Not only did a Louisiana sergeant who beat a Black man in police custody avoid accountability in the incident—that sergeant, Edwin Bergeron, was promoted to police chief after a 2017 encounter that city officials allegedly pretended they didn't have video footage of, according to ABC affiliate WBRZ.
That footage from inside a booking room of the Hammond Police Department, however, was leaked to WBRZ and aired Tuesday. “I got beat, stomped, kicked in my groin,” Kentdrick Ratliff told the news station.
Police in the college town about 50 miles east of Baton Rouge initially stopped Ratliff on an accusation that he was obstructing a sidewalk with his vehicle, WBRZ reported of a police report. Officers later found pill bottles inside his car with Xanax, marijuana, and a "legend drug" inside, so they took Ratliff into custody, police said in the report.
Ratliff told WBRZ that when he was taken to the booking room, he made a bad decision and reached for his pills. Bergeron responded by punching the man five times and wedging him between two computers, the video showed. Other officers later responded by shocking Ratliff with a Taser, kicking him between his legs and in the head, and even stepping on his neck with a tactical boot on. WBRZ identified the man who kicked Ratliff between the legs as Sgt. Thomas Mushinsky. By the end of the beating, nearly a dozen officers had appeared in the booking room, and Mushinsky was the only one disciplined, WBRZ reported.
Ravi Shah, Ratliff's attorney, told WBRZ he had been trying to get the video since 2017. "When I brought this to the attention to the district attorney's office and requested the video of the incident in booking, they relayed to me that they had an email from someone at Hammond PD that the video did not exist," Shah said.
He didn't obtain the video until last month, about two years after Mushinsky and his lawyer commissioned Use of Force Consultants Inc. to look into the case, WBRZ reported. The business concluded Mushinsky's kick was "a trained distraction technique." A report the consultants produced did not absolve Bergeron and another officer identified by the last name Dunn. "HFRG/PPCT does not advocate strikes to the face on a handcuffed subject. There were six strikes delivered by Sgt. Bergeron and three strikes by Officer Dunn. Ratliff was of no threat to either officers at this time," consultants said in report notes.
Shah said: "What shocked me is that they would so blatantly lie and tell another officer of the court that the video did not exist, and it did at one point and clearly still exists now showing what happened to my client."
“This behavior is egregious enough, but a blatant lie accompanied this behavior by your Police Department that the leaked video did not exist,” local NAACP chapters said in a letter to Bergeron. “We have law enforcement officers from all over the state calling us saying this is bad.”
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