Louisiana officers cleared in prior use of force complaints
BATON ROUGE, La. — Four previous “use of force” complaints were lodged against the two white police officers in the video-recorded shooting death of a black man and they were cleared in all of them, according to internal affairs documents released Thursday.
The complaints included three black men and a black juvenile. One of them was shot when police said he pointed a gun at them and the others were injured during arrests and a police pursuit in a vehicle.
The documents were released a day after the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the shooting of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, who was killed by police during an altercation outside of a convenience store where he was selling CDs. Police say he was armed and an eyewitness said he had a gun in his pocket.
Cellphone video posted online set off angry protests in this city of about 229,000, where 54 per cent of the population is black and more than 25 per cent live in poverty.