Louisiana Voice

Another black man killed by police during a routine traffic stop.

This time it wasn’t State Police, but a sheriff’s deputy and it wasn’t in Troop F, but in Rapides Parish.

And it was the end result of a traffic stop for, of all things, a pickup truck for suspected window tint and modified muffler violations, according to Louisiana State Police (LSP) Superintendent Lamar Davis, who belatedly came up with the reason for the traffic stop – even though the deputy who actually pulled Derrick Kittling over never explained to him why he was pulled over.

And also, to be completely fair, I don’t know what went on during the exchange between Deputy Rodney Anderson and Kittling, but I do know this: Louisiana’s archaic laws over window tint and muffler modification are nothing more than license to harass and an excuse for selective enforcement.

I live next to a major thoroughfare in Denham Springs and I literally am unable to count the number of vehicles – driven mostly by white, middle-class teenagers – that roar up and down Range Avenue with those loud, obnoxious modified mufflers with impunity from Denham Springs police.

To carry the absurdity a bit further, there is no continuity between states, no standardized regulations on tinted windows. A friend, also in Denham Springs, purchased a vehicle in another state that already had its windows tinted – legally in that state, but apparently not so much in Louisiana. The result? He can’t get his vehicle inspected in this state without changing out all his windows because of our backward laws regulating tinted windows.

In Kittling’s case, he allegedly asked repeatedly why Anderson had stopped him but got no response and things escalated.

And again, I don’t know the particulars of this incident. Anderson may have only been trying to give Kittling a warning and things got out of hand.

But Davis, who said State Police are conducting an ongoing investigation of the November 6 shooting – that’s an investigation that has slogged along for two whole months now, if you’re counting – said the sheriff’s office had been receiving reports of people with weapons in the area where Kittling was pulled over.

What?

Are you kidding me?

Weapons? Please name me any area of any town, city, burg, hamlet, village, or metropolis where there is not a presence of guns these days.

That’s about the weakest explanation yet from LSP.

And of course, LSP has not responded to a request for an update on its investigation but that’s not unusual. Make a request for public records to LSP for a public record (as I have) and you’ll get the response (as I have) that it may take up to 45 days for compliance despite Louisiana Revised Statute 44:1 (et seq.), which plainly says:

If the public record applied for is immediately available, it shall be immediately

presented to the authorized person applying for it. If the public record applied

for is in active use at the time of the application, the custodian shall promptly

certify this in writing to the applicant and shall fix a day and hour within three

days, exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays, and legal public holidays, for review of

the record.

Of course, when presented with that statute, LSP’s legal department responded with a statute that does not remotely apply to the records in question. We are now in our 24^th working day in our standoff over my pending records request despite the law that mandates “immediate” compliance.

But back to those Louisiana laws governing tinted windows and modified mufflers.

According to a deep dive into the records by freelance journalist FRANCES MADESON, writing for the Louisiana Illuminator, the Rapides Sheriff has a crack team assigned to the public danger inherent in dark windows and loud mufflers. Madeson reports that there was a grand total of seven modified muffler violations in 2020, ten in 2021, and eight as of November 28, 2022.

Tinted windows? Well, there was just one in 2020, five in 2021, and another five as of Nov. 28, 2022.

Would anyone care to guess as to the ethnicity of the drivers?

Oh, the sheriff’s office did say those numbers did not include stops in which drivers were not ticketed. Anyone care to hazard a guess as to the ethnicity of those drivers?

Another point raised by Madeson was the inspection sticker on Kittler’s vehicle, purchased only a month before the shooting. That would have been in October. The inspection sticker, issued that same month, indicated that it had passed inspection only a month before Anderson pulled him over. State inspections are supposed to check window tinting with an approved light meter, and vehicles with exhaust systems that produce “excessive noise” can be rejected, according to state law.

That alone should produce a curious “hmmm?” from investigators.

Madeson contacted Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project based in New Orleans (NPAP), who said such low-level infractions are widely known as “gateway” violations. “You get a tint violation,” she said, “and then it’s ‘I saw that you didn’t have your seatbelts on’ and then ‘I got a chance to read your license and saw that you had a suspended license’ or ‘I get this chance to look at your insurance and see that it’s expired.’”

While Bonds called RPSO’s citation numbers “strikingly low,” she described the tint and mufflers stops as often being “pretextual” or a reason to conduct another type of investigation. She said once they find a bigger violation, it’s a common practice not to include the lower offense on the ticket.

Do you like conspiracy theories?

Who was really responsible for the JFK assassination? Theories abound: the Mafia, Castro, the CIA, LBJ. I have no idea, though I do harbor my own doubts that Oswald acted alone.

Was the World Trade Center an inside job to justify the Mideast war? I weigh in with a resounding No on that one but I do still have questions about the true motives behind the decision to invade Iraq.

Did Elvis fake his death? Is he still alive? Come on. Really? Why would he do that? And the king would be 88 this month. I’m certain he has left the building.

Was the 2020 election stolen from Trump? How did Biden get so many votes? There were a ton of Americans fed up with his antics as president then and with his constant whining since November 2020. Yeah, there’s a valid explanation for all those Biden votes.

But here’s a conspiracy theory passed on to me by a friend. I was going to give him credit until he told me he stole the idea from someone else so, I’ll just forward it to you unattributed, but nevertheless it’s probably a solid possibility worthy of further pondering. Here goes:

The very public (C-Span cameras rolled and panned the entire time, which is unique in itself) haggling, finger-pointing and accusations in a stuttering, stumbling effort to elect a Speaker of the House was an orchestrated effort by Repugnantcans to divert attention away from the second anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol.

Before you guffaw and chortle and snort at the very suggestion, let’s consider a few odd coincidences (I’m sure you’ve read at one time of another about all the weird events surrounding the JFK assassination):

It would take only a handful of Trump lackeys to get together to stage a “second insurrection” to disrupt media coverage of the Jan. 6 anniversary. My friend called it “three-dimensional chess, which Democrats are incapable of.” I love that quote, though I don’t know if it is original with my friend or if he lifted that from someone else as well. Regardless, it’s a great observation.

I believe the following quote is original with my friend because he sent it to me after he fessed up to borrowing the theory of deflection and obfuscation:

“So the most Trumpism members are defying Trump’s choice? And it (the attempts to elect a speaker) goes to midnight on the 6^th, including the crazy red cards to stop the adjournment. And the whole time (Kevin) McCarthy (who finally got the needed votes shortly after midnight [on the 7^th] is saying ‘COME TO PAPA!’ Not one fist-fight on the floor. It was rigged.

“It was a fait accompli.”

So, there you go. The man who has been screaming “rigged election” for more than two years has now pulled off a “rigged election” of his own.

And no one saw it coming. Well, almost no one.

There you go. Something to mull over while watching a cheesy Netflix movie.

Republicans eat their own.

–Former Lt. Gov. candidate Caroline Fayard, March 2011 (Unable to use quote marks because the actual quote was, Republicans “eat their young,” but by revising it ever so slightly, it takes on more relevance today than ever)

By the time you read this, Kevin McCarthy may have pulled off some back room deals to swing enough votes to become the next Speaker of the House.

But on Tuesday, despite Louisiana’s five Repugnantcan congressmen voting for him, he failed in THREE SEPARATE VOTES to pull it off with 19 Repugs voting for other candidates the first two ballots and 20 the third time. Most of the opposing votes went to New York’s Hakeem Jeffries.

The deadlock could leave the door open for dark horse candidate Steve Scalise of Louisiana’s First Congressional District. Given the opportunity, Scalise would switch his vote in a nanosecond.

Folks in Rapides Parish might be unfamiliar with Jefferson Parish’s FODD (that’s Friend of David Duke) but it’s for certain that Scalise knows who Alexandria native Lamar White is.

You see, I could write all day about Scalise and his alliance with the white supremacy power structure in the Repugnantcan Party but why would I do that when Lamar White’s BLOCKBUSTER COVERAGE of KKKScalise created a national political firestorm and was of such superlative nature as to render anything else sadly redundant.

The thing that made his story even more unlikely was that at the time White was a third-year law student at SMU in Dallas, of all places.

That’s quite a distance from Metairie, but White dug out the story of how Scalise had once associated with Duke, a former KKK Grand Wizard, Nazi Party leader, and a Louisiana state representative from (hold on, don’t get ahead of me)…Metairie.

Scalise also found that Scalise was the guest speaker at a meeting of Duke’s outfit, the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a decidedly white supremist group.

Outed by a law student in Texas, Scalise had little option but to ‘fess up and in doing so, told POLITICO that he “regretted” the speech. That, of course, was nothing but damage control (and don’t they all “regret” their actions once they are caught?).

Of course, like any good politician, he initially CLAIMED IGNORANCE about the identity of the group he was speaking to. But how in the world do you speak to an organization without knowing their identity. And naturally, as so often happens, that story didn’t hold water, as revealed by yet ANOTHER of White’s groundbreaking stories, and he had to come clean and apologize in the end. To paraphrase comic Ron White, don’t that beat freaking all! (yeah, I cleaned that up.)

But White wasn’t finished. In February 2016, he published a THIRD STORY detailing the chronology of his unearthing Scalise’s affiliation with Duke and EURO.

Even the ultra-conservative Breitbart Internet publication jumped into the fray, quoting New Orleans political reporter Stephanie Grace of what Breitbart said was the “liberal” New Orleans Advocate (The Advocate, both the Baton Rouge and New Orleans versions, are anything but liberal in their editorial content. In fact, the original Baton Rouge version was a moving force behind the creation of the ultra-conservative business lobby the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, or LABI, as it’s better known).

I digress. BREITBART in December 2014 quoted Grace as saying that Scalise once told her that he was “David Duke without the baggage.”

I (and, I’m pretty sure, Lamar White) beg to differ. Scalise has plenty of baggage.

And, because of Kevin McCarthy’s inability to secure enough votes, Scalise could conceivably become the next Speaker of the House as a compromise candidate.

Do we really need – or want – a David Duke protégée for Speaker-by-Default?

Louisiana State Police (LSP) Internal Affairs (IA) has reprimanded a state trooper for neglecting to activate his body cam during a traffic stop but otherwise cleared him from any wrongdoing despite claims by a Broussard businessman who claims one of his employees was harassed by the trooper for driving on a road past the trooper’s residence.

The IA exoneration, however, does not mean that the matter is closed.

And we know for certain by now that it’s not unprecedented for LSP to gloss over responsibility when it’s convenient from a PR standpoint.

Billy Broussard has filed a lawsuit in 16^th Judicial District Court naming as defendants Trooper Scott Michael Lopez and his son, Benjamin Cole Lopez in connection with several incidents involving alleged harassment of Broussard and his employee, Robert Earl Miller, and for what Broussard says were efforts by Trooper Lopez to unite neighbors against Broussard.

(TO ENLARGE TEXT IN PETITION BELOW, CLICK ON THE PLUS (+) SIGN)

Of course, you’d never know the names of Broussard or Miller inasmuch as the records provided by LSP redacted their names despite the fact that Broussard had filed an official complaint with LSP.

Moreover, a cover letter from LSP noted that pursuant to LSP rules, “investigations that do not result in discipline are not considered ‘public.’”

LSP, in failing for more than two years to mete out punishment to the troopers involved in the May 2019 beating death of Ronald Greene, was able to prevent the release of any investigative records in its attempt to cover up facts surrounding Greene’s death.

Likewise, LSP was less than forthcoming about an incident involving Trooper Thomas Lewis who escorted an underage woman into a Vicksburg casino.

It fell to LouisianaVoice in that case to travel to Jackson, Mississippi, to retrieve records which revealed that Lewis had been fined $600 by the Mississippi Gaming Commission in a night court session. Instead of being punished for his indiscretion, Lewis was promoted to commander of Troop F.

LSP has also refused to cooperate in any manner with former New Orleans attorney Ashton O’Dwyer who was abducted from his St. Charles Street home on the night of Hurricane Katrina and subjected to tasing and being repeatedly peppered with beanbag shots while being held illegally by state police.

In Broussard’s case, Miller was pulled over by Lopez on June 14, 2021, at about 4:30 p.m. while Miller was transporting materials to Broussard’s farm on Duchamp Road in Broussard. Duchamp Road is a public road and runs past Lopez’s home.

Lopez, parked in his own driveway completing paperwork, saw Miller go past and initiated pursuit of the truck, owned by Broussard. After pulling Miller over, Lopez, who Broussard said made no representation that he was acting in his capacity as a state trooper even though he was officially on-duty at the time, told Miller, “You better not go down my road again if you know what’s good for you” and “made it clear” that he did not want the truck “passing in front of my home again.”

A State Police sergeant indicated that the “incident should not have transpired,” according to Broussard’s petition. Broussard claims that he told the sergeant that he was “willing to chalk it up to Trooper Lopez just having a bad day.”

Minutes later, Lopez called Broussard and indicated he did not care what Broussard did on his property but that he just didn’t want Broussard’s truck passing in front of his home and requested that Broussard approach his property from the opposite direction.

When Broussard attempted to obtain an audio copy of his phone call to Troop I, he was told LSP was conveniently unable to provide audio files of phone calls for that specific time frame because the troop was “utilizing a temporary phone service on that date and all recorded phone calls have been lost and we have no ability to recover them.”

Broussard said that Lopez subsequently went “door-to-door actively recruiting residents to join his efforts to seek injunctive relief against [Broussard] to block his ability to haul vegetative materials to his property” and that Lopez was communicating with the parish president in an effort to shut down Broussard’s farming operations. The parish council did, in fact, have a cease-and-desist order served on Broussard on June 21, 2021, which ordered him to cease all activity on his own property, including “any farming, agricultural, dumpsite, and commercial activity.”

Broussard said Lopez, in retaliation for his reporting the June 14 stop to Troop I, stepped up his harassment, including appearing before the parish planning and zoning commission where he leveled several “defamatory” and untrue charges against Broussard.

Then, on April 25 of this year, at about 4:30 p.m., Lopez’s son, Benjamin Cole Lopez, followed Broussard and videotaped him with his cell phone and later attempted to have Broussard arrested for assault by St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Baily Myles Romero, Lopez’s neighbor.

The “assault” ended up as a misdemeanor for blocking the roadway and followed the incident in which Benjamin Lopez videotaped Broussard, who continued to his property and exited his vehicle with his own cell phone and took his own video of the younger Lopez as he drove past his property, turned around, and drove back past.

To give a little background on Trooper Lopez, he was first employed by LSP in September 2008 and resigned on July 9, 2013, to work in the employ of then-Iberia Sheriff Louis Ackal, who was himself a retired state trooper. Ackal, of course, had his own legal problems that included a multitude of lawsuits that resulted in millions of dollars in settlements or judgments.

Lopez worked for Ackal for nearly two years, from September 24, 2015 until his resignation on March 12, 2017. He rejoined LSP the following day.

LSP indicated in the report provided LouisianaVoice that Broussard’s claims of harassment “were not supported by the evidence…nor was there any evidence to support the allegations that you used your position as a Louisiana State Trooper to influence your neighbors…with regard to Mr. Broussard’s farming operations.”

For his failure to activate his body cam, he received a letter of reprimand.