Background and some personal notes

Brief background about UCLA Law School and New Orleans Reconstruction

When I arrived at UCLA Law School I met Elly and we bonded over the stress of New Orleans reconstruction and naively decided to plan, organize and coordinate the trip to New Orleans this summer.  I am originally from New Orleans and had worked in New Orleans before going to law school.  Immediately after the storm, the predominantly African American and Vietnamese neighborhood in New Orleans was slated to be a landfill by Mayor Nagin.  When all diplomatic means to shut down the landfill and explore environmentally friendly alternatives had failed, UCLA Law students, Linh Ho ‘07, Rosalind Chan ‘08, and Thuc Nguyen ‘08 were involved in organizing the youth and elderly in the community to stage a direct action against further dumping in the community.  I was very impressed with their work and it became clear to me that law students could play a very unique role in the New Orleans reconstruction process.

Even before Linh, Rosalind and Thuc, UCLA students had organized themselves in 2005 and 2006 to go to New Orleans and work with alum Jen Lai, a youth organizer in the Ninth Ward when the storm hit. When the storm hit Jen returned to UCLA and recruited students through CRS and PILP to organize a trip to go to New Orleans and help with the reconstruction.  Among other success stories, the efforts of the students and Jen contributed to the creation of a Worker’s Center for Racial Justice where Elly had worked before going to law school.

In Spring 2007, another group of students went to New Orleans through a volunteer organization called the Student Hurricane network.  The network has limited capacity and  can be a great resource for general student volunteer service.

In Fall 2007, Elly and I met up and decided that we wanted to help carry on the UCLA Law School and New Orleans reconstruction partnership and also to institutionalize further the relationship so as to establish continuity and accountability by student volunteers in the reconstruction.  Elly and I had strong professional relationships in New Orleans and we leveraged our resources (housing, organizational relations) to seek funding from Dean Schill.  Dean Schill was very generous and helped close the funding gap to make the trip possible.  Further, Elly and I sought support from professors to brainstorm ways to formalize the UCLA Law School student effort to reconstruct New Orleans, focusing specifically on the development of the Worker’s Center for Racial Justice and support for the efforts of legal agencies on the ground, including the Louisiana Justice Institute.

 

Organizing people, places, events, etc.

Planning and coordinating a trip for sixteen students as a 1L is a time consuming and demanding process.  At this point I think it is important to thank some very key players in the process;

*Tracy Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute, Reverence Vien Nguyen of the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Church and other speakers met with the group and shared their insight about challenges in the reconstruction of New Orleans after Katrina

*Elly set up work placements for a majority of the students

*Citadelle help organize the student meetings during the school year. 

*With the help of Robin Barnes of Seedco Financial Services, Xavier University generously provided us free housing for the two weeks (it would’ve cost us over $3,000 otherwise)

*Jarin Jackson's mom opened her home to us and fed us delicious comfort food

We were able to plan some things in advance, some things we could not, and invariably we did not cover everything.

  

“If you are not at the table, you are probably on the menu”Post Katrina New Orleans Reconstruction: An urban development ideological battleground

After the storm I served as the business development director at a community development corporation in the Vietnamese neighborhood in eastern New Orleans.  This summer, I went back to work for the City’s Office of Recovery Management and help put together a proposal for citywide small business development.  Throughout I was engaged in various grassroots organizing efforts and worked closely with the state of Louisiana and city of New Orleans to develop and implement economic development projects.  The following are some of thoughts based on my experience.

After Hurricane Katrina, one thing went without question in the big easy, New Orleans will rebuild.  This commonality unified the city after the storm but the reality of scarcity of resources for the reconstruction of New Orleans quickly sunk in.  Folks in New Orleans have very distinct visions about what to rebuild and how to rebuild.  As you can probably guess, the division of opinion is usually along socio-economic and racial lines.  Do we rebuild based on the areas most heavily devastated or the areas that sit on highest ground?  If they all sit on even ground, do we first rebuild the areas where more people reside or the area with a higher property tax base?  How do we manage the billions of cubic ton of hurricane debris?  Do we and how do we rebuild affordable housing?  The city was almost entirely devastated and this list goes on to ask about almost every basic city infrastructure you can imagine.

For better or for worse, throughout the past three years of reconstruction in New Orleans, those individuals and communities with money and/or state and city political influence have determined the answers to the above questions. And as one wise New Orleanian once said to me, “If you are not at the table, you are probably on the menu”.

At the height of battling for resources, I witnessed two minority communities in New Orleans fight at the state senate level about which hood should bear the burden of storing the city’s billions of tons of hurricane debris.  Meanwhile, a more affluent neighborhood, not faced with the same city debris policy, organized itself to pull down over four million dollars (almost twice the average amount for other neighborhoods) for streetscape redevelopment. 

Another example of a clash in ideology in New Orleans redevelopment dates back to a meeting I had when I first returned to New Orleans to serve the Vietnamese community.  At a citywide visioning event, a purported philanthropist requested for a meeting with me.  When I met with him he proposed a plan to develop a sewing factory in our community.  I was open to the idea of job creation and exports but as I inquired further, he proceeded to tell me that he has factories in China and Taiwan and he knows that Vietnamese woman have dexterous hands and can work very fast.  His comment was insulting on so many levels.  Firstly, there was total disregard to this specific Vietnamese American community, their entrepreneurial spirit, and their other capabilities.  More personally, he seemed to have forgotten that I am a Vietnamese woman and that I have no interest in sitting at a sewing machine for his profit.  I relayed this story to a friend from the lower nine who commented that it would be same as going to the lower nine and proposing to develop a cotton field because ‘blacks have strong backs’.

When I returned to New Orleans this summer I learned that the same philanthropist is the co-founder of a major private sector organization that is partnering with the city of New Orleans.  He currently serves as the leader of race relations.  This same group has bought out huge parcels of land in he city and will build exquisite riverwalks for the tourists and wealthy of the community and manufacturing plants in the minority communities. Community culture is being appropriated for tourism, while the up river money continues to feed the hands of anyone willing to see economic development without a social context.

Many have appropriately titled New Orleans a tale of two cities.  And with the limited resources, it seems that these two cities are battling out ideological differences that will shape the future of New Orleans. 

Safe Streets/Strong Communities builds police accountability

For my full-time legal work, I interned at an organization called Safe Streets/Strong Communities . This organization was founded after Hurricane Katrina in the wake of several highly publicized shootings and beatings of unarmed civilians by police officers. New Orleans has a notoriously violent police force– and like everything else in the city, the history is twined together with a history of racism. A local academic traced the history of law enforcement in New Orleans back to slave catchers during the pre-Civil War era. Most of the incidents of shootings and beatings of unarmed civilians by police officers in New Orleans involved African American victims, including the CNN-covered case of the retired African American schoolteacher who was beaten bloody by New Orleans Police while CNN taped the whole incident.

Most people in New Orleans agree that prior to Katrina, violence was a problem in New Orleans. The murder rate in New Orleans post-Katrina has also been very high, with the vast majority of the murders and violence being committed against African Americans. However, people’s opinions are mixed about the cause of that violence and the way to end that violence.

Safe Streets/Strong Communities was co-founded by Soros Senior Fellow and former prisoner Norris Henderson, and it operates on the philosophy that safety does not originate out of increased numbers of police patrolling poor neighborhoods, but instead from low-income communities of color collaborating together to address community violence and raise the city’s level of response and accountability. Safe Streets places great emphasis on the engagement and representation of people in low-income communities of color, since these communities are profoundly underrepresented in the electoral political process. The organization is connected to nationwide fights for racial and economic justice through the national Right to the City campaign , and is simultaneously deeply rooted in New Orleans low-income communities.

The work I did with Safe Streets included:
• Going to a city counsel meeting with an intergenerational group of Safe Streets members – from little girls to grandmas in wheelchairs – all of whom were wearing orange Safe Streets T-shirts and ready to testify about the need for accountability in the city. We had a hard-won victory when council members came out in favor of the Safe Streets-endorsed move to create a position that would independently monitor the actions of the city and the police department. This independent monitor would be funded by city taxes so that he/she would be beholden to no special interest or funding source.
• Working to provide free expungement services to over 200 people who came to a criminal records expungement fair sponsored by Safe Streets and other local organizations. In New Orleans, anyone who has been arrested and booked – even if they were later acquitted or were never prosecuted to begin with – has their picture in the New Orleans crime database, and employers routinely check that database before hiring workers. People who are trying to lead law-abiding lives are frequently excluded from jobs they apply for, even if their names appear in that database because of arrests that never led to convictions. Safe Streets works in collaboration with local lawyers and community members to expunge people’s records and open up people’s access to employment.
• Driving a 16-passenger van to the small town of Jena, Louisiana with a group of lawyers and youth activists to observe part of the trial of one of the young men arrested and charged as an adult following a racially charged fistfight in which only African American young people were charged with offenses . We got to speak to the brother of one of the accused youths, who told us about the white part of town and the black part of town and how he had enlisted in the military to escape the pervasive racism. The white side of town, incidentally, included the only local public school, the courthouse, the township’s official buildings and most of the businesses.
• The vast majority of my work consisted of campaign and policy research. Safe Streets engages in community organizing. Since any community problem can be tackled from multiple angles, one of the most important jobs of legal volunteers is to identify the playing field – who has power, who is making funding decisions, and where change can be created to better people’s lives. I was at the organization during an exciting time, when the organization was working with the vibrant group of community members who defined the work of the organization to develop a major campaign around police accountability. They needed more information about the funding going into and accountability requirements placed on the task forces and private security forces that were pervasive in the area post-Katrina.
After Katrina, a large agglomeration of federal, state and local law and immigration enforcement entities began to collaborate together through task forces. These task forces frequently were amorphous entities – seemingly answering to no one boss and often providing only the most amorphous information to the public – supposedly the ones being protected – about their activities. Were these groups accountable to local authorities? State authorities? Federal authorities? If someone was beaten by a law enforcement agent working in one of these task forces, who would that person go to for redress? And who was monitoring these groups to ensure that they were engaged in effective work that served the needs of the communities they were acting within?
Likewise, immediately after Katrina, many property owners hired private security firms to protect their possessions. These private security firms were likewise question marks for community members. What laws did these people – some of whom were mercenaries and ex-military – follow, and who did they answer to? Were they bound to respect people’s rights as state actors because their responsibilities so paralleled those normally assumed by the state? On a more personal level, where could a mother go if her young, straight-A student son was grabbed on the street while socializing with friends, frisked and beaten by such a security agent?
I was able to research the multiple task forces and security that existed in the region - from drug-specific task forces charged with surveilling the larger state to anti-gang task forces focused on the Asian community (which people from the Asian community found puzzling, since as far as these lifetime residents knew, there was no Asian gang activity in New Orleans).
This information was difficult to track down, and I wished I had more time so I could have started to file FOIA request with state and federal agencies. There were so many pieces of the puzzle, and so many places where basic information – even a phone number or a central contact for a very openly known task force (such as one mentioned in Department of Justice press releases) was unavailable. One thing was clear - there was a lot of federal money being invested in these task forces from entities such as the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. It was much less clear – and impossible to figure out in a month –what exactly was being done with those millions of dollars and who had oversight over that money and activity.
At the end of my work, I was able to leave Safe Streets with a binder of information around the dozens of task forces operating in their city. I also had to leave them with many questions, some of which would have to be answered by subsequent law student volunteers or which would be revealed in the course of Safe Streets’ work.

Throughout this work, I was able to connect with a wide range of people – community members, lawyers who had been working in their communities for dozens of years, young activists, fellow law students and organizers who were dedicated to working together to improve community conditions.