No justice for just us!
27th January 2025 · 0 Comments
Hell must have frozen over during the rare snowstorm blanketing Louisiana last week because, for once, we agree with Governor Jeff Landry that the findings of the DOJ Report on the Louisiana State Police (LSP) are “old news.”
Landry was right.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Investigation of the Louisiana State Police, released on January 16, 2025, revealed systemic issues, including excessive use of force, violation of citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights, poor supervision, ineffective training and breakdowns in accountability.
That’s old news.
In an Associated Press investigation of racist language used by state employees, the wire service found many incidents of LSP employees forwarding racist emails on their official accounts with subject lines like “PROUD TO BE WHITE” or demeaning minority colleagues with names including “Monkey,” “Hershey’s Kiss,” “Django,” “Egg Roll” and “f—— n—–.”
New Orleans attorney David Lanser obtained the documents through a 2018 public records request. He concluded the state police have a deep-rooted racism problem.
That’s old news.
The 2019 death of Ronald Greene by the LSP, who claimed Greene was speeding, ran through a red light, crashed into a tree and died, prompted the DOJ investigation.
The LSP troopers lied to cover their crimes. That’s old news, too.
But the video didn’t lie.
Video shows the LSP pulling Greene out of his car, tasing him, punching him, dragging him face-down by the ankle shackles they put on him, and leaving him face down in the road. Multiple LSP troopers and sheriff’s deputies arrived at the crash scene.
The DOJ report found they used excessive force against Greene, whose lamentation of “I’m sorry, I’m your brother” and “I’m scared” fell on deaf ears.
The other episode that prompted the federal civil rights report involved a white Louisiana state trooper who attacked a Black motorist, Aaron Larry Bowman, after a traffic stop in Monroe, La., where Greene lived, three weeks after Greene’s death.
Ronald Greene’s mother, Mona Hardin, waited six years to see justice done by the DOJ for her son. To say she was deeply hurt to learn there would be no justice for Ronald and no peace for her is an understatement.
Biden’s DOJ concluded there was “insufficient evidence” to charge Greene’s murderers with any crime because federal law requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that an officer willfully violated Greens’s rights.
The report concluded that by that standard, an officer’s use of force may violate the Constitution even where it cannot be prosecuted as a criminal violation.
The fact that a Democratic administration’s DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, run by a Black woman, would not bring criminal charges, even when the video shows beyond a reasonable doubt that these law enforcement officers intended to attack and assault Green, is beyond astounding.
The Louisiana State Police, for years, have engaged in a statewide pattern of excessive force during arrests and pursuits of Black people, including the unjustified use of stun guns, according to the DOJ. Shouldn’t they be held accountable and charged criminally?
The DOJ’s finding of the use of excessive force, the lack of accountability within the LSP, and the DOJ’s refusal to hold LSP accountable is like the pot calling the skillet black.
That white cops and white men and women aren’t held accountable for crimes against Black victims is a pattern and practice that goes back decades. Emmit Till and Medgar Evers, lynching victims memorialized at the National Lynching Memorial. Ronald Green, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Sonya Massey, Breonna Taylor, The #SayHerName list is too long to recount, but you get the point.
Case in point: On his first day in the Oval Office, Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump Sr. pardoned more than 1,500 of the January 6 insurrectionists charged with crimes in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including people who assaulted police. Most of the insurrectionists were white men who called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence and the murder of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump gave them Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Cards.
Determined to “Make America white again,” not great again, Trump began the process of ending the Biden administration’s DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) efforts.
Need more proof that justice is not blind, that it too often sees what it wants to see, like the water fountains during the American Apartheid Era?
The White House issued a memo placing all federal staff who work on those efforts on paid leave with plans to lay them off soon. DEI training was also canceled. Trump also ordered the White House Spanish-language page and social media to shut down.
Trump plans to redefine birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. A Trump order asserts that a child born in the U.S. is not a citizen if 1.) the mother does not have legal immigration status or is in the country legally but only temporarily and 2.) the father is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.
The order forbids U.S. agencies from issuing any document recognizing such a child as a citizen or accepting any state document recognizing citizenship. This order is already being challenged in federal court.
According to two memos obtained by The Associated Press, Trump’s Justice Department leadership has frozen civil rights litigation and may reconsider police reform agreements negotiated by the Biden administration with Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Surely, the NOPD Consent Decree, which Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry wants to end, will magically disappear, too.
This article originally published in the January 27, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
