Holy shit. I know it’s expected of police in america to engage in police brutality but this is on another level. Taking people to a warehouse and assaulting them? What the fuck? The image in the article deeply unnerved me. It reminded me of the things you hear the CIA does in foreign countries…
This is just one of the ones that got reported. It goes on behind closed doors or on the back roads a lot more than anyone is willing to admit. When people say the police here are just a gang backed by capital and sanctioned by the state, it’s not hyperbole.
During the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, it emerged that there were similar sites in Chicago & other cities. Those taken to them were lifted off the streets, away from the protests, by people who were not in uniform & who did not identify themselves. Once at these unmarked sites, they were denied access to basics like a lawyer & a phonecall. Seems most were released relatively quickly, but the whole thing sends a stark warning: we can disappear you if we want & you can’t do a damn thing about it.
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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.
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”.
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.
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.
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