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