Krystallynn, 4, Deondre', 2, and Ramona Washington look out the window of their home in New Iberia's West End, one of dozens of blighted "Mixon homes" lining the block. The Mixons, a local lumber family, built the shotguns in the early 1950’s as rentals with no running water. Several of them on Shot Street were torn down last year. They’d become vacant magnets for crime. Many more like these remain, renting for about $200 a month.
Gunshots had become an almost daily feature in the historic black core of New Iberia in 2017.
The neighborhood had once been under siege from police. Now most days, residents said, policing in the West End was drive-thru only.
The shotgun shacks and narrow alleys of the West End had been home to a flourishing drug market since the early 1990s.
Not coincidentally, these streets were also where Iberia Parish sheriff’s deputies deployed their most aggressive tactics over the years, with narcotics agents jumping out of unmarked cars and playing rough with suspected dealers.
Whether that sort of hard-nosed policing paid dividends was a matter of long-running debate. But the question was resolved for many New Iberians as appalling revelations of a federal civil rights probe started to show up on newspaper front pages.
The gist: The Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office employed a violent gang with racist tendencies and batons. Deputies in Sheriff Louis Ackal’s elite narcotics squad routinely beat suspects, and sometimes just random African-Americans they confronted.
Some of the same deputies fabricated reports, made bogus arrests and lied under oath to cover their tracks. And to hear federal prosecutors tell it, Ackal was the architect of the whole thing.
“I have big plans for the narcotics division,” Ackal told The Daily Iberian, the city’s newspaper, while campaigning in 2007.
Not long after he took office, in 2008, three of Ackal’s drug agents got caught jumping two young black residents just for kicks.
Ackal allegedly dismissed the matter as “just another case of n*****-knocking,” a comment deputies said made the rounds of the narcotics squad and set a free-swinging tone for years of abuse.
Nearly a dozen Iberia Parish deputies would eventually confess to civil rights violations, and several agreed to testify against their boss over the biggest policing scandal in Louisiana in a decade.
But then Ackal beat the rap in 2016 and came back to town.
His enthusiasm for aggressively policing the West End, though, had dimmed.
Deputies weren’t jumping out and roughing people up any longer. They didn’t seem to be getting out of their cars much at all in the neighborhood — unless someone got shot or killed.
Which was happening with unsettling frequency.
‘All I did was duck’
Benjamin had fallen a few feet from the intersection of Shot and Mississippi streets. He wore red shorts, a black T-shirt and three gaping bullet wounds across his left forearm.
Blood also flowed from three holes in his side, another in his chest, two in his back, two more in a leg, one in the groin, another in his butt.
His white Chrysler 300 sat parked at the curb, steps from Henry’s patio, bullet strike marks on the hood. It had Texas plates, but Benjamin was a familiar face in the neighborhood, living in a flood-prone housing complex up the street. He had family in the West End. Henry knew him well.
blob:https://www.theadvocate.com/990c825e-291d-4e12-abcd-30f04cebf297
Full Article: https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/crime_police/article_7637a812-ec16-11e8-b82f-9b135d793f43.html
Source: theadvocate.com
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