Andrew Grossman
A police torture facility in Baton Rouge, Louisiana is under FBI investigation as numerous lawsuits against the police department are piling up, citing beatings, physical andsexual humiliation, and undue detainment. The facility, known by the police as the “Brave Cave”—but officially called the Narcotics Processing Facility—has been shut down by the police department. The Street Crime Unit which used it has been disbanded, though the officers have merely been re-assigned to other posts.
Three officers have been placed on paid leave, including Deputy Chief Troy Lawrence, while the FBI investigates allegations of torture at the facility. His son, Troy Jr., isnamed in a federal lawsuit, one of many lawsuits alleging torture, including sexual abuse, at the facility. Troy Jr. is already facing criminal charges for tasering a person handcuffed in the back of a squad car in August and has resigned from the police force. Troy Lawrence Sr. has recently been arrested along with three other officers for concealing video evidence that they brutalized a man during a strip search in a police department bathroom in 2020.
According to the lawyer representing plaintiffs in two of the lawsuits, the abuse associated with the Unit and the torture facility are widespread, with multiple people coming to the lawyer with their own stories since the lawsuits began.
The “Brave Cave” is just one face of the beast. Baton Rouge is the city where police murdered Alton Sterling in 2016, one of the killings that set off the 2016 uprisings against police terror.
The Louisiana state police are already under investigation by the Justice Department for excessively violent, “racially discriminatory policing,” and in January the Justice Department concluded that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections systematically keeps prisoners locked up beyond their release dates.
Baton Rouge is exceptionally racially segregated and impoverished; even police officers from other states complained of the racial discrimination and brutality in the city while on deployment there to bolster policing efforts following Hurricane Katrina in 2006.
The Baton Rouge Police Department said the allegations are “troubling,” while Mayor Sharon Weston Broome stated, “we are all committed to accountability, justice, and reform.”
In 2021, Broome promised to “close the gap between our police officers and citizens of our community” after body cam footage showed a police officer placing a 13-year-old boy in a choke hold. The “gap” apparently is a euphemism for the people’s rebellion against a militarized, vicious, and terroristic armed force patrolling their streets.
image: Jeremy Lee, one of the complainants in the federal lawsuits, detained in the police torture facility, BRPD bodycam footage
