When Kentdrick Ratliff tried to reach for a pill bottle that police had confiscated from him, his physical struggle with officers in Hammond, La., quickly got violent.
As the Black man wrestled with them on top of a table in a police booking room, one officer kicked Ratliff in the head, video of the 2017 incident shows. Another placed his boot on the man’s neck. Sgt. Edwin Bergeron, who is White, punched Ratliff five times with a closed fist.
“I got beat, stomped, kicked in my groin,” Ratliff told WBRZ, the ABC affiliate in Baton Rouge, which first published the footage in August.
Following the tussle, Bergeron was promoted to police chief, Ratliff was convicted of resisting arrest, and city officials in Hammond — a college town of roughly 20,000 in southeastern Louisiana — reportedly told his lawyer that complete footage of the incident did not exist.
This week, after a full video of the incident was published by a local TV station, local civil rights activists have renewed their calls for the embattled chief to resign as federal officials have reportedly reopened investigation into the booking room fight.
“This behavior is egregious enough, but a blatant lie accompanied this behavior by your Police Department that the leaked video did not exist,” three local NAACP chapters said in a letter to Bergeron, according to WBRZ. “We have law enforcement officers from all over the state calling us saying this is bad.”
Neither Bergeron nor Hammond Mayor Pete Panepinto (R), who appointed the police chief, immediately responded to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
But in a statement to WBRZ last month, a spokesperson for Hammond city government pointed out that neither local nor federal officials had opted to investigate Bergeron, who has increased community outreach and seen a reduction in crime during his year and a half in the role.
“With all of this going right, why is the video coming up again?” the statement said. “It seems more motivated by a personal vendetta instead of a real interest in the public safety of Hammond.”
Ratliff first ended up in the booking room in December 2017 after Hammond police officers saw his car illegally parked on the sidewalk. When the officers approached his vehicle for a traffic stop and searched inside, they said they found a pill bottle containing Xanax, marijuana and prescription drugs.
The tussle inside the booking room involving nearly a dozen officers proved so alarming to local officials that the city’s police chief alerted federal officials, WBRZ reported. Investigators declined to take any further action against any of the officers involved.
“The attorney directed them to bring it up to the FBI. They investigated. They came back with nothing,” Panepinto said at a Hammond City Council meeting Monday, according to the TV station.
Only one policeman who had been present in the booking room, Thomas Mushinsky, was disciplined, receiving a 60-day suspension and additional training, WBRZ reported. As he fought that order, Mushinsky commissioned a private report from a use-of-force consultancy in Texas, which called the tactics used by Bergeron “excessive and borderline criminal.”
(A spokesperson for the city of Hammond told WBRZ that city officials never saw that report, as it was presented directly to a local civil service board reviewing Mushinsky’s appeal.)
Months later, when the police chief slot opened up for the third time in four years, Panepinto offered up Bergeron before the city council as his only nominee for the job.
Speaking to the Hammond City Council in March 2019, the mayor said Bergeron had stuck with the department for nearly two decades, proving qualities like innovation and leadership, the Advocate reported.
Some city residents expressed concerns about his history, prompting two public meetings over his possible appointment.
As a lower-ranking police officer, Bergeron had allegedly tried to convince a college student from suing one of his fraternity brothers for rape, according to the newspaper, before the woman killed herself two months later. (Bergeron said he “didn’t have anything to do with it,” although the suit was later settled.)
In addition, a shortened, 30-second clip of the incident involving Ratliff had also been circulating around social media, and some residents who viewed it at the public meeting said they were “disturbed.”
But the council voted Bergeron in anyway, 4-1.
“There’s the usual armchair quarterbacks or people not in policing who assume they may know about what policing entails,” Panepinto said at the time, according to the Advocate. “When you’re involved and an active officer, you’re in positions where people may question what you see and if you see the full video, the gentleman came out of his cuff and across the desk.”
After the vote, council member Devon Wells said that most everyone in town had seen the 30-second video, which was played for the crowd during at least one of the two meetings.
But “I known this guy from seeing him, from him dealing with me, and from him working around me and being in the community,” Wells said, according to the Advocate, and Bergeron would lead the department well.
Although most of the 13 charges brought against Ratliff were later dropped, he was convicted on a marijuana possession misdemeanor as well as for resisting arrest.
Ravi Shah, an attorney who represented Ratliff, told WBRZ that he had long been trying to get his hands on the full video showing what occurred in the booking room.
When he made a request to the local district attorney, however, they said officials in the Hammond police department claimed the video did not exist. Shah got his hands on the video earlier this summer, though, it is unclear how, and then passed it onto the TV station.
“What shocked me is that they would so blatantly lie and tell another officer of the court that the video did not exist,” Shah said. “It did at one point and clearly still exists now showing what happened to my client.”
2 comments
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