wanted to see more. I wanted more action.
Next day the squad agreed to let me accompany a couple of officers as they served a warrant. They were going to bring in a man wanted for assault on his girlfriend and criminal damage to a property – we were going along for the ride.
But I wanted to earn my place in the patrol car and prove I wasn’t just some tourist, a Hollywood actor come to gawp at the real hard men. From what I had seen of the unit they were a fiercely loyal, incredibly close team, prepared to lay everything on the line for each other: and I wanted to be a part of that.
Big Jeff and some of the others had the day off: I was to ride with Officer Fred Faff on this one. He has served on the New Orleans streets for 15 years and with the Warrant Squad for four. He was a pretty relaxed kind of guy – and was keen for me to get involved as much as I wanted.
I asked him what he thought about British policemen – he couldn’t believe our Bobbies do their job without proper weaponry.
‘There’s no way,’ he laughed. ‘There’s no way that I would go out on a street without a gun…Not here, absolutely not. They have criminals all over the country but in this city they are savages. They don’t care about anything.’
Before long we pulled up at the target house. Made, like so many in this city, of wood, it also had a reinforced door, on which was painted some kind of weird blue hippy mural. The windows had shutters over them. Without Jeff, access was not going to be easy.
We stood and watched as Fred and the other officers knocked on the door – politely at first, and then with greater force. No answer. They rapped the windows. No answer.
We followed Fred around the side, where a locked wooden door blocked access to the back yard. ‘Give us a hand here, Vinnie,’ he called, and we got stuck in. Fred shimmied up the wall and tried to get some leverage from the top while I gave it a bit of gentle persuasion from the front. Finally there was a pop, a crack and a click and it swung open. We were in.
No holding me back now. ‘Open up,’ I shouted, hammering on windows, trying to prise open the shutters. Nobody believed the suspect wasn’t in – he was simply hiding, hoping we’d go away.
Eventually, good old-fashioned determination paid off. Fred spotted him from the back of the house. ‘Come round to the front!’ he yelled, banging on the door. ‘Come round now and let us in.’
Finally the door opened and a skinny, half-naked man appeared. His hair was all messed and he only had a pair of shorts on…but nobody could have slept through the racket we’d been making. He didn’t seem too happy to see us and was now making a lot of noise himself, but the sergeant put an immediate lid on the situation.
‘Get dressed,’ he ordered and, with the man still protesting, raised his own voice in reply. ‘Listen dude, calm it down, take it down a notch! Your girlfriend put charges on you, deal with it.’
Eventually he got into a pair of trousers and pulled a T-shirt over his head, then the cuffs went on and he was marched into the car. ‘This is embarrassing,’ he said, nodding at our cameras. ‘You treat a man like a rat.’
The sarge just laughed at him. ‘Treat you like a rat?’ he said. ‘How’d you treat your girlfriend? Tell you what, we’ll put you in a cage and see if that’s treating you like a rat, eh?’
As he was driven away, Fred and I shook on it. ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Getting that gate open was the thing. It opened up the whole case, right?’
He was half joking, but it still felt pretty good. The team were warming to us. What we didn’t know then was they still had one initiation test planned before they were ready to let us roll with them on the night shift.
On the way to the bust, Fred had pointed out gaps in the houses, huge mounds of rubble and some buildings half-collapsed or with whole walls or roofs missing. The after-effects of Hurricane Katrina were everywhere. The city wore its scars for all to see.
Not all the scars were on the landscape either. The VOWS Special Ops unit were the tightest squad of men I’d seen yet – but there was a reason for that. They had a bond forged out of the worst circumstances – they’d been through things together that you and I can’t even begin to imagine.
And any dangers they might encounter today pale in comparison to what they faced in 2005.
On Monday, 29 August 2005, New Orleans was hit by a storm greater than any in the history of America. Hurricane Katrina gained pace and power out in the Caribbean before unleashing a fury of biblical proportions on the Big Easy.
Katrina changed the city for ever. The storm slammed into the levees and floodwalls, ripping them apart and releasing a torrent of water. The power grid shorted, the pumping stations – so vital in holding back the sea – were drowned. Within hours, more than three-quarters of New Orleans was under water: in some neighbourhoods by as much as 15 feet.
People looked to the police – but the police were suffering too. At a stroke more than 70 per cent of the city’s cops became homeless…and as well as thousands of criminal files being lost, flooding ruined hundreds of guns, bullet-resistant shields and countless rounds of ammunition.
Throughout New Orleans, citizens trapped by the rising waters and the lawlessness desperately took to their rooftops, or else barricaded themselves in where they could – often ready and willing to defend themselves with guns.
On the streets, it was Armageddon, described by one local news crew as ‘a tidal wave of chaos and violence’. Stores were looted, houses were robbed, bands of outlaws and vigilantes roamed the streets, robbing, raping and pillaging at will. Police stations came under attack; paramedics were shot at; relief and aid convoys trying to get into the city were hijacked.
Three days after the storm, National Guard helicopters were brought in to evacuate critically ill patients from one hospital – they were driven off by snipers. Doctors wheeling stretchers to the helicopter had to run for their lives as bullets zipped around them.
Dead bodies floated in the dirty water, thousands more were suffering horrific injuries at the hands of the mobs…or were simply dying from starvation, lack of water, heatstroke.
Society had completely broken down.
Into the breach stepped the NOPD. We met one of the unit who, like so many of his colleagues, stayed here to do his job. His name is Jason Samuels and if any cop we encountered around the world deserves to be called a hero, he does.
‘It was almost apocalyptic,’ he said, ‘probably 85 per cent of the city was under water. At least three to four feet, and everywhere you had families stuck that needed rescuing. And then that other 15 per cent that was out of water, you had millions of people heading that way – basically to steal what they wanted, what they needed, just to find safety.’
Jason and the rest of the unit regrouped in a nearby school, determined to keep serving the city, putting the people of New Orleans before their own needs.
‘We basically learnt the survival mentality: we went and found stores that maybe weren’t flooded where we could get supplies like socks and maybe some canned food and we were able to sustain ourselves until help arrived.’
The unit spent as many hours of the day and night as they could physically manage out on the streets, patrolling the dry areas and recovering bodies from the flooded zones.
The final death toll was nearly 2,000.
But as if that whole situation wasn’t enough, Jason did all this with an open gunshot wound in his leg: just over a month before Katrina hit he was involved in a shootout with a fleeing criminal while on patrol in the city. He rolled up his shorts and showed us his left thigh – long, ragged scars ran down from the groin to the knee, and a big triangle of skin like a pizza slice was red raw and tender from all the operations since.
‘The gunshot wound in my groin area had never closed so I was constantly bleeding,’ he said, as matter-of-fact as if he was describing a headache. ‘My left