Utah rumors of evacuees debunked

All the evacuees staying at Camp Williams are expected to move out by today, but the nagging rumors won't leave with them.

It's the same story nationwide, with rampant rumors of violence, looting and shady criminal pasts that just won't die, despite persistent denials by police and other officials.

"I don't know where these rumors are coming from," said Derek Jensen, a Utah Department of Public Safety spokesman. "They are just not true. The evacuees have been cooperative and behaved themselves pretty well while they were here."

They behaved so well that police issued no criminal citations during the evacuees' stay of more than three weeks, Jensen said.

But that won't stop the rumors. E-mails about the Utah evacuees are circulating nationwide, with claims of rape, gang violence and drug sales among the evacuees.

These alleged criminal acts seem to get bigger and more elaborate every day as the e-mails are forwarded to the next in-box.

"Essentially ever since the evacuees got here, I have heard 20 different versions of what's out there and what has been going on out there," Paul Murphy, spokesman for the Utah Attorney General's Office, said of the rumors about Camp Williams.

These rumors should be expected after such an unusual event, said Michael Lindell of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University.

People don't know what to expect when a large group of strangers comes to town. Often, rumors of bad behavior accompany feelings of uncertainty, he said. "Clearly race has something to do with it," Lindell said.

As one evacuee told a Utah Air National Guardsman shortly after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, "It sure is white here."

Sixty-seven percent of New Orleans residents are black while only 1.9 percent of Salt Lake City's population is black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"Because Utah is such a white state, there are a lot of people that have only had contacts with blacks through the media, and frankly the depictions of blacks in the media is not particularly favorable," Lindell said.

"It's not perfectly rational, it certainly isn't fair, but it happens," he said of the rumors.

Even Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff fell victim to some of the rumors, saying on a local radio call-in show that there were "several dozen" convicted murderers living at Camp Williams.