Why were police from other cities allowed to keep people from leaving New Orleans?

It's true:

Police from surrounding jurisdictions shut down several access points to one of the only ways out of New Orleans last week, effectively trapping victims of Hurricane Katrina in the flooded and devastated city.

An eyewitness account from two San Francisco paramedics posted on an internet site for Emergency Medical Services specialists says, "Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot."

"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.

"All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down," he said.

Lawson doesn't even try to hide his agenda: To keep the Scary Negroes^TM out:

"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."

Sorry, folks, but you can't blame Ray Nagin for people not leaving when cops from other towns refused to allow them into their towns. As I've written before: With no one willing to take these people in absent a Federal order, where the heck were they supposed to go?

Earl Bockenfeld has more. Still think the "G" word doesn't apply?