Danziger Bridge

That officers of the New Orleans Police Department shot six unarmed civilians at the Danziger Bridge on 4 September 2005, killing two, and that officers and supervisors then conspired to make the shooting appear lawful by falsifying reports, planting evidence and fabricating witnesses.

Six days after Hurricane Katrina, with the city flooded and the department operating without functioning command, officers responding to a radio call of shots fired drove to the bridge and opened fire on two groups of civilians walking to find food and supplies. James Brissette, seventeen, was killed. Ronald Madison, forty, a man with severe intellectual disabilities, was shot in the back and killed. Four others were seriously wounded, one losing an arm.

For the families, a decade of litigation and a set of sentences most regarded as inadequate. For the city, a consent decree that ran for more than a decade and reshaped how the department investigates its own use of force. The case is also the strongest available answer to a specific objection raised whenever police misconduct is alleged — that a conspiracy of this kind would require too many people to keep quiet. Here roughly a dozen did, for four years, and it unravelled because participants began cooperating rather than because the fabrication failed on its own.