Baton Rouge officer says approaching crowd with rifles drawn is protocol

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Baton Rouge, LA (PPN) – Customers outside of a Baton Rouge grocery store were frightened for their lives when two Baton Rouge police officers approached them on with assault rifles drawn and aimed towards their bodies.

The officers allegedly received a call that someone had a gun in front of a store on the corner of N. 22nd St. and Jackson Avenue.

Eric Louis pulled up to the store on May 23 and stopped to give a homeless man a dollar. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a police unit turns around in the middle of N. 22nd St. and parks on the side of the store.

“Seconds later an unmarked car turns around in the middle of N. 22nd and parks on the side of the road,” Louis tells PPN reporters.

Before Louis makes it into the store, 2 officers approached the crowd with their assault rifles already drawn.

The officer yelled, “Everybody hands up!” and the crowd complied.

“I throw my keys on the ground, put my hands up and ask what are ya’ll doing?” Louis was concerned and wanted to know what exactly did they do to deserve that type of treatment.

The second cop told everyone to get on the ground while sweeping his riffle left to right and responded, “We received a call saying someone had a gun!”

The officer randomly accused and identified the homeless man as the alleged suspect. Barely breathing, the homeless man told the armed officers that he didn’t have a gun, while the officer’s knee was pressed on his neck.

Louis and others were told to get up. Before he proceeded to walk into the store, he asked the special agent if having guns already aimed and ready was their protocol.

They officer boldly replied “Oh yea”.

However, when Louis went to file a police complaint, he was told by authorities that weapons should be ready, not drawn, and held at a 45 degrees angle pointing towards the ground.

“I walked into the store scared and confused.” Louis said he began to weep, for a moment he believed that as another unarmed Black man in America facing armed cops, his life may have been taken away at the hands of those who swore to protect and serve the community.

The alleged suspect didn’t have a gun and was a regular at the store. The homeless man doesn’t bother anybody, according to the store owner. In a matter of minutes, about a dozen more police units arrived on the scene.

In February, Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome released a new use of force policy for the department and plans to hire a new police chief. The previous policy stated officers should use “only the amount of force necessary to effect the arrest.

Louis did make an attempt to file a police report but the officer who assisted him at the precinct didn’t take his complaint and didn’t write down any information that Louis told him.

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