The 15-year-old son of Alton Sterling, a black man who was fatally shot by police officers in Baton Rouge, said Dallas officers didn’t deserve to be killed during a protest organized in part due to his father’s death.
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A group of local organizations are suing the Baton Rouge police over their treatment of demonstrators protesting the shooting death of a 37-year-old black man.
The lawyers for the plaintiffs in the suit filed for a temporary restraining order against the defendants, which includes the city of Baton Rouge, BRPD, Louisiana State Police, the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, and several law enforcement officials. The complaint also said police rounded demonstrators up in mass arrests and subjected them to physical and verbal abuse. Protests were a result of the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling outside a convenience store July 5, 2016.
Police said they learned of the plot when an officer responded to a burglary at Cash America Pawn early Saturday morning and arrested Antonio Thomas in the store, Debadie said. They said Tuesday that the three, and possibly a fourth person, are accused of stealing at least eight handguns in a plan to harm police officers in the Baton Rouge area.
“[The police response] made me afraid to protest”.
“I feel that people in general, no matter what their race is, should come together as one united family”, Cameron Sterling told reporters outside the store where his father died.
Protesters flooded the streets of Baton Rouge after Alton Sterling’s death.
“This exercise of constitutional rights has been met with a military-grade assault on protesters’ bodies and rights”, the lawsuit, filed by the ACLU, claims.
Cameron Sterling, the son of Alton Sterling, called for peace during these hard times.
“This group was certainly not about a peaceful protest”, State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said after a protest Sunday night that resulted in more than 100 arrests.
Dunn was treated at a local hospital before being transported to the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, from which he was released Tuesday. The other two robbery suspects – Malik Bridgewater, 20, and an unidentified 13-year-old male – were charged with burglary and theft of a firearm.
The chief said one of the suspects said the burglary was carried out “to harm police officers”, but he didn’t give any details about when or where a possible plot would be carried out.
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Authorities in Louisiana have defended their response to protesters, saying that their gear – which evoked the chaos that unfolded on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., after a white officer shot a black teenager there in 2014 – was needed to protect police officers.
