Justice Dept. opens civil rights probe into Louisiana State Police
BATON ROUGE, La. — The U.S. Justice Department is opening a sweeping civil rights investigation into the Louisiana State Police amid mounting evidence that the agency has a pattern of looking the other way in the face of beatings of mostly Black men, including the deadly 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene.
The federal “pattern-orpractice” probe announced Thursday followed an Associated Press investigation that found Greene’s arrest was among at least a dozen cases over the past decade in which state police troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Dozens of current and former troopers said the beatings were countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, racism.
“We find significant justification to open this investigation now . ... We received information of the repeated use of excessive force, often against people suspected of minor traffic offenses, who are already handcuffed or are not resisting,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.
Clark added that there were also reports of troopers targeting Black residents in traffic enforcement and using “racial slurs and racially derogatory terms.”
The federal probe, the first such action against a statewide law enforcement agency in more than two decades, comes more than three years after white troopers were captured on long-withheld body-camera video beating, stunning and dragging Greene on a rural roadside near Monroe.
Despite lengthy, ongoing federal and state criminal investigations into a death troopers initially blamed on a car crash, no one has been charged.
“This systemic misconduct was blessed by top brass at the Louisiana State Police,” said Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana. She described a “culture of violence, terror, and discrimination” within the agency, calling Greene’s death “the tip of the iceberg.”
Clarke said the probe is aimed at driving needed reforms, if necessary by suing to implement a federal consent decree.
She added that Gov. John Bel Edwards and the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, Lamar Davis, have pledged their cooperation.
Davis, in an internal email obtained by AP, told troopers to “hold your heads high” and embrace the federal scrutiny.
Pandemic origins: Over two years after the coronavirus was first detected in China, and after at least 6.3 million deaths have been counted worldwide from the pandemic, the World Health Organization is recommending in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is required into whether a lab accident may be to blame.
That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins, and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.
WHO concluded last year that it was “extremely unlikely” COVID-19 might have come from a lab. Many scientists suspect the coronavirus jumped into people from bats, possibly via another animal.
Yet in a report released
Thursday, WHO’s expert group said “key pieces of data” to explain how the pandemic began were still missing.
UN council election: U.N. member nations elected Ecuador, Japan, Malta, Mozambique and Switzerland to join the powerful 15-member U.N. Security Council on Thursday.
While all five countries ran unopposed, they still needed to obtain the votes of two-thirds of the 193-member General Assembly.
It will be Mozambique and Switzerland’s first time serving on the council. For Japan, it’s the 12th time, while it’s the third for Ecuador and second for Malta.
The five new council members will start their terms on Jan. 1, replacing five countries whose two-year terms end Dec. 31. Those countries are India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico and Norway.
Ala. school shooting: A
man who tried to enter an Alabama elementary school where a summer program was being held was shot to death by police Thursday, authorities said.
Gadsden City Schools Superintendent Tony Reddick said a “potential intruder” went to several doors trying to get into Walnut Park Elementary School, where a summer literacy program was being conducted for 34 children.
All the exterior doors were locked and the principal contacted the school resource officer when she realized what was happening, Reddick said.
The resource officer confronted a person who attempted to break into a marked police car near the school, according to a statement from the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency.
The person was shot to death after resisting and trying to take the resource officer’s gun, the agency said.
The dead man was identified as Robert Tyler White,
32, of Bunnlevel, North Carolina.
A man accused of driving into a school group in Berlin, killing a teacher and leaving dozens of others injured, appears to have a history of mental illness, prosecutors said Thursday.
A court ordered the man placed in a secure psychiatric hospital. He faces preliminary charges of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder, prosecutors said.
Investigators found medicines when they searched the man’s apartment, and “a great deal speaks for paranoid schizophrenia” as the suspect’s diagnosis, said Sebastian Buechner, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office. “What there isn’t is indications of any kind of terrorist background.”
Police also found two placards with “a very general reference” to the long-running dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Buechner said.
Fatal Berlin crash:
China flooding: At least 17 people were killed and four are missing after flooding hit the central Chinese province of Hunan and a landslide buried parts of several villages in the southern Guangxi region, state media reported.
Storms have pummeled Hunan since the beginning of the month, with some monitoring stations reporting historic levels of rainfall, the Xinhua News Agency said.
As of late Thursday, 10 people were reported dead and three missing in the floods that have affected around 1.8 million people in the largely rural, mountainous province, Xinhua said.
In Guangxi, rescue crews were still looking Thursday for survivors in several villages in the area of Beiliu city, where days of rain left hillsides waterlogged, Xinhua said.
Seven people were confirmed dead in the landslides, one was missing and at least one person was pulled out alive.