When Walmart Became Our Police Station After Katrina

The following is adapted from Treading Water by Chad Perez.

By Wednesday morning, three days after Hurricane Katrina hit, the officers of the NOPD’s Sixth District were running out of everything. Floodwater had reached our station, and the few provisions we had weren’t going to last. Captain Cannatella saw it clearly: we needed a real base of operations inside our district, somewhere with food, water, and supplies to sustain us for however long this would last. Walmart was the obvious answer.

About a dozen of us drove back across the bridge to take it over. Hundreds of people were milling around the parking lot. Some were there to survive. Others clearly weren’t. As we pulled up, a grown man wearing a Batman helmet was pushing a shopping cart with a big-screen TV inside. There was no electricity anywhere in the city. I took the cart and sent him on his way.

Inside was a free-for-all. People ran from us, and there were too many to stop. It took a few shotgun blasts into the ceiling to clear the store. Then we went aisle by aisle. Every shelf was stripped except one. The book aisle was untouched. No one wanted a book, even when they were free.

The real danger was the gun counter. Pry marks covered the cabinets holding AR-15s, hunting rifles, and handguns. Fifteen or twenty more minutes and the looters would have walked out with an arsenal. We finished the job they started, broke the cabinets open ourselves, moved every weapon into a metal storage container outside, and padlocked it.

Then we called the rest of the district over. From that day on, Walmart was the police station.

We were completely on our own. The Feds weren’t dropping supplies. The department had no water to give us. Everything we needed to survive and keep serving was on those shelves, and officers found creative ways to make it work. One showed up with a port-a-potty in the bed of his pickup without anyone asking. Another rigged a pump off a car battery to pull gas from a station’s underground tank. Some of our female officers built a kitchen in the lobby and served red beans and rice, beef stew, even gumbo, with the day’s menu posted on a whiteboard.

Not everyone stayed. More than 250 of the department’s roughly 1,700 officers never showed up or deserted during the crisis. Every morning, another car or two was gone. But as our numbers dwindled, the trust among those of us who remained grew stronger.

That night, standing in the pitch-dark encampment, I realized how exposed we were. Anyone with a grudge could walk in and start shooting. I told Cannatella, and he didn’t hesitate. We circled every spare vehicle we had, stolen limos and mail trucks included, into a perimeter with two guarded entrances.

Outside that parking lot, the city was descending into chaos. Inside it, we were creating order.

…

For more on holding the line when every system around you fails, you can find Treading Water on Amazon.

Chad Perez is a serial entrepreneur and highly decorated law enforcement veteran who has served in SWAT, narcotics, and gang investigations. He has received eleven award medals, including a Medal of Merit, a Purple Heart, and a Lifesaving Medal, and is a two-time Officer of the Year recipient. Following his law enforcement career, Chad founded Pinnacle Security and scaled it to four hundred employees, earning a spot on the Inc. magazine list of fastest-growing private companies four times. He is the co-founder and CEO of Aegis Response, a business providing alternative response services for law enforcement agencies. Chad lives outside of New Orleans with his wife, Leighet; their son, Braiden; and their dog, Max.