Did a search, didn't see this discussed. Pretty ****ing bad.
Ramon Antonio Vargas in Louisiana
Sat 23 Sep 2023 01.00 EDT
Across from an industrial hose and gasket supplier’s office, in a mostly empty and fenced-off lot behind a precinct house belonging to the police department of Louisiana’s capital city, there sits a white storage shed without any markings explaining its purpose.
That single-story warehouse – within a couple of blocks of a daycare center, an eatery specializing in chicken wings and a gasoline station frequented by unwary residents – is now the focus of local and federal authorities examining alarming claims that officers with the Baton Rouge police department (BRPD) took detained people there and brutalized them.
Allegations portraying the warehouse once used by the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination, or Brave, anti-street crime unit as a sort of black site or torture chamber are contained in two federal court lawsuits filed relatively recently.
One of the lawsuits maintains that a woman was illegally forced to disrobe and endure a humiliating search of her body. Another contends a man was so badly beaten by officers who took him to their so-called “Brave Cave” that one of his ribs was broken.
The plaintiffs accuse police of violating their civil rights and have demanded damages, prompting not only public outcry against the local law enforcement establishment – but also having an impact, at least at this early stage of the scandal.
After the first of the two lawsuits, the Brave unit primarily addressing drug-related complaints was disbanded, and its warehouse was shuttered. One of the officers named in both lawsuits – Troy Lawrence Jr, the son of the BRPD’s deputy chief – has resigned, and he has also been arrested on a count of battery in connection with a third case that got a closer look because of the Brave Cave allegations.
Meanwhile, in a statement provided to the Guardian, a police spokesperson said the department’s chief, Murphy Paul, had asked the FBI to assist his agency as it conducted “administrative and criminal investigations” into the circumstances surrounding the Brave Cave. “The Baton Rouge police department is committed to addressing the troubling accusations,” Paul said.
The FBI confirmed it had opened a civil rights investigation following the lawsuits.
The consequences, however, should not end there, lawyers involved in the Brave Cave lawsuits have said.
“What happened there was unconscionable,” one of the attorneys, Ryan Thompson, said at a news conference. University of Virginia law school professor Thomas Frampton said Baton Rouge police’s leadership had a chance to implement meaningful changes when allegations of an illegal strip-search in 2021 brought criticism to the agency.
But police botched that opportunity by doing nothing, Frampton said, and since then, “countless Baton Rouge citizens have been subject to illegal, sexually humiliating strip-searches”. And, in remarks to the Associated Press, Frampton warned that additional lawsuits from others are coming.
A lawsuit filed Monday by Baton Rouge grandmother Ternell Brown provides chilling details about one such search. In filings at Baton Rouge’s federal courthouse, Brown recounts how she was out driving on 10 June when two officers, Lawrence Jr and Matthew Wallace, noticed prescription medications in her car during a traffic stop.
Brown asserts that she had offered to show the cops that she had a valid prescription, but they didn’t want to hear it. They took her to the Brave Cave, ordered her to fully undress, and made her spread her vagina to officers who were men, the lawsuit alleges.
Police ultimately released Brown without having booked her with a crime, according to Thompson, as Baton Rouge’s daily newspaper, the Advocate, has previously reported.
Brown’s claims came less than a month after a Baton Rouge man named Jeremy Lee accused Lawrence Jr and Wallace of arresting him in front of his home “without reasonable suspicion or probable cause”. The officers ultimately took Lee to the Brave Cave, where Lawrence Jr, Wallace, and Joseph Carboni fractured one of the 21-year-old’s ribs and caused him other injuries while roughing him up there, according to the lawsuit.
In the end, Lee was booked with a count of resisting arrest. He and his attorneys, who include Thompson and Frampton, have deemed the charge “materially false”.
Shortly after news of Lee’s lawsuit broke, Baton Rouge’s mayor, Sharon Weston Broome, had the Brave unit disbanded, its members reassigned to other duties and its purported cave closed permanently. She cited the results of a preliminary investigation as well as information provided to her directly by Paul, the chief, to justify the decision.
“I was appalled to hear what was being alleged to take place there at the facility,” Broome has said, according to National Public Radio’s Louisiana Considered show.
Lawrence Jr subsequently resigned amid the investigation into the Brave Cave. On Wednesday, the Advocate reported, he was issued a misdemeanor summons charging him with simple battery after investigators found bodyworn camera video which showed him using a stun gun to shock a detainee handcuffed in the back of a patrol cruiser “without giving the suspect an opportunity to comply [with] verbal commands”.
Despite Broome’s self-described disgust, Frampton has been quick to point out this is not at all the first time officers who are sworn to protect the city with a majority of Black residents have been accused of such abusive behavior.
Baton Rouge officers looked in the underwear and groped the genitals of Clarence Green and his teenage brother during a 2021 traffic stop, subsequently drawing scrutiny of the police force’s methods, as the Advocate reported. Officers alleged that the search turned up a gun and marijuana that were both illegally possessed, but a judge dismissed the charges filed against Green.
Brown and Lee’s lawsuits were both pending heading into the weekend, and there was no telling how they might conclude. Nonetheless, the allegations had added another chapter to a BRPD history that has been particularly turbulent since 2016.
Notably, an officer’s killing of Alton Sterling outside a convenience store ignited days of Black Lives Matter protests that year. Less than two weeks after Sterling’s slaying, which was recorded on a widely viewed cellphone video, four law enforcement officers were shot dead and two others were wounded in an ambush-style attack down the road from BRPD headquarters.
The officer who fatally shot Sterling resigned. The gunman who killed two Baton Rouge police officers as well as two sheriff’s deputies was shot dead himself by law enforcement members who confronted him.
Sterling’s family later received a $4.5m settlement from Baton Rouge’s city government to conclude an episode presaging the worldwide protests against police brutality that were elicited by a Minneapolis officer’s murder of George Floyd in 2020.
www.theguardian.com
Louisiana police accused of ‘unconscionable’ abuse in ‘Brave Cave’
Baton Rouge officers allegedly brutalized and disrobed detainees in storage shed once used for anti-street crime unitRamon Antonio Vargas in Louisiana
Sat 23 Sep 2023 01.00 EDT
Across from an industrial hose and gasket supplier’s office, in a mostly empty and fenced-off lot behind a precinct house belonging to the police department of Louisiana’s capital city, there sits a white storage shed without any markings explaining its purpose.
That single-story warehouse – within a couple of blocks of a daycare center, an eatery specializing in chicken wings and a gasoline station frequented by unwary residents – is now the focus of local and federal authorities examining alarming claims that officers with the Baton Rouge police department (BRPD) took detained people there and brutalized them.
Allegations portraying the warehouse once used by the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination, or Brave, anti-street crime unit as a sort of black site or torture chamber are contained in two federal court lawsuits filed relatively recently.
One of the lawsuits maintains that a woman was illegally forced to disrobe and endure a humiliating search of her body. Another contends a man was so badly beaten by officers who took him to their so-called “Brave Cave” that one of his ribs was broken.
The plaintiffs accuse police of violating their civil rights and have demanded damages, prompting not only public outcry against the local law enforcement establishment – but also having an impact, at least at this early stage of the scandal.
After the first of the two lawsuits, the Brave unit primarily addressing drug-related complaints was disbanded, and its warehouse was shuttered. One of the officers named in both lawsuits – Troy Lawrence Jr, the son of the BRPD’s deputy chief – has resigned, and he has also been arrested on a count of battery in connection with a third case that got a closer look because of the Brave Cave allegations.
Meanwhile, in a statement provided to the Guardian, a police spokesperson said the department’s chief, Murphy Paul, had asked the FBI to assist his agency as it conducted “administrative and criminal investigations” into the circumstances surrounding the Brave Cave. “The Baton Rouge police department is committed to addressing the troubling accusations,” Paul said.
The FBI confirmed it had opened a civil rights investigation following the lawsuits.
The consequences, however, should not end there, lawyers involved in the Brave Cave lawsuits have said.
“What happened there was unconscionable,” one of the attorneys, Ryan Thompson, said at a news conference. University of Virginia law school professor Thomas Frampton said Baton Rouge police’s leadership had a chance to implement meaningful changes when allegations of an illegal strip-search in 2021 brought criticism to the agency.
But police botched that opportunity by doing nothing, Frampton said, and since then, “countless Baton Rouge citizens have been subject to illegal, sexually humiliating strip-searches”. And, in remarks to the Associated Press, Frampton warned that additional lawsuits from others are coming.
A lawsuit filed Monday by Baton Rouge grandmother Ternell Brown provides chilling details about one such search. In filings at Baton Rouge’s federal courthouse, Brown recounts how she was out driving on 10 June when two officers, Lawrence Jr and Matthew Wallace, noticed prescription medications in her car during a traffic stop.
Brown asserts that she had offered to show the cops that she had a valid prescription, but they didn’t want to hear it. They took her to the Brave Cave, ordered her to fully undress, and made her spread her vagina to officers who were men, the lawsuit alleges.
Police ultimately released Brown without having booked her with a crime, according to Thompson, as Baton Rouge’s daily newspaper, the Advocate, has previously reported.
Brown’s claims came less than a month after a Baton Rouge man named Jeremy Lee accused Lawrence Jr and Wallace of arresting him in front of his home “without reasonable suspicion or probable cause”. The officers ultimately took Lee to the Brave Cave, where Lawrence Jr, Wallace, and Joseph Carboni fractured one of the 21-year-old’s ribs and caused him other injuries while roughing him up there, according to the lawsuit.
In the end, Lee was booked with a count of resisting arrest. He and his attorneys, who include Thompson and Frampton, have deemed the charge “materially false”.
Shortly after news of Lee’s lawsuit broke, Baton Rouge’s mayor, Sharon Weston Broome, had the Brave unit disbanded, its members reassigned to other duties and its purported cave closed permanently. She cited the results of a preliminary investigation as well as information provided to her directly by Paul, the chief, to justify the decision.
“I was appalled to hear what was being alleged to take place there at the facility,” Broome has said, according to National Public Radio’s Louisiana Considered show.
Lawrence Jr subsequently resigned amid the investigation into the Brave Cave. On Wednesday, the Advocate reported, he was issued a misdemeanor summons charging him with simple battery after investigators found bodyworn camera video which showed him using a stun gun to shock a detainee handcuffed in the back of a patrol cruiser “without giving the suspect an opportunity to comply [with] verbal commands”.
Thomas Frampton
Despite Broome’s self-described disgust, Frampton has been quick to point out this is not at all the first time officers who are sworn to protect the city with a majority of Black residents have been accused of such abusive behavior.
Baton Rouge officers looked in the underwear and groped the genitals of Clarence Green and his teenage brother during a 2021 traffic stop, subsequently drawing scrutiny of the police force’s methods, as the Advocate reported. Officers alleged that the search turned up a gun and marijuana that were both illegally possessed, but a judge dismissed the charges filed against Green.
Brown and Lee’s lawsuits were both pending heading into the weekend, and there was no telling how they might conclude. Nonetheless, the allegations had added another chapter to a BRPD history that has been particularly turbulent since 2016.
Notably, an officer’s killing of Alton Sterling outside a convenience store ignited days of Black Lives Matter protests that year. Less than two weeks after Sterling’s slaying, which was recorded on a widely viewed cellphone video, four law enforcement officers were shot dead and two others were wounded in an ambush-style attack down the road from BRPD headquarters.
The officer who fatally shot Sterling resigned. The gunman who killed two Baton Rouge police officers as well as two sheriff’s deputies was shot dead himself by law enforcement members who confronted him.
Sterling’s family later received a $4.5m settlement from Baton Rouge’s city government to conclude an episode presaging the worldwide protests against police brutality that were elicited by a Minneapolis officer’s murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Louisiana police accused of ‘unconscionable’ abuse in ‘Brave Cave’
Baton Rouge officers allegedly brutalized and disrobed detainees in storage shed once used for anti-street crime unit
