History Repeats: Thompson takes second stab at police brutality
The Brooklyn district attorney announced his decision to bring criminal charges against two New York City police officers accused of beating an unarmed teenager with a service weapon. This is a significant decision considering the last time an NYPD officer was criminally tried for police brutality was in 2008.
But this is not District Attorney Kenneth Thompson’s first bite at the police abuse apple. Thompson, before his aspirations of being Brooklyn’s top prosecutor were formed, was a member of the prosecutorial team behind the seminal NYPD brutality case involving Abner Louima.
Thompson was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District in 2000, when he gave the opening statement before a Brooklyn federal jury in the case against the officers accused of torturing and sexually abusing Louima, a Haitian immigrant.