Sheriff of St. Tammany Parish, Jack Strain,

As crime returned to New Orleans it is also spiked upward in the surrounding parishes. St. Tammany had its first quadruple murder ever on June 29, 2006. Thugs invaded a trailer home and killed four occupants in a drug related shooting. Witnesses included two occupants who escaped by hiding in a bathroom.

Strain gained immediate notoriety when he made statements that if you were found walking around St. Tammany parish wearing dreadlocks or "chee wee" hairstyles you should expect to be visited by the police. The murder suspects were described as such.

Predictably the NAACP responded. Not with a condemnation of the crime and the criminals. Not with clues leading to an arrest, but with a lawsuit against the Sheriff. The message ought to be clear. The prospect of racial and class based profiling is more terrifying to the NAACP than are the murders.

This hints at just how damaging decades of racial discrimination have been for the entire metropolitan area. The same sentiments were voiced by the NAACP when Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish tried to enact law enforcement tactics that acknowledged the demographics of the criminals.