Hattiesburg into New Orleans North?

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Hey don't talk about our students like that. With our new high standards, they were required to correctly spell their names. They worked real hard to be able to fill in the little circles that spelled their names on the ACT tests. Combine that challenge with having to go out and drink beer for an unexpected two weeks and poof - you have a lot of tension to unleash.

 

When there was a recent car jacking and murder up in Atlanta, the local tv stations made sure they pointed out that the suspect in police custody was a refugee from New Orleans who was up here because of the hurricane. You're going to see a lot of similar reports in several cities. A doctor who went to help refugees in Houston told the media that these people are unruly and ungrateful.

In Hattiesburg's case, I doubt it's a problem of the refugees being unruly (although it's likely that some may be. Not a racist comment, but an inevitable truth that not everyone is going to be good) as much as it's some members of the local population taking advantage of the HPD being stretched too thin at this time. You can't add an estimated 10,000 people to the city in one-two weeks without the local government being stretched beyond their capabilities.

And if you think the media, both local and national, did not report the situation in New Orleans in an unbiased maner, you're sadly mistaken. There was atleast some racial bias in how they reported some people as searching for basic sustenance, while others were portrayed as downright criminals. Do you really think that African-Americans and Hispanics were the only people who were stealing clothes and electronics? You'd be foolish to believe that. The Associated Press Style Guide, which is to journalists what Chicago or Turabian style is to a Historian, still tells journalists to use black and white instead of African-American or Caucasian; even though several African-Americans find the term 'black' to be a bit outdated and close-minded in the 21st century.

Aah yes, the evil, crime-ridden, raping, shooting, pillaging New Orleans population sure to spread its oh-so-unique behavior to the rest of the country. Problem. It ain't true and never was. Ask the NO Times Picayune: http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tporleans/archives/2005_09_26.html

If someone could make this a live link, I'd much appreciate it.

Can we now put the fear-mongering and rumor spreading to bed? Thank you.

Excerpts:
After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.


Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.
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That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."
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As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: evacuees firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people killed for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers supposedly fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
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Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.
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Compass said rumors had often crippled authorities' response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to respond to situations that turned out not to exist. He offered his own intensely personal example: The day after the storm, he heard "some civilians" talking about how a band of armed thugs had invaded the Ritz-Carlton hotel and started raping women - including his 24-year-old daughter, who stayed there through the storm. He rushed to the scene only to find that although a group of men had tried to enter the hotel, they weren't armed and were easily turned back by police.
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"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.

As the Dome cleared out Sept. 3, Beron, the National Guard commander, fashioned a plan to deal with the dead. He knew of the six bodies in the freezer, but expected far more. He and an Ohio National Guard commander sent 450 Ohio troops to search every nook of the Dome, top to bottom. They told them to mark locations of bodies on a map of the Dome, to rope off suspected crime scenes, and leave a chemical light sticks next to each one so they could be retrieved later.

"I fully expected to find more bodies, both homicides and natural causes," he said.

They found nothing.

These stories are very common in times of crisis. Those tv scenes of mobs of unruly blacks don't mean anything. It was a misrepresentation.

Having served my time as a student at USM (I'm a three-time loser), my first reaction to the topic title was, "Hmmm... So THAT'S what they're calling the student body these days..."

Invictus wrote:

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Your Anglo-Italian-Scots-Irish-Franco-American spaghettio, Invictus

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I may may pretend to be Irish and drink green beer on St. Patty's day, but I know that America is the great melting pot and that my lineage has been filtered from generation to generation. For most of us, identification with our perceived ethnic group is only a figment of our imagination. I am a Heinz 57 American.

Nice feel-good story for those who refuse to recognize facts as facts. It's so much easier to ignore problems than to confront them.

As usual, Black Cat is trying the "slight of hand" with the facts. Try out this link:

Link

New Orleans has a crime problem, and that problem has nothing to do with the hurricane, the SuperDome, FEMA, or George W. Bush. The crime in New Orleans has and will spread to other areas of the country because of the evacuation.

Black Cat wants to make everything about race, because (s)he can't refute the fact that New Orleans is a crime-ridden city. Stories about how the number of murders in the SuperDome during Katrina's aftermath have fallen short of expectations doesn't wipe clean the fact that New Orleans has a murder rate that is 10 times the national average (according to some sources) and as much as 10 times that of New York City (according to other sources).

One story and one instance of "good" (if you can call the SuperDome behavior good) behavior doesn't erase a consistent pattern of bad behavior.

Having all of these refugees in Hattiesburg has already had a negative effect on the city. Traffic is worse, the "Louisiana rudeness" has set in, and there have been a number of refugee-related violent incidents.

Things won't return to normal around here until we can get all of these undesirables back to their home turf where they can rob, kill, rape, pillage, and maim while the city government turns a blind eye.