Carried Away

Cooper replied, "I wouldn't call it looting. What I have seen is desperate people kind of wandering around here in downtown Gulfport. There are a lot of police here in Gulfport, so you can't get away with looting. But I have seen people picking stuff up from the wreckage. I saw a man with two bottles of olive oil. He was hoping to try to cook something up. He says he has no water. He doesn't really have much of a place to go. So there are a lot of people just desperately in need."

The word "loot" comes from Sanskrit and means "booty" or "spoil." It has that basic sound to the ear. Something meaningful; something valuable. In 1860 Dickens wrote of "loot plundered by laundresses."

The verb "to loot" is different from the verb "to pillage," says Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster's New World Dictionaries in Cleveland. "Looting puts a criminal tinge on an act, a legal tinge. Pillage is wanton, out-of-control barbaric behavior."

The people on TV appear to be under control. There has been little talk of pillage.

Surely looting dates back to the dawn of humans and their caves full of stuff. Looting has always been a tenet of war. The Vandals looted Rome in the 5th century. The Nazis were notorious looters.

In contemporary times, there has been looting of relief supplies in Somalia and antiquities of Iraq. We've seen looting by the rich before a company like Enron goes bust. And looting by the poor after a National Basketball Association game.

The type of thievery we are seeing in New Orleans, Aguirre says, often happens in the wake of a catastrophe. Similar upheaval occurred in St. Croix in 1989 after Hurricane Hugo and in Los Angeles in 1992 during the Rodney King riots. In St. Croix, as in Louisiana, police were caught stealing.

Understanding the fact that part of a population, and not the whole population, can be criminals is essential to understanding that not everyone who steals is a looter, he says.

Criminals know to strike, he says, when there is chaos and confusion. And there is plenty of both to go around in New Orleans.