How to get away with murder
9th April 2018 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
I have to admit it, I wasn’t prepared for the virulent hatred and brutal violence I witnessed when the Baton Rouge Police Department finally released body camera footage of the July 5, 2016 killing of Alton Sterling.
From the very first words recorded by the Baton Rouge Police Department body camera, you just knew it was going to end badly.
One got the impression that Alton Sterling’s fate was sealed the very moment Officer Blane Salamoni and his partner were dispatched to the scene of the incident. In my mind’s eye, there was nothing Sterling or anyone could have done to convince Salamoni that he didn’t need to exit his police car in full-on attack mode.
If you recall, Salamoni becomes even more incensed once Alton Sterling says that his arm is being hurt and instructs Officer Howie Lake II to Taser Sterling.
What kind of law enforcement officer steps out of his or her vehicle already screaming at the top of his or her lungs about blowing somebody’s head off if they are even considering the possibility of a peaceful resolution of whatever the issue may have been?
And how often would you suppose that law enforcement officers use this aggressive, profane tone when encountering white suspects?
Given his demeanor and his eagerness to shoot first and ask questions later, one can say with great certainty that Officer Blane Salamoni is not a law enforcement officer who should be out in the field coming into contact with other human beings. Nor should he be given the power of life and death over another human being given his willingness to take a human life so capriciously.
It is shocking and disgusting that state Attorney General Jeff Landry and the U.S. Department of Justice could look at this body camera footage and conclude that Officer Blane Salamoni did absolutely nothing wrong.
This underscores the need for sweeping police reforms, which are not likely to take place in a culture that portrays cops as victims of anti-police bias and a racial climate that promotes white supremacist beliefs and practices.
The Associated Press reported recently that Officer Salamoni told an internal affairs investigator in September 2016 that he cursed at Sterling to send a message that the officers weren’t “playing,” according to a report released by the BRPD on March 30. Salamoni also said he saw Sterling reach for and hold a gun in his pants pocket right before he shot him during their struggle on the ground.
Trying to explain why he swore at Sterling after the shooting, Salamoni said “he was so mad at Sterling for making him kill him and for trying to kill us,” the report says.
What exactly did Alton Sterling do to “make” the two officers kill him?
Was it that he asked them what he had done or was it that he told Officers Howie Lake II and Blane Salamoni that they were hurting his arm?
Neither comment appears to be aggressive or sound like a veiled threat to take the officers’ lives and both appear to have been well within Sterling’s constitutional rights.
The first thing Alton Sterling heard and saw when the two officers approached him is Officer Blane Salamoni pointing a gun at his head and screaming about blowing his (expletive) head off. And the last thing Alton Sterling heard as he bled to death was Salamoni hurling obscenities at him for “making” Salamoni kill him.
There will come a day when state Attorney General Jeff Landry will be called upon to answer for his failure to protect innocent civilians from cops who think it is well within their sworn duties to take the lives of people who committed no crime and posed no threat to these officers or anyone else.
It may come when he runs for elected office next time or it may come sooner.
At the very least, Landry needs to be investigated for being derelict in his duties as the state’s top prosecutor. It is up to him to set the standard for equitable justice in Louisiana.
With him thus far, Black Louisianians have gotten no justice — there is just us out there on a limb hoping against hope that the state AG summons up the character, courage and integrity to do his job.
It is worth noting that there was a time when the Louisiana State Police under then LSP Col. Mike Edmonson backed law enforcement agencies across the state whenever there was an officer-involved killing. We saw it happen with Victor White III, who supposedly shot himself while he was handcuffed and sitting in a police car, with Cameron Tillman, a 14-year-old gunned down in Houma by Terrebonne Parish sheriff’s deputies while hanging out with his friends at an abandoned house, and of course with Alton Sterling, whose only crime appears to have been Selling Mixtapes While Black in Baton Rouge.
It was as if these law enforcement agencies could do no wrong and the LSP was happy to clear them of any wrongdoing over and over without ever considering that even one of these officers might have acted inappropriately and wrongfully caused someone’s death.
But things often have a way of working themselves out and we flash forward and witness former LSP Col. Mike Edmonson now facing an investigation and possible ethics charges for taking advantage of free hotel rooms in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, living on the state police compound without paying anything in taxes or even listing the arrangement as a job-related benefit and allegedly doing away with evidence about state troopers taking side trips to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon on the taxpayers’ dime.
The Baton Rouge Police Department is putting its best face forward now, but has it formally apologized to Triple S Food Mart owner Abdullah Muflahi for forcing him to sit in a hot police car with the windows rolled up for hours, for confiscating video surveillance from his store without a search warrant or for forcing him to relieve himself on the side of his building instead of allowing him to use the restroom in his store?
Muflahi rightfully filed a federal lawsuit against the BRPD after the fatal shooting of Sterling, who the business owner clearly considered a good friend.
Lest we be duped into thinking that the Alton Sterling shooting was an isolated incident, we should remind ourselves about the high number of complaints filed by Katrina survivors from New Orleans who relocated to Baton Rouge after the Great Flood and were treated like criminals by the BRPD.
Or 15-year BRPD veteran Michael Elsbury, who resigned in 2014 after finding himself in hot water for texting and posting comments about killing Black people.
“I wish someone would pull a Ferguson on them and take them out,” he said in one of his texts. “I hate looking at those African monkeys at work… I enjoy arresting those thugs with their saggy pants.”
Does anyone really believe that former BRPD Officers Elsbury and Salamoni were isolated bad apples who did not influence other officers over the course of their careers and are not representative of a larger problem within the BRPD?
Does anyone believe that incidents that lead to the firing or resignation of police officers “cure” these law enforcement agencies of unconstitutional policing or teach these officers how to better conceal their violations of civilians’ constitutional rights?
What I can say with certainty is that the murder of a civilian by a law enforcement officer and the refusal of the U.S. Department of Justice and the state Attorney General’s Office to prosecute the offender is the worst possible violation of public trust and leads to an erosion of the public’s faith in the criminal justice system and the law itself.
These kinds of egregious acts of violence and disrespect of civilians’ constitutional and human rights all but guarantees that there will be an segment of society that will take the law into its own hands and deal with lawless cops.
Violence, after all, is the language of the oppressed. And violence begets violence.
So with eyes always watching police carry out their duties and the way government agencies regulate law enforcement, it would behoove cops to remember that when it comes to rogue civilians taking the law into their own hands, the lives cops save and protect in carrying out their duties may very well prove to be their own.
No one deserves to be gunned down like an animal, whether he or she wears a badge or not.
Quiet as it’s kept, Black, Brown and poor people have families and other people who love them and want them to make it home every day just like law enforcement officers.
This article originally published in the April 9, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
