And while the case of Ronald Greene ends in a whimper, a related federal investigation it spawned also ended disappointingly in that it failed to pursue something vitally relevant to it – the politics behind Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards’ quest to stay in office.
Greene, a black motorist, died at the hands of law enforcement in May, 2019. After a high-speed chase ending in a minor fender-bender, a mix of white state troopers and a local deputy battered and restrained him for nearly an hour, with him eventually dying on route to medical care. From the start the Louisiana State Police mendaciously reported that Greene had died in an accident even as several months later they began investigating the events around it, having known the truth all the time.
That investigation, completely out of the public eye and which also covered an attempted LSP coverup, over a year later led to disciplinary action against the troopers, where the one most seriously involved in brutality dying in a solo car crash just after its conclusion that had all the hallmarks of suicide-by-reckless-driving. The others lost their jobs, and the deputy retired.
Criminal investigations were launched but the federal government decline to prosecute. Eventually, district attorney felony charges either were dropped or reduced to misdemeanors, with the only two convictions coming from those. Last fall a trooper accepted a misdemeanor plea deal and the final chapter was written when last week the deputy did the same.
While this may have disappointed the Greene family and special interests who wanted to politicize the incident to buttress a burgeoning national open-season-on-blacks-by-law-enforcement narrative, the lamentable fact was that Greene apparently, according to parish authorities, died from “cocaine induced agitated delirium complicated by motor vehicle collision, physical struggle, inflicted head injury, and restraint,” and also included alcohol consumption. This made it impossible to prove that abuse alone had killed Greene, although it was ruled out that the low-speed crash by itself could not have caused his death.
A civil suit remains in the offing, but another consequence of the incident resonated this week when the federal Department of Justice released a report looking into several similar incidents, the main impetus for which was when details emerged about the Greene incident. Notably, that jumped onto the DOJ radar screen because of media reports, not because of anything released by the Department of Public Safety or LSP.
Nor by Edwards, who was in office at the time of all the incidents in the report and, as media reporting made clear, did nothing to bring a reckoning to an agency that the federal report said was prone to using force excessively and included reasons why with suggested corrective measures, if not participating in obfuscating LSP culpability. As it turns out, Edwards actively peddled the narrative privately and publicly that Greene died in a crash well over two years after he surely knew that to be false and was himself subject of a federal investigation, presumably over potential obstruction of justice, according to media reports.
Edwards had every incentive to back the LSP and keep any hint from emerging that it has used excessive force against any black citizen because he had run for office posing as a defender of law and order, having been in the military, related to a brother who was an elected sheriff, and was endorsed by the Louisiana State Troopers Association in his initial bid for office. Further, in 2019 running for reelection he could not afford any whiff of scandal on his watch that could discourage black voter turnout that overwhelmingly favored him in an election he barely won.
Regrettably, the report didn’t include any aspect of its investigation (that never was officially confirmed) into his actions. Of course, at the eleventh-hour-fifty-ninth minute the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden Administration released it with only a press release (as opposed to the fanfare surrounding its initiation) so as to put its political stamp on the conclusions, and there was no way it would extend beyond the LSP to Edwards’ obfuscation role in the Greene case as an explanatory variable for toleration, if not encouragement, of LSP behavior given his status as a Democrat and his being the most prominent white member of his party in the state.
The report does acknowledge towards the end of Edwards’ term reforms it applauds – when the spotlight became too glaring and Edwards no longer could run for reelection. But the public got cheated when it held back on reviewing his role as enabler that provided disincentive to pursue reform more quickly.
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