The St. Louis Police Dept. Has Unbelievably Brutal “Riot King” Committed to Stopping Protests...He Must Be Stopped!

St. Louis has long been a house divided against itself. The city is still mostly segregated despite the courts striking down legal segregation half a century ago. So it’s no surprise it has become one of the centers of the new civil rights movement, a dramatic stage where, faced with massive protests against the unjust killings of Michael Brown and Anthony Lamar Smith, the city government outrageously chose to respond with overwhelming, militarized police brutality.

Out of this tense, heated conflict, one cop has emerged as a symbol of that police brutality: Brian Rossomanno, the supervisor of the Civil Disobedience Unit of the St. Louis Police Department, commonly known as “The Riot King.” 

Rossomanno oversees riot training for the SLPD, whose savagely violent tactics include the controversial “kettling” technique, in which protesters are surrounded and maced or beaten into submission regardless of whether they have surrendered. St. Louis police are notorious for beating peaceful protesters with batons, gassing them, shooting them with rubber bullets and arresting them by the hundreds regardless of whether they’ve committed an offense. Rossomanno is also notorious for his inflammatory rhetoric - he has used the hashtag #protestseason on social media, as though Americans exercising their Constitutional rights were game to be hunted - and his officers have mocked protesters by chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” 

It doesn’t matter how harsh and brutal Rossomanno’s tactics are, though. Nothing is going to stop the people of St. Louis from marching in the streets until there is justice for the families of those who have been killed and the police department is reformed from the bottom up. But what this brutality does is send a clear message to protesters: Fight back. 

If you were a young activist marching against injustice and you knew that you were going to get beaten, tasered and gassed, no matter whether you were peaceful or violent, no matter whether you surrendered or stood your ground, which would you choose? You come home with your shield or on it. Better to be bloodied and beaten while standing proudly than to drop to your knees and take a beating anyway.  

Rossomanno is not a stupid man. You don’t get to be the supervisor of the entire Civil Disobedience Unit in a city of millions of people if you can’t put two and two together. He is an expert in this field. So we gotta ask: How does he not know he’s making it worse? How does he not see he’s making violence more likely? He went to kindergarten, right? Then he knows that if you mock and insult people, you just piss them off even more. If he just wanted to pour gasoline on the fire, he’s doing everything right. 

Real talk: The Riot King has a side hustle. He owns a company called 0311 Tactical Solutions that does security consulting. They have worked with the St. Louis Cardinals, A-B InBev and the Republican National Convention, and presumably with many other clients not listed on his website. Some of his fellow police officers work for him as a second job. Why does this matter? His company used to boast that he had his own St. Louis Police Department as a client, before reporters called him out for a possible conflict of interest.

This just raises more questions: Is St. Louis lining the Riot King’s pockets? Is he training other cities’ police forces to abuse activists? When he and his fellow SLPD officers are at a protest doing all they can to provoke and harass protesters into violence, is he profiting off their misery? 

So far, the Department of Justice has complained about the police brutality in St. Louis, and the ACLU has filed a lawsuit for the same. The activist community has demanded that Rossomanno be fired. Surprise, surprise: The St. Louis city government is ignoring them. But until the city outlaws his tactics, heals the relationship between activists and police that he helped to poison,) and investigates the controversy surrounding Rossomanno’s business dealings, the outcry will only grow louder.

What do you think? Should the Riot King be fired? Should his company and the SLPD be investigated for ethics violations? Let us know in the comments.