1467 New Orleans Police collapsing?

I've read that Mayor Nagin of New Orleans is going to send some of his police to Vegas for a break. I hope that is a cruel, right wing rumor. But things don't look good for him:

"Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs, and two have committed suicide, police officials said yesterday.

Some officers told superiors that they were leaving, police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in after the storm."

Story here from Seattle Times, but is from the New York Times. I think it is too much "he said, she said," to be solid news, but that's NYT for you. I came across this article looking for the one where the NYT praised Congress for resisting flood control excesses, and I passed by the photo of all the buses underwater that the mayor didn't use, and the story about how the President had to plead with the Mayor Saturday night [before the hurricane hit] to get him to give a mandatory evacuation order. Some of these stories are so beyond belief you just don't know how to go about researching them.