15 May—Louisiana prosecutors have finally filed charges, such as they may be, against three white state troopers who are accused of beating a black man pulled over for a traffic violation in 2020, forcibly lifting him to his feet by his hair braids and bragging in text messages following the incident that the “whoopin’” would give him “nightmares for a long time.”

It must be said that the victim isn’t an angel by any means. (But he’s likely to be a rich devil.) He had—and probably still has—outstanding warrants and sped away from the traffic stop, leading the fuzz on a 29-mile chase that, according to the Associated Press, reached speeds of 150 mph. In a Hyundai Sonata? He was finally stopped with a tire deflation device, a.k.a. spike strip.

Sure, the cops were pissed and the suspect/victim may not have been a model citizen, but that’s no excuse for what they did.

An internal investigation found that the scummy cop trio had filed “wholly untrue” reports that the suspect/victim had kept trying to flee, refused to obey commands, and fought with them before they administered the nightmare whoopin’. Two of the scumbags were fired, one retired.

Body camera video gave the lie to their claims. Evidently one of the trio had neglected to turn off his body cam but lied about it. Body cam footage can’t be manually erased.

After the incident, the scummy cop trio got themselves deeper by exchanging over a dozen text messages peppered with “lol” and “haha” responses in which they boasted about the beating and mocked the victim, who had spat up blood and suffered from sore ribs and stomach pain for some time after the arrest.

“He gonna be sore tomorrow for sure,” one scumbag wrote in one of the texts. “Warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man.” What were these morons thinking? Even in Louisiana.

The scummy cop trio had in fact been arrested in February 2021 on felony charges of malfeasance in office, among other crimes. But the local prosecutors have since chosen to forgo the felony and just charged the morons with misdemeanor simple battery, which carries a maximum sentence of six months in the slammer and a thousand-dollar fine. I rather doubt they’ll be serving any time.

The scummy cop trio were part of a division of Louisiana state troopers notorious or celebrated (your choice) for its violence that’s been implicated in similar incidents, including a fatal one. Louisiana State Police have been involved in at least a dozen cases in the past decade in which troopers or their supervisors have ignored or concealed evidence of unnecessary, excessive violence, cover-ups, and a culture of impunity, nepotism, and racism. The LSP superintendent is in fact black. But he took command only at the end of 2020.

I’m disturbed that the Louisiana prosecutors aren’t going for anything bigger than a misdemeanor. Sounds like the same kind of police-prosecutor incest we regularly see in Connecticut—and probably everywhere. There’s talk of the feds bringing a case, but I shouldn’t expect too much out of that either.

Louisiana is known as the Pelican State, the Creole State, the Bayou State, the Sugar State, Child of the Mississippi, and Sportsman’s Paradise . . .