BATON ROUGE, La.

— 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 controversies involving

race, did not respond to a detailed

request for comment. A

State Police spokesman said

only that “these incidents

were already addressed by

the agency.”

On Friday, Gov. John Bel

Edwards appointed a Black

State Police captain, Lamar

Davis, to succeed Reeves,

who is white.

Law enforcement misconduct

— especially cases

involving bias — has drawn

new scrutiny amid a racial

reckoning sweeping the

country after the killing of

George Floyd.

In Louisiana, racial tensions

have heightened in recent

months amid a federal

civil rights investigation into

the still-unexplained death of

Ronald Greene, a Black motorist

taken into custody last

year following a State Police

chase near Monroe. Reeves

faced criticism for his secretive

handling of the case, including

waiting 474 days to

open an internal probe and

refusing to release body-cam

video that, according to those

who have seen it, shows

troopers beating, choking

and dragging Greene while

calling him a “son of a b—-.”

State Police records obtained

by the AP revealed

that Reeves also refused

to discipline another state

trooper and a longtime administrative

assistant last

year after they were found to

have forwarded overtly racist

emails from their account, including

a five-page chainmail

titled “BE PROUD TO BE

WHITE” that claims white

Americans have “LOST

most of OUR RIGHTS” and

addresses law enforcement

treatment of minorities. The

email questioned why “only

whites can be racists” and

challenged its recipients to be

“proud enough to send it on.”

A State Police attorney

said the emails were several

years old when they surfaced

and there had been “no complaints

since” against either

employee.

Other records obtained

by AP revealed a pattern of

racist remarks made by white

troopers — such as saying a

Black trooper resembled a

“monkey” in his uniform.

A State Police captain,

whose name was redacted in

the records, accused a Black

subordinate of lying after

he told investigators he was

offended by his colleagues

repeatedly calling him

“Django” after the character

in a film about a fictional

freed slave. State Police determined

the nickname was

“not intended to be racially

derogatory.”

The same internal investigation

delved into the use of

the term “Oreo” to describe

white troopers’ aversion to

working a shift alone with

two Black colleagues.

And in another racist

exchange, a State Police

sergeant was accused of disparaging

a Black colleague

when a child asked a group

of troopers in a restaurant

why they left their patrol car

idling in the parking lot with

the air conditioner on.

“Have you not seen a Hershey’s

Kiss when left in the

sun?” the sergeant reportedly

replied.

It’s not clear from the records

whether any troopers

were disciplined in these incidents.

Eugene Collins, president

of the Baton Rouge branch of

the NAACP, said the records

show the state’s “premier law

enforcement agency is systemically

racist at multiple

levels.”