Nearly eight months after Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s office began its review of the July 2016 shooting of Alton Sterling by two Baton Rouge Police officers, Landry says he cannot provide an update on when the review will be completed.
Following an address by Landry today to the Baton Rouge Rotary Club, Metro Councilwoman and Rotarian Barbara Freiberg asked Landry, as a member of the Metro Council, for a timeline or an estimate of when the review might be done.
Landry referred to a statement his office released last May, when it first received the thousands of pages of documents related to the case from the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to prosecute the two officers after a 10-month investigation.
In that statement, Landry reportedly said “it is important for the public to know that this matter will be handled by the most professional and proficient law enforcement use of force team in Louisiana.”
At the Rotary meeting, he would say only that his office is still working on the case.
“That was day three hundred eighty something for y’all, but it was day one for us,” he said. “We have been working diligently and we are working as fast as we can but we are going to ensure that it is done as thoroughly as possible.”
He declined to elaborate.
Though many observers do not expect the Republican to charge the officers, who are white, with any wrongdoing in the shooting of Sterling, who was black, the ongoing investigation leaves open a painful chapter in the community and Freiberg, for one, was disappointed with the response she received.
“I am very, very disappointed he was not able to give us some sort of time line,” she says. “Is he halfway through the investigation? Working on it every day, but still has 400 more pages to go through? I think it’s time we address this issue and move on.”
Sterling was killed by officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II in the early morning hours of July 5, 2016, outside the Triple S Food Mart in north Baton Rouge, setting off weeks of protests. After a 10-month investigation, the U.S. Dept. of Justice said it couldn’t meet the burden of proof necessary to bring federal civil rights charges against the officers.
—Stephanie Riegel
