Newly-Released Body Cam Footage Shows Louisiana State Troopers Beating A Man To Death

from the followed-by-months-of-lies-and-obfuscation dept

Two years after cops killed Ronald Greene following a car chase, the Louisiana State Police have finally released the recordings. Greene led officers on a high-speed chase before being stopped, subdued, and ultimately killed. Here's how the State Police described it two years ago when it still had control of the narrative.

Greene allegedly sped away, and a chase continued for over 20 miles until Green wrecked near the intersection of Louisiana 2 and Highway 143 in Union Parish.

After the wreck, troopers allegedly attempted to take Greene into custody. An altercation with troopers allegedly followed until Greene was handcuffed.

According to LSP, Greene became unresponsive after emergency responders arrived on the scene and died on the way to the hospital.

Lots of really passive writing here, with an altercation "allegedly following" and Greene magically "becoming unresponsive" but not until after emergency responders arrived.

But the LSP said something completely different to Greene's family.

Greene’s family has said that police initially told them he died on impact when his car crashed on May 10, 2019, after a police pursuit.

And the officers told the coroner's office roughly the same thing:

An initial crash report from state police did not mention there was a struggle between Greene and the officers.

The final report from the coroner's office noted the injuries were inconsistent with those sustained from a car crash. It noted Greene had a fractured sternum and multiple contusions. It also noted the LSP seemed uninterested in helping the office perform an accurate autopsy.

The autopsy, prepared by the Union Parish Coroner's Office, states in its opinion section that lacerations of Greene's head were "inconsistent with motor vehicle collision injury and most consistent with multiple impacts from a blunt object."

The report notes that "no written incident report was provided despite requests," and that "no detailed information regarding the motor vehicle collision ... was provided. It also notes that "no emergency services medical records were provided" to the coroner's office.

The fix was already in. The coroner's office ultimately decided there was no one to blame for the death other than the injuries and the substances in Greene's system, ultimately chalking it up to cardiac arrest. But now that the recordings have been released, it's pretty clear Greene might have survived the encounter with LSP officers if they hadn't been so enthusiastic about beating him.

Louisiana state troopers were captured on body camera video stunning, punching and dragging a Black man as he apologized for leading them on a high-speed chase -- footage of the man’s last moments alive that The Associated Press obtained after authorities refused to release it for two years.

“I’m your brother! I’m scared! I’m scared!” Ronald Greene can be heard telling the white troopers as the unarmed man is jolted repeatedly with a stun gun before he even gets out of his car along a dark, rural road.

That was just the beginning. The entire ordeal lasted almost 45 minutes. For much of the recording, Greene and the officers can't be seen. When they do reappear, Greene is covered in blood and already pretty much unresponsive. And he's surrounded by people who have no interest in keeping him from dying.

The 46-minute clip shows one trooper wrestling Greene to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and punching him in the face while another can be heard calling him a “stupid motherf---—.”

Greene wails “I’m sorry!” as another trooper delivers another stun gun shock to his backside and warns, “Look, you’re going to get it again if you don’t put your f---—- hands behind your back!” Another trooper can be seen briefly dragging the man facedown after his legs had been shackled and his hands cuffed behind him.

Instead of rendering aid, the troopers leave the heavyset man unattended, facedown and moaning for more than nine minutes, as they use sanitizer wipes to wash blood off their hands and faces.

“I hope this guy ain’t got f------ AIDS,” one of the troopers can be heard saying.

The fine public servants of the Louisiana State Police, wondering whether the beating they've just inflicted might possibly injure them. And there's more. One trooper, Chris Hollingsworth, can be heard in a separate recording telling other troopers at the station that he "beat the everliving fuck" out of Greene.

There should be more recordings. But of course there aren't. Another trooper, Kory York, was suspended without pay for failing to activate his body cam. Six troopers responded to the scene but only one appears to have activated his camera. At one point during the sole recording, the microphone is deactivated, leading to even less information being captured.

The LSP may claim no coverup took place but that's hard to square with the initial reports handed to Greene's family and the coroner's office -- both of which suggested a car accident was to blame for Greene's injuries and death. And it took the LSP 474 days to even bother opening up an investigation into the incident, suggesting LSP officials either didn't want to know what they'd find or, more likely, didn't want to give the public any way of discovering what had actually happened that night.

If you want the public to trust you, you can't lie to them for months and let a questionable incident go uninvestigated for a year-and-a-half. The Louisiana State Police has proven itself unworthy of trust -- both in its inaction and its officers' actions, which needlessly ended a man's life and went mostly undocumented because the troopers knew better than to record their own excessive force and rights violations. It shouldn't take two years for the truth to come out.

Filed Under: body cam, louisiana, louisiana state police, ronald greene, transparency

Officer's Body Cam Fails To Capture Footage Of Woman Shooting Herself In The Head While Her Hands Were Cuffed Behind Her

from the another-law-enforcement-miracle dept

There's more than one contortionist performance going on here. (h/t Greg Doucette)

A 19-year-old woman whose hands were cuffed behind her back when she committed suicide during a traffic stop in Chesapeake died of a gunshot wound through the mouth, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

This is the official line -- one repeated several times by local journalists. The traffic stop leading to this highly unlikely conclusion occurred July 25, 2018. Here's what the Chesapeake Police Department said then:

Officers pulled over the car at 4:24 p.m. Wednesday near the intersection of Berkley Avenue and Wilson Road, police said in a news release Wednesday afternoon.

The exact timeline is not clear, [spokesman Leo] Kosinski said. As officers used a stun gun on the driver, Wilson, who was a passenger, shot herself, he said. Police attempted life-saving measures and called for medical assistance, but she died at the scene, the news release said.

The original report also noted the PD was looking at body cam footage from the scene to determine what happened.

Less than a week later, the initial impression was the official narrative.

Police had handcuffed Wilson when Medlin began resisting arrest and trying to flee, said Officer Leo Kosinski, police spokesman. Wilson was left standing next to the passenger side of the car while police rushed to help the officer who was trying to arrest Medlin, he said.

It was then that Wilson somehow got a gun and shot herself in the head, Kosinski said. It was not immediately clear how Wilson got the gun, but it was not a police weapon, he said.

“We clearly ruled that it was a suicide,” Kosinski said.

"We." I guess that means the PD since the medical examiner didn't hand down his declaration until March 14, 2019. The police department, however, made its own unscientific findings public twice in one week.

As for the body camera footage, there was nothing usable there.

One officer was wearing a body camera, but it was “knocked offline” while Medlin was fighting the officer, Kosinski said. If the camera hadn’t gone offline, it still wouldn’t have recorded the shooting, Kosinski said, because the officer was struggling with Medlin.

The police department has 356 cameras and deploys "40-60 per shift." The department has 525 officers so it seems the odds were in favor of there being multiple cameras on the scene. But the only footage recorded didn't capture the incident. Multiple police cruisers were on the scene, but the Chesapeake PD decided to eliminate dash cams when it acquired body cameras, removing one more impartial witness.

With the official word from the state, the Chesapeake PD closes the book on an extremely dubious "suicide." Whether this is just a bunch of lies or some very terrible police work, the end result is the same: someone in handcuffs ended up dead. The odds that this person decided to escalate a traffic stop to a successful suicide attempt are incredibly low. Something fucked up happened that afternoon and the police department hasn't even attempted to explain how something like this might have happened. Since the medical examiner has spoken, the Chesapeake PD has decided it's no longer obligated to provide an explanation.

The CPD launched an internal investigation into Wilson's suicide in July. Kosinski confirmed that the department has since concluded that investigation, but declined to comment on its outcome.

Worse, there's been no pushback from the local media covering this arrest and its ensuing, and completely unbelievable, suicide. This isn't journalism. It's stenography.

Filed Under: arrest, body cam, chesapeake, handcuffs, holden medlin, journalism, police, sarah wilson, suicide

Body Cam Footage Clears Police Officer Of Bogus Sexual Assault Allegations

from the the-almost-impartial-witness dept

With so many police forces being saddled with body cams against their (or their union's) will, you'd think this form of public accountability (but not really, because so many legislators are helping cops opt out of the "accountability" part) was foisted upon law enforcement by axe-grinders looking to finally expose the proverbial "bad apples." There's some truth to that, seeing as some of these implementations have originated as stipulations in settlements with the DOJ.

But what can damn can also exonerate. This video, posted by notorious cop-haters* CopBlock (who, in return, are universally hated by haters of cop-haters…), shows that body cam recordings aren't solely there to encourage cops to be on their best behavior. They're also there to nudge citizens in the right direction. But in this case, the "aggrieved" citizen was far too impaired to notice her dramatics were being observed by an unblinking eye.

*I am, of course, using the term facetiously.

The young woman in the video attempts to set the officer up by using her phone to record an audio only performance meant to make it appear as though he was acting inappropriately. She was attempting to ‘flip the script’. What she failed to realize is that the entire thing, including her devious performance, were recorded.

Audio-only: for when you want a certain version of the "truth" on record. (Still a step ahead of the FBI's pen-and-paper interrogation "recordings...") After failing a field sobriety test, this woman thought she could turn an embarrassing arrest into sexual assault allegations. She asks to use the restroom, and while in there, wonders aloud (a bit too aloud, apparently) how she can get her arresting officer in trouble. Cue the false accusations of "inappropriately touching" her while she was in the squad car and her saying, "Please don't touch me" when the officer is outside the bathroom door, getting this all down on his body cam.

Now, while this does show that body cams can help cops, rather than just "hurting" them, there's still the issue that far too many agencies retain strict control of the resulting footage. This was released by the involved police department -- something likely expedited by the fact that the recording showed no wrongdoing by the officer. The real test of this department's transparency will come when the disputed footage isn't nearly as flattering.

Filed Under: body cam, police