A lot of people who support the Second Amendment in our country have a hard time reconciling the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights. When Alton Sterling was murdered, on camera, it reignited the traditional media’s attention towards the serious life and death circumstances that many citizens in our country have been toiling under for hundreds of years. Activists and the community around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Alton Sterling lived and died, organized and began to stage peaceful protests throughout Baton Rouge. The Baton Rouge Police Department isn’t racist as shit for nothing, and they have been responding in totalitarian-like ways to these protests. Enough is enough, say activists and the ACLU—we have a right to be angry and loud and demanding of our government and our government’s agencies.
So in our grand American tradition, residents sought to make their voices heard, to speak truth to power about police use of force, to object to the death of Black men in police custody, and to say that Black lives matter. To do this, they spilled out onto the city’s streets and sidewalks — the very places which the Supreme Court has described as having “immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public” as the place to exercise our constitutional liberties.
But it doesn’t appear that the law enforcement agencies in Baton Rouge care much for our Constitution, or for the liberties of its own citizens. Instead officers have shown naked hostility to the constitutional rights of the citizens they have a duty to serve. That’s why today the ACLU of Louisiana is going to court on behalf of community organizations like Black Youth Power 100 New Orleans, New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, and Louisiana Chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild to seek an emergency order to ensure that the police in Baton Rouge obey the Constitution. It’s not the first time an ACLU affiliate has stepped up to challenge the cops reacting to protests over police accountability — and while I hope it’s the last, it won’t be.
The Baton Rouge Police Department must stop trampling over the rights of the citizens of the United States. That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact of their sworn oath.