Innocent people detained by Police In Baton Rouge after the Sterling killing: Why was the Store owner held captive for 4 hours?

Abdullah Muflahi is a Yemen-born Baton Rouge resident who owns a popular Triple S Food Mart in the Louisiana capital. Chris LeDay is a Georgia resident and Air Force veteran born and raised in Baton Rouge.

Both men played critical roles in exposing the brutal police killing of Alton Sterling, just outside of Muflahi’s store. And both say that, because they revealed the murder, they quickly became the next police targets, hit with retaliatory detention, abuse and degrading treatment that threw their lives into upheaval.

“They treated me like I was a criminal,” Muflahi told AlterNet, “I was just a witness.”

Muflahi used his phone to record the killing of Sterling, whom he describes as a “good friend,” and the shop owner is responsible for the second video of the shooting. The footage shows that Sterling was not holding a gun or posing a threat when police officer Blane Salamoni shot him six times while he was pinned to the ground, debunking a key narrative perpetuated by Salamoni and Howie Lake, the other police officer involved in the incident.

Watching his friend die would turn out to be only the beginning of Muflahi’s nightmare. According to a lawsuit filed earlier this week by his attorney, Joel Porter, “Immediately after the killing of Mr. Sterling officers came inside Triple S Food Mart and without a warrant confiscated the entire store security system and took Plaintiff Muflahi into custody.”

The petition, which names several officers and was emailed to AlterNet, charges that police “then illegally placed Mr. Muflahi into custody, confiscated his cell phone and illegally locked him in the back of a police vehicle and detained him there for approximately four hours.”

During that period, Muflahi was not even permitted to use the bathroom in his own store, forced to relieve himself on the side of the building “in full view of the public,” the lawsuit states.

Another week in America, another week of sadness and hand-wringing prompted by gun violence. While the most recent incidents are tinged by race, they also point to a country awash in guns and the too many deaths that result from their use (or abuse). But are these shootings any more likely to lead to some kind of meaningful action to address the problem? Unfortunately, probably not. As long as the debate continues to be one of constitutionality (the right to bear arms) and control (regulation), little meaningful change is likely to address the 16 million new guns entering the U.S. market each year or the nearly 34,000 annual gun deaths. A new dialogue is desperately needed among policymakers and the public. And it could begin by shifting our focus away from the regulation of guns toward understanding (and mitigating) the social costs of firearm fatalities. My research examines ways to assess the social, environmental and health effects of new technologies to inform policymakers and companies. Though my focus at the University of Minnesota is on sustainability, similar analyses may also be useful for the political debate over gun control. Firearm fatalities The current congressional debate focuses on the most violent actors (terrorists or those whose background check may not check out) and the most lethal guns (military-style rifles) – not necessarily the deadliest guns or those creating the greatest risks to society. Despite the headlines, most guns never kill anyone, and military-style rifles are some of the least frequently used guns in firearm deaths. Each year, fewer than one firearm-related death occurs in the U.S. for every 10,000 guns in circulation, or 33,636 fatalities for an estimated 357 million guns. And about two-thirds of those deaths are suicides.