A growing police brutality controversy in Louisiana bears watching as Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards faces accusations of helping cover up the incident during his 2019 reelection campaign.
A thorough investigation is warranted but without demagoguery or any public unrest.
The incident occurred in May 2019, a full year before the Minneapolis murder of suspected counterfeiter George Floyd roiled the nation. After a black man named Ronald Greene, reportedly high on cocaine, tried to evade a highway arrest, state troopers dragged, beat, and choked him, and he died.
State police at first covered up the cause of death, claiming he died as a result of a car accident during the chase.
Just hours after the death, the state police chief texted Edwards to say a black motorist had died after “a violent, lengthy struggle,” to which Edwards replied, “Thank you.” Yet when police told Greene’s family the lie that the death resulted on impact from a crash and repeated the lie on reports, Edwards did nothing to correct the record.
Critics theorize that Edwards, who is seen as less liberal than most Democrats, didn’t want to create a racial controversy during his tight campaign for reelection, which he ultimately won with just 51.3% of the vote.
Video of the arrest did not go public until October 2020, 17 months later. Edwards now says he had stayed silent because he wanted to avoid interfering with the investigation into Greene’s death — and that, indeed, the Trump administration’s Justice Department specifically asked him not to talk about it. All sources have denied the contrary idea that he took active steps to limit the investigation. Now, however, he is openly calling the police actions “racism,” resulting in a “violent death” from treatment that was “criminal” and “horrific.”
Greene’s mother called on Edwards to resign. Republican House Speaker Clay Schexnayder said he is considering a legislative inquiry into what he called the “gross misconduct” of Edwards’s actions, inactions, and statements. Numerous black activists and black legislators also have expressed anger at Edwards’s perceived inaction, although none have called for his resignation.
I spoke to Lanny Keller, the longtime chief editorial writer for the statewide Advocate newspapers and whom I have known for 35 years as a voice of fair-minded centrism. He said that in some ways, “this is not a George Floyd kind of thing because it was a far murkier situation.” The beating, as dreadful as it was, did appear to follow a somewhat violent resistance to arrest.
As for Edwards’s silence, Keller wrote in a Feb. 3 column that “deferring to the Trump Justice Department in this case was the politically astute thing to do, and essentially the only thing to do.”
In the final analysis, impeachment is probably only a remote possibility. It would require another, unexpected shoe to drop. If Edwards is impeached, Republican Lt. Gov. William Nungesser would become governor, giving him a leg up in what is expected to be a bruising, multi-Republican candidate battle in the 2023 state elections.
Don’t expect race riots, either — that’s not usually the Louisiana way. Still, given Louisiana politicians’ habit of playing outsize roles in the national political scene, this imbroglio is worth some attention because of the ripples it could cause.
*story by The Washington Examiner
