New Orleans and the Guard – it's a good thing

From NOLA.com:

A man was fatally shot by a New Orleans police officer after he pointed a gun following a foot chase, authorities said.
[snip]
Lewis was shot in the chest after he pointed the weapon at an officer, the department said. He died later at Ochsner Hospital.

Now… I’ll be the first one to admit that the NOPD has monumental problems, but before folks start wrapping up too tightly about an officer having shot somebody, I’d like to take this handy-dandy opportunity to bring up a couple of other recent stories:

Acting on a tip, a New Orleans police SWAT team trapped an attempted murder suspect in Algiers’ Fischer public housing complex and ran into one of the most dangerous weapons on the streets: the Chinese- and Russian-made SKS rifle.
[snip]
The SWAT team crept into a courtyard at the complex in the 2000 block of Leboeuf Street and the men loitering, one brazenly holding the SKS, NOPD Lt. Dwayne Scheuremann said.

Do you get a visual? Polimom does.
There’s a reason the NOPD needs some help, folks. Those streets are rough beyond imagining.
Some well-meaning folks have written that having the National Guard in New Orleans sends the wrong message — that it actually worsens the bad impression:

So, with those modest credentials in hand, please understand my reaction when I heard that Mayor C. Ray Nagin had asked for National Guardsmen to help patrol the city’s streets: Is Nagin an idiot?
My friend the New Orleanian was surprised at the strength of my reaction. “What’s our alternative? Let these kids kill each other?”
No, that’s not the alternative. The alternative is to ask the New Orleans Police Department to do what they do.
I understand the stress level — and the level of financial distress — is high in New Orleans. I’m sympathetic to the fiscal blight that infects the city.
Yet, as an outsider, I’m distressed at the image of armed soldiers in “camos” patrolling the streets.

Mr. Woodall may very well understand the stress level, or the financial distress… but he evidently doesn’t understand the criminal element at all. Yes, those five guys casually hanging around with an SKS were in Fischer projects. No, a tourist is unlikely in the extreme to accidently wind up there.
But Fischer is part of Algiers… which is in turn part of New Orleans, and while the tourists don’t go there, New Orleanians live there!
Those vicious criminal elements are part and parcel of how New Orleans became what we all saw on our televisions after Katrina… and it’s worse now — not because the NOPD isn’t doing its job (absurd), but because huge swaths of the city are a no man’s land.
They’ve been camping out and taking over, and New Orleans needs many successes like this one (and there’s the whole judicial and prosecution mess yet to contend with) before they’ll have things in hand.
(Perhaps Ashley could add the national perception of NOLA’s crime to his list of possibilities for why the city’s dropped out of the bidding for the 2008 Democratic National Convention…?)
Polimom’s glad the National Guard is in New Orleans, because I want to see the city healthy — not like it was before the storm, but as it was 25 years ago… and I know I’m not alone.