News & Commentary

A state judge ordered Louisiana State Police to release public records, including training materials related to interacting with people experiencing mental health issues, in the Justice Lab's excessive force lawsuit, Asante-Chioke v. Dowdle.

ACLU-LA Senior Director for Philanthropy and Community Investment, Maggy Baccinelli, and two Guaranteed Monthly Income Program participants, Janell Landry and Sandra Carr, share the impacts of reparations work on the lives of those impacted by systemic racism and oppressioN.

The ACLU of Louisiana’s ‘Justice Lab’ wins on qualified immunity as the pilot program brings cases before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Fifth Circuit judges seemed interested in the case of Black teenagers who were stopped at gunpoint, after asking law enforcement for help while searching for a lost dog.

Not only did the protests that followed Minneapolis police murdering George Floyd fail to lead to meaningful police reform, but there’s been an awful move in the opposite direction.

We surveyed participants in our Guaranteed Income pilot project about the program’s impact on their lives. Here's what we've learned.

On August 21st, Trayford Pellerin – a 31-year-old Black man – was killed by Lafayette police officers outside a convenience store. Cell phone video of the incident clearly showed Pellerin moving away from the officers, but they shot him 10 times, killing him. An autopsy later showed no evidence that officers had tased him before using deadly force.

My name is Jasmine Groves and I am the youngest of three children of Kim Marie Groves. A former New Orleans police officer Len Davis put a hit on my mother in retaliation for her witnessing him beat a teenager in our neighborhood and filing a complaint against him. The day my mother reported Officer Davis was the day before my 13th birthday. About 3:30pm, she called the office to file the complaint, and it usually took 24 to 72 hours for an officer to be notified of a complaint against them. Unfortunately, Davis knew within hours of my mother filing the complaint; by the time she made it home that night, the hit to take her life was already set.

None of our communities are safe when the police can murder people with impunity or when routine encounters escalate into deadly shooting sprees.