The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

And then Luke heard a rock and rollin’ thunder like a low-riding helicopter gunship, and ’round a bend it came at about fifty miles an hour, with an actual airplane propeller whirling and roaring inside a wire cage behind some kind of racing car engine, planing a flat-bottomed boat like a huge water ski magically slip-sliding over mud and water alike and leaning over into the turn like a motorcycle—one of those high-speed airboats snapped up at cut-rate prices by the New Orleans Police when the Okefenokee and the Everglades became deep year-round lakes, kicking up a rooster-tail of mud and water behind it, and pushing a heady cloud of expensive gasoline fumes before it.

  Whoo-ee! Enough to give a teenage Alligator a hard-on for hot iron, and it more or less did, and likewise in spades for the three cops riding it and having a high old time, at least as Luke was seeing it: one driving the speeding airboat, another standing up beside him waving a pistol, the third at some kind of long-snouted curdler mounted on a swiveling pedestal.

  The police airboat caught up with the Fuck Yo Mothers in nothing flat, and took to gliding mocking circles around their two boats, then neato figure eights around and between them just to taunt them, hah, hah, hah, go fuck yoselves, muthas!

  Now, of course, anything in the Swamp with descended testicles automatically hated the cops, Luke being no exception, but who could keep from laughing at this sarcastic display of police primacy at the expense of and over these feared lizard-lords of the Alligator Swamp?

  And that was when it came to him, even before the cops began playing the tight beam of their sonic curdler over the Fuck Yo Mothers, causing them to scream, grab at their ears, and, it would seem, piss, and possibly shit in their pants.

  Think of the Cops as just another gang and it was immediately apparent.

  The Cops were the Supreme Gang of the Alligator Swamp.

  They had the top gear. They had the colors. Each of them got a top-of-the-line gun for nothing and plenty of ammo for it. Each of them made more money in a year than anyone else in the Swamp, without risking hard time in Angola like Papa.

  Forget the Vu Du Daddies, Luke told himself. Forget trying to join the Fuck Yo Mothers or the Spades of Ace or the Darth Invaders.

  The Police is the gang to get into.

  That was when Luke knew that a Cop was what he wanted to be, had to be, and he never looked back. The Police were always looking to recruit a few gang members from the Alligator Swamp for their down-and-dirty knowledge, but rarely getting any takers, seeing as how they were the Enemy, not to mention that you couldn’t even try to get into the police academy without being a high-school graduate.

  But if you looked at the Cops as just another gang, as the toughest, best-armed, best-equipped, richest gang of all, you took advantage of the invitation to try your stuff at the police academy.

  Bummer that it was, Luke actually started going to the local one-room school regularly enough and studied just hard enough to get into Brad Pitt High School, a long, hard, and somewhat dangerous daily commute from his own hood in the southeast edge of the Lower Ninth Ward through sometimes hostile territory by a ratty kayak he stole and defended with a rusty Bowie knife by waterway when he could, slogging through the mud when he couldn’t, and squeezing through to a high-school diploma.

  After all, looked at the right way, it was better than having to make your bones, or get banged by the whole gang, or go through some disgusting punk vu du ceremony, which was the sort of thing you had to do to join any other gang worth getting into.

  3

  Let me tell you, New Orleans was knocked back on its soggy ass by Katrina, and much worse by the advent of the Hurricane Season, and so was I. Katrina was nothing compared to what followed, like a pug got knocked down in the first round by a haymaker, managed to crawl more or less to his feet on the eight count, only to get socked again, and again, and again, each roundhouse right stronger and stronger.

  Before Katrina, ol’ J. B. was riding high on the return from three saloons, one of which was actually in the Quarter, and a couple of cathouses, one of which was a fancy three-story establishment in the Garden District. None of ’em was washed away by Katrina, and all of them were high enough to survive even the annual Hurricane Seasons.

  But the same could not be said for the tourist trade, knocked back down after it had just about recovered from Katrina by one Category 3 or 4 storm after another during what came to be called the Hurricane Season, by at least one Category 5 hurricane a year, by the rising seawater of the Gulf surging up through the waterways and canals and down over the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, squeezing what was left of the Easy part of the Big Easy up onto the levees and ridges.

  It finally got through to the powers that be at the time, or anyway to Cool Charlie Conklin who was then the mayor and well known for knowing which side of his bread the butter was on, that this situation was going to be permanent, and the only way to save the city from completely turning into a series of islands in the watery muck was to draw borders around what could afford to be saved by permanent pumping operations and internal levees, and giving up on trying to save the rest of the city by letting nature do its stuff and turn it back into the buffering marshland that had once been known as the back swamp.

  Charlie Conklin also knew where the votes weren’t, which was in the lowlands first depopulated by Katrina, and turned into isolated faux Third World villages by the Hurricane Season, inhabited by fragmented tribes of blacks who had been there for generations, Cajun refugees from the bayou country now permanently under water, Vietnamese fish-folk, and the like, the sort of population highly unlikely to get it together to vote as a constituency, so he was able to get away with this bottom-line political calculation.

  Which was cool, if you were among the electorate up on the Quarter, or Metarie, or the Business District, or the Garden District and so forth. What was not cool if you were in the saloon and bordello trade was creating an urban bayou land known all too far and wide thanks to the less-than-favorable media coverage as the “Alligator Swamp,” legendarily infested with human reptile life whose gangbangers slithered out of it of it whenever they could to seek their pickings in the turf of honest sleazy impresarios like me.

  So in practice the tourist district, aka the Zone, was more or less reduced to the areas bordered by the Mississippi and Canal Street, and maybe as far north as Rampart or maybe Claiborne, and as far east as Esplanade or maybe Frenchmen. And after a passel of nationally and internationally colorfully reported unfortunate incidents, it sort of became official via hotel and tourist board pamphlets and maps, and by the concentration of the majority of police patrols and sometime checkpoints guarding its periphery.

  Well, as you might imagine, the two saloons whose premises I rented outside the Zone became the giant sucking sounds of expenses over receipts gurgling down the drain. I owned the building the one in the Quarter was in, or thought I more or less did because I had twenty-three years left on a fixed-rate mortgage I could easy afford thanks to a federal loan shark subsidy I didn’t really understand or want to, or so I thought at the time. It ran at a small profit, and I had a nice apartment with a balcony above the bar.

  The bordello in the Garden District was further in the black, and I owned that too along with your friendly government subsidized and regulated mortgage packager, but the whorehouse outside the Zone became a den of meth and heroin-addicted hookers half a step up from street traffic, and what they attracted is something you don’t want to think about, and neither did I.

  Those who adapt survive, so I closed everything that I was renting space for, leaving me with the nameless bordello house known only by its address and phone number, and my Bourbon Street saloon, Lafitte’s Landing, and a much-reduced monthly nut to carry.

  If it was no longer exactly cocaine and cognac and Antoine’s for lunch and dinner every day, at least it was only a few cuts below the lifestyle to which I looked back so fondly to have become accustomed to.

  No one expects the Spanish Inquisition or the Banking Cras
h of ’08 or one disastrous hurricane to be followed by an endless line of bigger and bigger brothers and sisters or an alligator to come up through the toilet and bite you on the ass.

  So how was I to foresee the Great Deflation Scam?

  How was anyone except the sons of bitches who ran it, whoever they really were?

  And there is smart or not-so-smart money claiming that, in the end, they really didn’t even know what they were doing either.

  4

  With a diploma from Brad Pitt, Luke found getting into the Police Academy mysteriously easy and when he found out how right he was about the Cops being the top gang in the Alligator Swamp, he found out the reason why.

  The tourist street crowd life in the Zone being such a big slice of the economy, the police force had always been undermanned in venues not involved in the tourist trade when it came to keeping the peace in poor and mainly black neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward or northeast Tremé.

  Post–Hurricane Season, with where the money was to be made more or less surrounded by the Alligator Swamp, the most important job of the NOPD was to keep the Alligators down there where they belonged and, above all, from invading the Zone.

  Completely cordoning it off would have required a police force far larger than anything the city government could afford, so the only viable tactic was to make the gangbangers live in fear of the cops, and the only place to do it was inside the Swamp itself.

  This had long been accomplished by arbitrary airboat patrols, arbitrary billy clubs laid upside arbitrary heads, the occasional terminal elimination of gang leaders who got too big for their britches, and other assorted acts of forthright police brutality, busting such would-be perps and treating them to prolonged free food and shelter in jail cells being counterproductive to the municipal budget.

  But now some asshole in the mayor’s office had persuaded Sam Bermudez to set up a so-called Experimental Community Outreach Unit in the Lower Ninth, and recruit a few Alligators from the Swamp itself to partially man it.

  So soon as he had the badge Luke found himself dropped right back into the Alligator Swamp, into the Lower Ninth Ward, into one of the crummiest of the Brad Pitt Houses converted into what was laughingly called a new district police station.

  The Brad Pitt Houses were originally a noble development godfathered by an idealistic movie star close up to the section of the Industrial Canal levee breached during Katrina, something like a hundred single-family homes made available with all kinds of subsidies to those who had lost theirs in the flood.

  Pitt had commissioned world-class architects to do their stuff, the main rules being that the houses had to be built up on stilts or pylons to survive the further flooding, which the advent of the Hurricane Season turned out to supply in abundance, and have energy-wise solar panel roofing. Most of the results were artistically stunning, but the new Ninth Ward Community Police Station was not one of them.

  One of the earliest built, it resembled an outsized aluminum shipping container propped up on metal piping of the sort used to frame staircases in parking garages. It was also outside the electrified fence of what was now a gated community besieged by the Alligator Swamp and the lowlife wildlife within to which it was an all-too-tempting target.

  The ward room of this dump was where Luke Martin found himself dropped along with the other eleven cops who constituted the new unit to be greeted by a lieutenant whose orders were delivered in jaundiced terms that were brutally clear.

  “The New Orleans Police Department does not have the men or the money to adequately protect this place from what periodically tries to short out the fencing for the purpose of sacking it, but the Brad Pitt Houses are a political sacred cow, and if that were to happen, there would be holy hell to pay at City Hall, and as y’all might be aware, shit flows downhill, meaning from the mayor to the police commissioner, and from there to you. So your mission is to keep that from happening and nobody gives a fuck about how. Just make it so and don’t bother filing reports. Screw up and nobody ever heard of you.”

  So saying, higher authority departed, leaving the Experimental Community Outreach Unit all on its own. You didn’t exactly have to be a political sophisticate to figure out that no one in the police department had a clue as to how it might accomplish its mission, and that the higher-ups probably believed it was impossible and really didn’t give a shit if it failed because its very existence was some sort of political ass-covering operation and nothing more.

  Twelve cops in a unit supposedly ordered to pacify the immediate area besieging the Brad Pitt Houses or maybe even the whole fucking Lower Ninth—yeah, sure. Three veteran cops a few years from retirement, and probably assigned to the unit as a garbage dump, seeing as how the three of them were overweight and out of shape drunks, and Sergeant Rick Harrison, who had no idea of what orders to issue beyond “Bring that bottle over here.”

  The eight other cops in the unit were, like Luke, recruits from the Alligator Swamp straight out of the academy, unable to get into a Swamp gang of significance and hoping they could be better positioned to line their pockets under the colors of the Police.

  Only Luke took the mission seriously and only because no one else did and it therefore afforded him the first opportunity he had ever had to become a gang leader himself.

  He set up a firing range close by the gate to the electrified fence and easily enough persuaded his fellow Alligators to blast away. He organized mass nutria hunts in the surrounding swamp and left piles of the dead rodents around to rot as calling cards. His Alligator squad took to doing likewise with the real-deal reptiles, chopping off the heads and impaling them on poles as exclamation points.

  To his gang of Alligator Swamp Cops, this was just good dirty fun, but Luke had a point to make, that there was a new gang on this turf, namely the Alligator Swamp Cops, and they were trigger-happy badasses not to be fucked with and out to rule.

  Toward this end, he took advantage of a half-assed attempt by some local gangbangers to breach the electrified fence to bullshit Sergeant Harrison into bullshitting the higher-ups into supplying heavier weaponry, hoping for an airboat, which was not forthcoming. But they were issued M35s, stun grenades, two handheld sonic curdlers, a couple of crates of tear gas grenades, gas masks, riot shields, and electric billies.

  Fully dressed in these colors, the Alligator Swamp Cops trudged and canoed around the swampland, blowing away nutria and alligators in the process of showing the flag, violating the turf of the local gangs with swaggering impunity, and all but calling them pussies and daring them to come out and fight.

  Luke didn’t really expect them be stupid enough to offer themselves up as target practice for this level of ordnance. He expected them to bitch about it sooner or later one way or another and waited for it to happen.

  It finally did in the form of Ally X, honcho of the Fuck Yo Mothers, the acknowledged top gators in this neck of the Swamp, who swaggered into the police station decked out in twenty pounds of cheap steel bling and piercings, packing a pair of rusty revolvers, and doing his best not to look nervous as he shouted at Sergeant Harrison, who was in the process of washing down a shot of bourbon with the last of a six-pack of beers.

  “Yo mo, bobo, what the fofo goin’ on?”

  Harrison shouted for Luke, who had long been waiting for something like this, had watched Ally X enter the building, and had assembled his posse just outside.

  “Get yo ass out here, you wanna know what the fofo goin’ on, mofo,” Luke shouted back.

  When Ally X did, he found himself surrounded by a semicircle of fully armed and armored Alligator Swamp Cops and backed up uncomfortably close to the electrified fence.

  “I’m gonna tell ya, mofo, and you gonna tell yo’ bobos, and y’all gonna spread the word from the bird fuck’ far an’ fuckin’ wide—”

  “Wish is—”

  “Wish is there’s new colors inna Swamp, an’ you lookin’ at ’em, and the name of our gang is the Alligator Swamp Po-lice, and the deal is we
rule. We the top of the food chain in this here turf, and we do not take shit, an’ shit is what we will get from what’s up the food chain from us if they get the idea we not doin’our job. And our job is to tell you how to do your job, so here’s how it is.…”

  Luke’s Alligator Swamp Cops flipped their M35s down into firing position and pointed them at Ally X before he could do more with his mouth than drop his jaw wide open, and Luke laid it out:

  “Look, the po-lice don’t want no trouble and trouble for us is getting shit from upstairs because you motherfuckers are making trouble down here, like any you mofos get so much as in sight of the Brad Pitt Houses, like any you mofos try to cross the canal into the Zone, like any you mofos fuck with anyone but other mofos down here—”

  “Oh, yeah, bobo?”

  “Cor-rect, mofo. These are the rules now, we find you disobeying them, we come after y’all and we do not stop till we got no more targets.”

  “Well, what the fuck does that leave us to do, mofo? Chase fuckin’ nutria an’ pray t’Jesus?”

  “Look, my man, the police don’t want no trouble from what goes on in the Swamp as long as it stays in the Swamp and don’t make any trouble for us—”

  “Meanin’ what?” Ally X demanded belligerently. But Luke could smell it was turning phony, turning into a necessary face-saving show.

  “Meaning don’t make trouble for us and we won’t make trouble for you. We not gonna be runnin’ no hos, we’re not gonna deal no stuff, an’ if we steal this and that once in a while, it’s just gonna be for personal use. Meaning the police are not here to be bad for business. Who goes along, gets along … ain’t there enough shit in this city already? We don’t have to make no more for each other, now do we?”

  5

  Don’t expect J. B. Lafitte to explain what really caused the Great Deflation because the smart money—what’s left of it—says the what is a who, and the why is to make money off it, what else, and if the suckers who are born to be screwed every minute in this great nation ever find out who and why, there won’t be enough tar, feathers, railroad ties, and rope in all of Dixie to do the necessary justice.