Baton Rouge Police Fatal Shooting of Alton Sterling

bnw wrote:

zn wrote:

It may well have been false but the officers responded under that assumption and found the guy at the scene matching the call and the guy did have a gun. Don’t resist arrest. That is the simple lesson.

The officers shot a guy they had pinned on the ground.

There is no narrative that can excuse that.

And near as we know he didn’t resist. I see a guy pinned on the ground getting shot in the chest. I don’t feel the need to make excuses for that. It should never happen.

How about “don’t shoot guys you have pinned on the ground.”

I am not very tolerant of excuse making for that.

No excuses. DON’T RESIST ARREST! The guy was resisting arrest from the very beginning. He was not following their instructions. Even when on the ground he kept struggling . What that video doesn’t show is his hands. And this in the context of the officers having been alerted to his having a gun! DON’T RESIST ARREST!

You know I am not buying that stuff.

He wasn’t resisting, he had been subdued.

Unless you believe in summary execution, there is no freaking excuse for the cops acting like that at that point.

And you will get nowhere trying to push the same point. I don’t buy it now and never will.

If nothing else, it means the police are so poorly trained they can’t make distinctions.

And we are repeating ourselves in pure “agree to disagree” territory. Take that into account if you insist on trying to push your point, at least with me anyway.

…

Alton Sterling Witness: Cops Took My Phone, My Surveillance Video, Locked Me Up

Abdullah Muhlafi says the Baton Rouge officer who killed a man selling CDs immediately ordered him to be detained and then stole footage of the slaying.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/11/alton-sterling-witness-cops-took-my-phone-my-surveillance-video-locked-me-up.html

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana — The owner of the convenience store where Alton Sterling was killed last week by cops alleges in a lawsuit that police stole surveillance video from his shop, confiscated his cell phone, and locked him inside a car for the next four hours.
Abdullah Muhlafi, proprietor of the Triple S Mart, saw police confront and kill Sterling who was selling CDs with his permission in the front parking lot last Tuesday night. Muhlafi recorded part of the incident in footage he gave The Daily Beast last week that shows Sterling did not have a weapon in his hand when Officer Howie Lake shouted “gun!” and Officer Blane Salamoni fired six shots into his chest.
Muflahi claims in a lawsuit filed Monday in Baton Rouge district court that after Salamoni killed Sterling, he immediately told responding officers Lt. Robert Cook and Officer Timothy Ballard to confiscate the “entire store security system” and detain him.
“I told them I would like to be in the store when [they took it],” Muflahi told The Daily Beast, adding that he also demanded they get a warrant for the seizure of his private property.
Officers didn’t even file an application for a search warrant, The Daily Beast found last week. Nor did Muflahi sign a “Voluntary Consent to Search Form” with the Baton Rouge police.
After taking away Muhlafi’s cellphone — and the damning video on it — Lt. Robert Cook and Officer Timothy Ballard locked the him in the back of a police car for the next four hours, the lawsuit claims. The only time Muhlafi was let out was when he had to use the restroom.
“The officers would not allow Mr. Muflahi to use the restroom inside of his business establishment and he was escorted to the side of his building and forced to relieve himself right there within arm distance of a BPRD officer and in full view of the public,” the lawsuit states.
During the four hours inside a cop car and another two hours at police headquarters, Muhlafi was allegedly prevented from making a phone call to his family or an attorney.
Muhlafi is suing Salamoni, Lake, Cook, and Ballard as well as the City of Baton Rouge and police chief Carl Dabadi. The lawsuit seeks damages for “false arrest, false imprisonment, the illegal taking and seizing of his security system, illegally commandeering his business,” attorney Joel Porter told The Daily Beast on Monday.
Hours after Muflahi’s lawsuit was filed, it was revealed that police had filed the search warrant and the affidavit with a court clerk on Monday morning–six days after Sterling was killed.
The warrant suggests that Cook waited five hours after he began his investigation at the Triple S Mart before applying for a warrant to search for the video. Cook submitted an affidavit to Commissioner Quintillis Lawrence at 5:23 a.m. and Lawrence authorized the warrant that very same minute, court papers show. At 5:50 a.m. Cook began his search and finished by 7 a.m., according to the warrant’s return.
“The timeline definitely doesn’t add up,” Porter told The Daily Beast.
Muflahi claimed in his lawsuit that police detained him and took the hard drive around 1 a.m. So either police waited five hours to get a warrant and seize the hard drive or they grabbed the hard drive and got a warrant after the fact to make the seizure appear legal.
The only way to know which scenario is true is to see the security camera footage, which would show if it was terminated before or after the warrant was authorized. However, police don’t have just the video but the hard drive itself, making it impossible to challenge their timeline of events unless and until they give up the video.
And Sterling’s family wants it released.

“The family would like the release of the video survillence tapes,” the attorney for Sterling’s son said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “If we are searching for the truth, it starts here.”
Porter claims police exceeded the warrant’s authority by seizing the hard drive.
“The warrant gives the Baton Rouge Police Department the authority to search the surveillance video on recording device, it doesn’t give them the authority to seize the device,” he said.
The warrant states that “the purpose and reason for the search is to find and seize the item(s) listed above,” referring to “Video Surveillance from the Digital Video Recorder.” It continues, “You are hearby ordered to search the aforesaid Revo Digital Video Recorder …and if the thing(s) specified are found there, to seize them and hold them in safe custody pending further orders from the court.”
How did the police know the brand of recorder without already searching the back room where it was kept? Porter asked.
“They lied in the warrant,” he said, calling it “laughable.”
In response to questions surrounding the investigation, Gov. John Bel Edwards “believes all evidence should be collected in accordance with the law,” said spokesman Richard Carbo, although he wouldn’t comment on the specifics of the case, and again deferred to law enforcement on details.
Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond told The Daily Beast, “I think the public has a right to know under what authority the tapes were seized.”
Protests over Sterling’s killing have been escalating over the past few days, with 48 people arrested on Sunday and more than 100 arrested on Saturday. More protests are planned for Monday with no signs of letting up.

Before killing Alton Sterling, Baton Rouge police had a history of brutality complaints

Jarvis DeBerry, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune By Jarvis DeBerry, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2016/07/baton_rouge_police_brutality.html

Alton Sterling was selling CDs outside a Baton Rouge convenience store early Tuesday morning when the police responded to a 911 call that Sterling had threatened the 911 caller with a gun. That’s sufficient reason for the police to come to the scene, but – just in case this needs to be said – that’s not sufficient reason for the police to kill him.

The Baton Rouge Police Department – like so many other departments across the country – is notorious for its brutal treatment of black people. And the confrontation that ensued between Sterling and Officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II should be discussed within its proper context. The Baton Rouge Police Department has a history of brutality against black people.

Many law enforcement officials came to Louisiana immediately after Hurricane Katrina to provide reinforcements, and one state trooper from Michigan said Baton Rouge police attempted to thank him for his help by letting him “beat down” a prisoner. A trooper from New Mexico wrote a letter to the Baton Rouge police expressing the concerns of seven New Mexico troopers and five Michigan troopers that Baton Rouge police were engaging in racially motivated enforcement, that they were physically abusing prisoners and the public and that they were stopping, questioning and searching people without any legal justification.

In case you weren’t paying attention, I’ll repeat it: The people accusing Baton Rouge police of brutality and racism were other law enforcement officials. And, yet, the general response from Baton Rouge was that those outside officers didn’t know what they were talking about. An attorney for the Baton Rouge police union said all the stops the outside troopers criticized were legal. Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden, a black man, said that he had heard of looting in New Orleans and was determined not to have any such thing in Baton Rouge.

The visiting troopers say Baton Rouge police told them that they were under orders to be so hard on New Orleans evacuees that they’d decide against settling in Baton Rouge.

As if.

So that’s what we’re dealing with: a police department whose behavior worried other law enforcement officials and whose leadership has been more defensive than responsive to the claims of racist policing.

But the bad reports aren’t confined to the time around Hurricane Katrina. In 2014, a 15-year-veteran of the force resigned after a series of racist text messages were attributed to him. Michael Elsbury, who routinely patrolled an area around Southern University, resigned as the department was looking into text messages that called black people monkeys (and worse) and expressed pleasure “in arresting those thugs with their saggy pants.”

In April 2016 we saw a video of a 22-year veteran of the Baton Rouge force repeatedly punching a teenager in the back of the head as other officers held the teenager on the ground.

So let’s not look at Sterling’s death as an isolated incident.

The police reportedly scuffled with Sterling, held him down and fired multiple shots at him, killing him. Their body cameras didn’t’ record everything that happened because, officials say, they fell off as the officers struggled with Sterling.

The video recorded by a bystander has sickened people across the country.

Sterling was 37 years old. He joins a long list of black people whose killings at the hands of police seems unnecessary.

We should all be thankful that Baton Rouge police aren’t going to be investigating the actions of Baton Rouge police. (Like they investigated themselves and found themselves innocent of racism and brutality when outside officers who were deployed after Katrina expressed horror at what they saw.) On Wednesday, FBI New Orleans division spokesman Craig Betbeze said that federal officials will “conduct a fair, thorough and impartial investigation” of what happened outside the Triple S Mart Tuesday morning.

When the Department of Justice looked into Ferguson, Mo., they decided against charges for Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown. At the same time, the Justice Department described a police force that blatantly and repeatedly harassed black people and put them in jail for made up reasons.

Who knows what the feds will say about Sterling’s death? But if investigators thought the whole Ferguson department was rotten, they’re likely to reach a similar conclusion about the department in Baton Rouge.