Two Louisiana cops have been indicted after they were caught on camera beating a 14-year-old school student to a bloody pulp.
Video footage of the attack was leaked last month by an insider at a Louisiana Middle school. It shows a school cop slamming a student to the ground and relentlessly pummeling his face.
Thefreethoughtproject.com reports: Last week, a West Baton Rouge grand jury indicted the two Brusly officers for their use of excessive force on the 14-year-old boy.
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Former Brusly Police Department officer Anthony “Kip” Dupre was charged with malfeasance in office and former officer Dan Cipriano with a count of simple battery. The parents of the boy say the charges do not go far enough.
“They feel the DA’s office did an adequate job by bringing it quickly to the people, but feel it was a slap on the wrist based on the tape and what they saw done to their grandson,” the family’s attorney Kwame Asante said Friday. “This young man will still be dealing with this for a long time.”
After the video was leaked, both officers promptly resigned.
According to the report, the incident happened on October 5th and never made the news until the footage was sent by an anonymous source to WAFB. Had the footage not been leaked, these officers would have never been exposed.
As the Advocate reports:
The case came to light in November, after video footage leaked to the media showed what appeared to be Dupre beating a student in a school office Oct. 5.
Full view of the scuffle between Dupre and the student is blocked by a desk in the Brusly Middle School office, but Dupre can clearly be seen wrestling the student and slamming him to the ground twice.
There is no audio in the video, but it appears in at least some of the encounter, Dupre rapidly thrusts his arm and shoulder up and down toward the youth, as if punching him, while school staff nervously look on.
As the video shows, after struggling with the teen for almost 2 minutes, the officer is seen picking him up once again, this time in a headlock, before slamming him down to the ground once more.
Some of the staff cannot stand to watch the scene unfold in front of them and one woman covers her face to shield herself from the violence.
The officer then pins the boy to the ground and holds him there until a second officer arrives, officer Cipriano. Officer Cipriano then handcuffs the child and slams his face into the desk before dragging him outside.
After the officers leave, the staff members don rubber gloves and begin cleaning up the bloody mess the officers made with the boy’s face.
Naturally, the state police found nothing wrong with the video, but the DA brought it to a grand jury anyway, who obviously disagreed. Originally, police claimed that the child tried to grab the officer’s gun and it is seen falling out of his holster. But the video doesn’t show the child attempt to grab the gun. The DA agrees.
“I will tell you there is no evidence, no findings that the young man reached for any weapon or tried to take an officer’s weapon. That’s not in the evidence,” Scott Chabert, an assistant district attorney in West Baton Rouge Parish, told WAFB.
As you watch the video below, ask yourself whether or not this school cop’s original force was necessary at all. While the boy may have needed to be disciplined, it was the officer who initiated the force. This is the problem with cops in schools.
