Government Security News July 2016 Digital Edition

Ambush of law enforcement officers in
Baton Rouge
Editor’s Note: In this article, scientist,
former journalist, lifetime resident
of Baton Rouge and GSN columnist
George Lane describes cycles of
violence in his hometown from the
1970s to the present
This past weekend’s ambush and
targeted killings of three law enforcement
officers in Baton Rouge
is part of a recent cycle of violence
that began with a number of shootings
of black citizens by law enforcement,
one here in Baton Rouge
where I live. Sunday’s shooting in
Baton Rouge is the latest episode
in a month of violence and extraordinary
racial tension and took
place after Baton Rouge officers
fatally shot Alton Sterling, a black
man who was selling CDs outside
a convenience store on July 5. The
night after Sterling was killed, another
black man was killed by the
police during a traffic stop in a St.
Paul suburb in Minnesota. The next
night five police officers were killed
by a gunman in Dallas who said he
wanted to kill police officers, particularly
white officers.
This weekend brought back painful
memories of similar cycle of
violence in the early 1970’s that culminated
in a shootout in downtown
Baton Rouge in which I was an unwilling
participant while working
as a journalist for a Baton Rouge
television station. As media I was
a target in the 1972 shootout by
self-professed Black Muslims from
outside of Baton Rouge. I avoided
injury; however, two East Baton
Rouge Sheriff ’s Office deputies were
killed and my friend and anchor of
the television station was viciously
beaten and remained in a coma for
several years, dying in 2010.1 Another
shootout occurred on November
16, 1972 at a local university in
Baton Rouge between students and
law enforcement in which two black
students were killed.2 Then in 1973,
in retribution for the Baton Rouge
shootings, an ex-military sniper,
Mark Essex, terrorized downtown
New Orleans for a week, killing seven
people, including three police officers,
and wounding eight.3
Before the recent ambush, Baton
Rouge Police Department (BRPD)
had said they were investigating a
plot by four people to shoot at police
officers, and they cited the threat to
explain the heavy police presence
14
at protests.
Police said a
17-year-old
was arrested
after running
George Lane
from a burglary
of weapons from a pawn shop in
Baton Rouge. He and three others
were believed to have broken into
the pawnshop. The Baton Rouge
police chief told reporters that the
17-year-old told police “that the
reason the burglary was being done
was to harm police officers.”
The chief of BRPD said during a
press conference today that he believes
Long would have continued
to BRPD Headquarters just a handful
of miles away from the site of
the ambush attack had he not been
taken out by a SWAT officer with a
shot from 100 yards away. “This guy
was going to another location,” said
the BRPD chief. “He wasn’t going to
stop here.”
Gavin Eugene Long has been identified
as the gunman who opened fire
in Baton Rouge. Long, described as
a 29-year-old black male from Kansas
City, Missouri, was killed at the
scene of the shooting. Long’s birth-
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