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When Baton Rouge police officers detained Ternell Brown in June, they didn’t take her to the district’s precinct, according to a newly filed lawsuit. Instead, it alleges, the officers drove past the police station and down a side street to a row of industrial buildings ringed by steel fencing. They took Brown into one of them, a squat, white warehouse with no police markings, the lawsuit states.
This, attorneys for Brown allege, was what officers dubbed the “Brave Cave”: an unmarked police facility and “torture warehouse” where the department’s street-crimes unit detained people and subjected them to assault and invasive strip and body-cavity searches.
Brown, who had been detained on suspicion of illegal drug activity after officers found bottles of legal prescription medication in her vehicle during a traffic stop, was held in the “Brave Cave” for two hours, according to her lawsuit. Officers allegedly forced Brown, 51, to expose herself in a strip search and examined her body cavities with a flashlight. She was released without a charge.
Brown’s lawsuit, filed Monday, is the latest allegation facing an embattled Baton Rouge Police Department that has paid out settlements and faced scrutiny for previous strip searches. The department’s use of the “Brave Cave” was first reported in late August when Jeremy Lee, another Baton Rouge resident represented by Brown’s attorneys, sued the police department, several officers, the city and the parish, alleging that he was beaten by officers in the warehouse after a January arrest.
Lee’s lawsuit, accompanied by a body-camera image of the 22-year-old in a wooden chair in the bare interior of the “Brave Cave,” prompted the shuttering of the facility, the disbanding of the street crimes unit and an ongoing investigation by the FBI, according to Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome.
“We are committed to addressing these troubling accusations, ensuring that any misconduct is exposed and those responsible are held accountable,” Weston Broome said in a statement to The Post.
But other residents who were taken to the “Brave Cave,” including Brown, have since come forward.
“We think we’re just scratching the surface,” Ryan Thompson, an attorney for Lee and Brown, said in a Monday news conference.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Police Chief Murphy Paul Jr. declined to comment on Brown’s and Lee’s cases, saying the department is conducting an internal investigation. Paul said in an August news conference that the “Brave Cave” was a narcotics processing facility owned by the parish that had been used by the police department for decades, but that he’d never heard of officers using the name “Brave Cave” or the alleged misconduct in the warehouse until Lee’s lawsuit.
“We made a mistake on this one,” Paul said to The Post. “I’ve got to own that.”
Anderson Dotson, the East Baton Rouge parish attorney, declined to comment on the pending litigation. The FBI’s Louisiana office told The Post it was aware of the allegations against the police department.
The street-crimes unit focused on Baton Rouge’s “most violent” regions and polices drugs and violent crimes, according to the police department’s website. Brown’s lawsuit alleged that the unit regularly took detainees to the “Brave Cave” for questioning, adding that many were detained and released without a formal arrest.
“Everybody we’ve spoken to has said that when they were taken to the ‘Brave Cave,’ they were stripped and searched,” Jessica Hawkins, another attorney for Lee and Brown, told The Post.
Lee was arrested in January when he visited a house that officers were serving a warrant on, Hawkins said. The officers pulled down Lee’s pants to strip-search him in the middle of the street and threatened to beat him, according to Lee’s lawsuit.
At the “Brave Cave,” Lee was repeatedly punched and kicked by three officers before being interrogated, court documents state. He was then taken to jail but was so injured that he was rejected admission until he received medical care, according to the lawsuit. Lee was then treated for a fractured left rib, according to a hospital report.
Lee and Brown also accuse the police department of a broad failure to correct previous instances of misconduct. An officer who beat Lee had previously strip-searched a 16-year-old in public during a traffic stop, leading the city to pay a $35,000 settlement, according to the lawsuit.
That officer resigned shortly after Lee’s lawsuit, Weston Broome announced in late August.
Brown’s lawsuit accuses the department of maintaining a strip-search policy that allows officers to subject non-arrestees to demeaning searches based solely on an officer’s suspicion. Brown, upon filing a complaint with the police department, was told that the officers had done nothing wrong, the lawsuit alleged.
Brown’s lawsuit also accuses the department of ignoring complaints and quashing internal investigations of misconduct by the street-crimes unit. Though Paul, the police chief, said in the August news conference that he had only learned of a complaint about beatings at the “Brave Cave” in early August, Brown’s lawsuit alleged that he had been sent a complaint about Lee’s case in January.
Paul told The Post that the department regularly revises its policies and that he would examine the strip-search policy after investigating the allegations in the lawsuits. Paul denied that the department stifled investigations and said he consistently disciplines officers found to commit wrongdoing. Although the January complaint was emailed to Paul, he said that he never reviewed it before an assistant forwarded the email to the department’s internal affairs team, which did not act on the complaint.
“We’ve been pretty consistent in our discipline,” Paul said. “We’ve terminated officers for bad behavior.”
Paul said the department had transferred operations previously conducted at the warehouse to other department facilities and that he would wait for the department’s investigation to conclude and consider corrective measures before restoring the street-crimes unit. Two Baton Rouge police officers, one who was a member of the unit and one who was a former member, were placed on administrative leave Tuesday, Paul said.
Hawkins, the attorney for Lee and Brown, disagreed that the police department had successfully held officers accountable.
‘There’s plenty that needs to be addressed,” Hawkins said. “We’re asking really for the whole unit to stay disbanded.”
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/20/baton-rouge-police-brave-cave-lawsuits/