NEW ORLEANS — In a deserted subdivision, past mobile homes blown inside out and power poles snapped in two, there is an unassuming home with a two-car garage, porcelain ducks on the dining table and a swing set in the backyard.
The 26 men and women inside sleep next to their guns, scrounge for food, rely on handouts for things like toilet paper, and steal cars.
Then they get up in the morning and try to save the city.
This is what it's come to for the New Orleans Police Department, where authorities estimated Tuesday that 70% of the city's 1,700 officers are homeless.
The department has been decimated by Hurricane Katrina. Two officers have put their guns in their mouths and killed themselves. More than 200 have quit. About 500 are unaccounted for. The rest have fought with looters, run out of ammunition, fended off criticism of their response to the storm and been knocked off rescue boats into the fetid stew that covers more than half the city.
For more than a week, they have dealt with personal tragedies no different from anyone else's here -- apartments that are underwater, parents who are missing, children who are being shuttled from one shelter to the next.
Two dozen of them found their way to the home of Lt. David M. Benelli, 55, commander of the city's sex crimes unit, and the woman he calls his child bride, Sgt. Becky Benelli, 42, assistant commander of the crime lab. The Benellis are cops to the core; they met at a traffic fatality and fell in love.
The officers at "Camp Benelli" in the Algiers area of New Orleans reflect the diversity of the department: 21 men and five women, black and white, 33-year veterans and patrol cops with six months under their belts. They have more than 300 years of combined service on the force.
And every morning, they find the strength to go to work.
Glenn Madison, 47, is a firearms instructor, a 22-year veteran of the force with an easy smile and biceps that stretch the fabric of his T-shirt. His story is typical of the officers staying at Camp Benelli.
His three children evacuated before the storm, and he has barely spoken with them since. His home is underwater in New Orleans East, a district on the northeast side. Two nights ago, he made his way back to Camp Benelli only to hear that a bus carrying nursing-home evacuees had been hijacked west of the city.
"Your daddy was on there," one of his colleagues said.
Madison's father, an 83-year-old Alzheimer's patient, had been left with the others on the side of the road. After a frantic night on his cellphone, as the signal died again and again, Madison learned that his father had been picked up by another bus and was safe. He tried to sleep for a couple hours, then hit the streets again.
"It definitely isn't for the pay," the officer said Tuesday. "Believe it or not, this is where we live. New Orleans is our home. And this is our job."
Like those of so many people in New Orleans, the plight of the officers at Camp Benelli began not so much with the hurricane itself but with the water that began creeping into the city the next day.
Most of the officers were bunking at the crime lab, which is in the central business district, when the hurricane hit Aug. 29. The water started rising around the building that Monday, then came in the front doors by Tuesday morning. The officers raced to the main police compound on South Broad Avenue, but the water kept rising.
Madison had hauled his 20-foot-long fishing boat into town just in case and parked it near City Hall. But without any tools, officers couldn't get it off the trailer -- so they roared into the flooded streets with the trailer still attached to the hull. The water was so deep they didn't hit anything. They picked up everyone left at the police compound and fled for a Marriott hotel on St. Charles Avenue.
They were there for two days.
"Then the manager came by and said he was leaving," said Capt. R.R. Duryea, commander of the crime lab. "He told us, 'There is no help coming to you.' "
They had no place to go, no police headquarters, no operating radios.
Meanwhile, the Benellis had made their way to the Algiers section -- across the Mississippi River and about seven miles from downtown -- to check on their house. That stretch of the West Bank, as it's known, fared better than almost any other part of the metropolitan region. But even there, as the Benellis drove in, they saw towering pine trees that had collapsed on houses, crushing roofs.
"I didn't lose a shingle," David Benelli said.
On Friday, Becky Benelli discovered that they had running water, a rare commodity in New Orleans these days, even if it is not potable.
"You take stock," David Benelli said. "You circle the wagons. We're trying to survive here."
The Benellis decided to set up camp for their stranded colleagues. But the officers' squad cars were underwater, and they had no way to get to the Benellis' house. So they set up a checkpoint in downtown New Orleans. They spent all night stopping every car that went through.
