Sh** just getting ridiculous. Well, technically, it’s been ridiculous, but now the injustice is just blatantly in our face.
Over the past ten years, white Louisiana State troopers and their commanders concealed troubling footage of minority suspects being beaten during arrests.
The Associated Press investigated the situation and discovered at least 12 cases in the past decade in which troopers and their superiors ignored or tried to conceal evidence of the beatdowns or block efforts to stamp out misconduct, the New York Post reported.
The AP found that troopers regularly turned off or muted their body cameras during police chases. It also alleges that officers left out uses of force like hits to the head in official police reports, while others tried to justify their actions by lying, saying suspects were resisting or trying to escape.
“Hyper-aggressiveness is winked upon and nodded and allowed to go on,” former police chief and use-of-force expert Andrew Scott told the Associated Press.
Most victims of excessive force are black, data that aligns with other department data that shows 67 percent of use-of-force incidents between 2017 and 2019 involved black suspects. The data is double Louisiana’s percentage of black residents, the AP reported.
One of the videos shows Jacob Brown, a former trooper, hitting Aaron Larry Bowman 18 times with a flashlight after a 2019 traffic stop. Federal authorities are now looking into the matter.
Brown faces state charges after investigators claimed he “engaged in excessive and unjustifiable actions” while pummeling Bowman with an 8-inch aluminum flashlight. The victim suffered fractures to his jaw, ribs, and wrist, as well as a gash on his head.
Bowman’s incident came less than three weeks after Louisiana State troopers punched, stunned, and dragged Ronald Greene, another Black man, who later died in police custody.
The Associated Press obtained the video footage of Greene’s tragic encounter, which showed him begging for mercy.
Troopers initially said he died from crashing into a tree, but his family claimed in a federal wrongful-death lawsuit that the troopers “brutalized” him, which caused him to go into cardiac arrest.
“They murdered him,” Greene’s mother, Mona Hardin, said in May. “It was set out, it was planned. He didn’t have a chance. Ronnie didn’t have a chance. He wasn’t going to live to tell about it.”
Four Louisiana troopers have been charged with state crimes in connection to Greene’s tragedy.
Federal prosecutors are also looking into the allegations that officers and their commanders used excessive force and potential obstruction of justice charges, the Associated Press reported.
Louisiana State Police said in a statement that the agency has “completely revised” its excessive force policies with numerous reform measures since Col. Lamar Davis took over the agency 11 months ago.
“No instance of excessive force is acceptable and when the department learns of such misconduct, an immediate review is launched leading to administrative and/or potential criminal investigations,” the agency said.
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