By The Editors

The investigation into incidents of murderous violence by the New Orleans police department in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina received another jolt late last week when a federal grand jury there indicted five city current and former officers in connection with the gruesome death of Henry Glover.

Glover’s charred body was found days after the devastating hurricane struck the city in a burned automobile near a city police precinct.

The grand jury indictment charges that he was shot on September 2, 2005 by New Orleans police officer David Warren, and that two other police officers assaulted William Tanner and another civilian who tried to seek aid for Glover by driving him to the police precinct. The indictment states that those two officers later took Tanner’s car and burned it, with Glover inside it. Two police lieutenants were charged with filing a false report about the incident and making flase statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The indictments are the latest developments in one of several cases of questionable police actions and outright misconduct that rocked the city and the department since the chaos wrought by the hurricane enveloped the city and the region.

Those actions have provoked several Justice Department and city investigations. They have also cracked a concerted police department cover-up in an unprovoked shooting of six unarmed civilians on the city’s Danziger Bridge overpass days after the strom devastated the city. Two of the civilians, who were walking to a nearby store for food, were killed. Thus far, three police officers have pleaded guilty to charges related to covering up the incident.

Henry Glover’s death has been as much of a flashpoint in provoking several media organizations to mount a continuing, minute examination of the lawless actions some police officers engaged in during those days and weeks and of what some allege is a wider pattern of endemic corruption in the department.