Here's one of those reasons, as reported by The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune:
On a Friday night last June, a week after the massacre of five young men stunned New Orleans residents, police burst through the doors of the Sportsman's Corner bar in Central City, looking for two men in white t-shirts who they believed had just run in.
In the wake of the brutal killings just blocks away, police promised a strong presence in the city's most violent neighborhoods. At about 8:30 p.m., members of NOPD's Special Operations Division charged into the club at the corner of Second and Dryades streets. Two split off to search the bathrooms while others kept watch on the patrons, guns drawn. Where were the two men in white t-shirts who had just run into the bar? the officers asked.
You've got the wrong place, said the patrons, many of them regulars in a bar known as a hangout for oldtimers from the neighborhood.
"Not a man in here had a white shirt on," said Mary Jane Spears, 56, who had yet to taste the bourbon and tonic she'd ordered. "I'm scared of guns to begin with, and the way they came in with those big guns, with their hands ready to pull the triggers, that terrified me."
Spears, seated in a chair facing the door, knew the only patrons who'd come in after her: Myra Boudreaux and her companion, 64-year-old Joseph Hall, wearing a red shirt and a blue cap, Spears said.
Police did not find the men in the white t-shirts. But amid the typically older clientele, the youngest person there may have been the man running the Sportsman, 26-year-old Steven Elloie, a solid, broad-shouldered man who stands 5-feet-11 and weighs 265 pounds.
What happened next shocked the 17 people who were there that night. In separate interviews with nine of them, witnesses consistently offered the same version of events. Police have declined to discuss what happened during the search of the bar, but here is what the nine witnesses say unfolded.
Elloie was in the storage room, making a shopping list for the next day -- potato chips, cold drinks, napkins, paper towels, toilet paper, he said -- when through the wall he heard yelling.
He grabbed his keys and headed into the main room, through one of a pair of wooden doors. The two doors are set up like those in a restaurant kitchen -- cut about 10 feet apart and connecting the same two rooms -- the one-room bar and the back room, where supplies are kept.
As Elloie came out one door, an officer was yanking on the other door knob. Elloie said the trouble seemed to start when he turned and said, "I'm the owner. Please don't break it. I can open it."
Witnesses at nearby tables said Elloie introduced himself and that he was wearing a black shirt that bore the name "Sportsman's Corner" across the lapel. Elloie asked what was going on and the officers asked if he'd seen two guys run in wearing white t-shirts. Elloie said he had not, then looked at his barmaids. They shook their heads no.
When the officer resumed yanking on the door, Elloie turned to him and said, "If you need the door open, I can open it." According to Elloie, the officer said, "I don't care who you are. You're going to jail."
Elloie said, "For what?" The officer said, "Because you hit me." Indeed, a citation filed later in municipal court offered a scant description of the allegation, saying only that Elloie "struck officer in the chest." Witnesses said Elloie had not touched an officer.
Several officers then slammed Elloie against the wall, in a powerful blow that sent his glasses flying and flipped a table over, sending drinks flying. They cuffed him and threw him to the floor. He hit with full force. "Everybody in here could hear that lick, as Steven hit the floor," said Boudreaux, who winced as she recalled it.
Once Elloie was on the ground, a group of officers kicked and hit him, then fired twice into his back with a Taser, an electric stun gun, witnesses said.
"That was the most pain I've ever encountered," said Elloie, who as he twitched and hollered was heard asking the officers why they were doing this to him.
Charles Walker, a truck driver who stops in regularly after work, heard the cries. "Steven was asking them why they were beating him, but they didn't respond in words, they responded with violence -- they told him to shut up and beat him more."
One officer told Elloie that he was taking the beating like a woman. With a little kick, he ordered Elloie to get up and walk. Elloie said he couldn't, his legs were numb. The officer looked at his colleagues, then at Elloie and said, "Then drag the motherf-----."
''It was like when you take a trash bag that's too heavy and drag it to the curb. They grabbed onto his hands, which were cuffed behind his back, and that's how they dragged him,'' said Calvin Edwards, a 44-year-old bellman-valet at a St. Charles Avenue hotel.
(snip)As Elloie was dragged out, a barmaid called his mother, Teresa Elloie. Police were prohibiting all cell phone use. The barmaid spoke softly. She had to be brief.
With police yelling in the background, Teresa Elloie thought she heard that police had shot her son Steven.
She grabbed her wheelchair-bound father, Louis Elloie, 75, and left the house doors open as she rushed to the Sportsman's Corner. She knew the route well. Louis Elloie ran the bar for more than three decades until he suffered two strokes in the fall of 2005 -- one the day Hurricane Katrina, the second when Rita hit. Steven re-opened the bar in the spring of 2006. He added wireless Internet access, but kept the Sportsman largely the way his grandfather left it.
Teresa Elloie arrived to find the bar surrounded by police, about six cars she believes, and maybe 10 or 12 officers.
''I didn't know whether Steven was alive or dead,'' she said, adding that officers told her to ''to get the f--- back'' as she walked toward the bar to find out. She called 911 and asked the dispatcher to send a ranking officer. None came. Nothing was making sense, she said. She has another son who she said can be a little mouthy, but not Steven, who she describes as easygoing to a fault and whose normal speaking voice is so quiet it can be difficult to hear.
Teresa Elloie, who's describes herself as less easygoing, found herself getting angry on her son's behalf.
As the officer in the passenger seat wrote the report, he asked, ''What's the name of the bar?'' Elloie, slumped in the back seat, saw the officer look back at his shirt and say, ''There's the name,'' and write down ''Sportsman's Corner.''
The other officers walked back into the bar and asked to speak with the owner. ''You just dragged him out,'' the customers said.
Thirty minutes after their arrival, the police left, witnesses said.
Arresting officers took Elloie to Orleans Parish Prison's Central Lockup, where sheriff's personnel refused him until he received medical attention, he said. After a trip to a makeshift post-Katrina emergency room set up at the closed Lord & Taylor's store, where Elloie was treated for a black eye, bruises, abrasions, and numbness in his limbs, the officers took him back to jail, where at 1:12 a.m. he was booked with battery of a police officer and resisting arrest.
With the police gone, Teresa Elloie walked into the bar and pulled out a piece of paper and a pen. Every patron in the bar -- 16 in all -- wrote down his or her name and phone number, promising to be a witness for any investigation. ''Everybody signed because what happened was not right and we knew it,'' Calvin Edwards said.
Teresa Elloie gave a copy of her handwritten list to the NOPD's Public Integrity Bureau. In March, Steven Elloie received a letter from the bureau, which said the allegations of excessive force were ''not sustained.''
''They basically said that they'd found nothing and that the case was closed,'' Teresa Elloie said.
(snip)The charges against Elloie also never went anywhere. The patrons at the bar that night showed up religiously for every hearing date in municipal court, eager to testify on his behalf. At one point, a sheriff's deputy stationed at the court recognized the group and said, ''You guys again?''
When the officers failed to show up after multiple trial dates, the city attorney dropped the charges.
In a federal lawsuit filed this week against the city on behalf of Steven Elloie by the American Civil Liberties Union, Elloie alleges the Public Integrity Bureau's investigation of the incident ''was a sham, or that it was performed and concluded in an inefficient and biased manner.''
Katie Schwartzmann, ACLU staff attorney, said that she hopes to see changes in how the NOPD treats suspects, uses Tasers and oversees police officers.
''Basically, we're asking that cops treat people humanely and with respect,'' she said.
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