White ex-cop in St. Louis gets light sentence for beating up undercover cop

This is one of the “blue lives” that matters? Tuh.

Source: LauriPatterson / Getty

For several years now we’ve seen people take to the streets to protest unjust brutality in the aftermath of a violent and viral incident with police. The sad irony is that we’ve seen many people be assaulted and brutalized by the police while they are protesting the type of abuse that they are being subjected to. Cops just generally don’t do a great job of reading the room.

According to a report on Buzzfeed News, a white ex-cop in St. Louis, Missouri has gotten off with a slap on the wrist for his violent offenses but there’s a kicker. The person who 37-year-old Dustin Boone assaulted was also a cop! During a 2017 protest that resulted from the acquittal of ex-cop Jason Stockley in the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith, a Black undercover police officer was brutally beaten by Boone and another officer named Randy Hays. Boone pinned officer Luther Hall to the ground and allowed Hays to savage him with a baton. The white officers believed that Hall was a protester. Guess that’s all it takes to be assaulted with a weapon.

Prosecutors in the case asked that Boone be sentenced to 10 years in prison. His defense attorneys asked for a little over 2 years. US District Judge E. Richard Webber decided both were obscene amounts of time and tapped Boone of the wrist for 1 year and 1 day that way he would be eligible to get reduced time for “good behavior”. The injuries and PSTD that Luther Hall suffered got him a $5 million settlement from the department which is great, but for his attacker to get a calendar year’s worth of time is insulting…as hell.

During the trial, prosecutors released mounds of evidence proving that there was no “good behavior” in Boone’s body. For example, he sent the following text to another officer on the force during the times of protest.

“But it’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these s**theads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart,” he wrote in one message.

In another text, Boone referred to Black folks as “F***ing ni**ers” while talking to another officer. Yet, despite all that, the judge only saw fit for 366 days of “punishment.”