AP: Use of slurs not 'isolated' at Louisiana State Police

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A Black trooper with the Louisiana State Police was on a break when his cellphone buzzed with an unusual voice message. It was from a white colleague, unaware his Apple Watch had recorded him, blurting out the Black trooper’s name followed by a searing racial slur.

“F----- n----, what did you expect?”

That unguarded moment, sent in a pocket-dial of sorts, touched off an internal investigation at Louisiana’s premier law-enforcement agency that remained under wraps for three years before a local television station reported last month that the white trooper had not even been reprimanded for the racist recording.

“I believe this to be an isolated incident and I have great confidence in the men and women who serve in the Louisiana State Police,” the agency’s outgoing head, Col. Kevin Reeves, said in response to the controversy.

But an Associated Press review of hundreds of State Police records revealed at least a dozen more instances over a three-year period in which employees forwarded racist emails on their official accounts with subject lines like “PROUD TO BE WHITE,” or demeaned minority colleagues with names including “Hershey’s Kiss,” “Django” and “Egg Roll.”

“The State Police has a real, deep-rooted racism problem,” said David Lanser, a New Orleans attorney with the Law Office of William Most, which obtained the records and emails through a targeted public-records request in 2018 for emails containing racist language. “Denying the existence of systemic and individual racism in the LSP will only serve to perpetuate its serious and often tragic effects on the people of Louisiana.”

Reeves, who abruptly retired this week amid a series of racially tinged controversies, did not respond to a detailed request for comment. A State Police spokesman said only...