Brave Cave
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The Brave Cave[a] is a former inmate processing center, and more recently an off-site interrogation facility, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was run by the Baton Rouge Police Department's street-crime squad, Brave (Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination), until August 2023.[1] It has been described by some as having been a 'black site' or 'torture warehouse', where detainees were held off the books and could be coerced into providing information or capitulation, beaten, or subjected to extensive cavity/strip searches.[2][3][4] The facility came to the national forefront in 2023 following the widely publicized lawsuits of Jeremy Lee and Ternell Brown, who had been held at the facility in separate, unrelated incidents. It is currently being reviewed by the FBI as the result of a civil rights investigation into lawsuits stemming from the facility.[5][6] The Deputy Chief, along with other BRPD officials, have insisted that the now defunct facility was never a cause for concern and not covert by nature.[7]
Baton Rouge police indicated in a statement that the facility had been a former "processing center" where "thousands of inmates" have been processed over the years. In recent years, it fell under the command of the Street Crimes Unit, known as Brave, for interrogation purposes and "narcotics processing".[1][7]
Official knowledge regarding the facility is somewhat dubious. When initially reached out to by WAFB, neither the Baton Rouge Police Chief, Murphy Paul, along with his staff, nor the BRPD spokesmen, were aware of the facility.[7] However, the Deputy Chief, Myron Daniels, along with other leaders, were "adamant" that it had been used for years and was in no way a secretive site.[7] Attorneys have alleged, however, that the facility is a black site:
In our view it almost seems like they take people to what we consider a black site, an area where there’s not many cameras and where people don’t really know about it and they can essentially hold you there until they decide what to do with you...I believe that he was taken to this room because there were no cameras in this room, and it was to actually beat my client. I believe that’s what it was for.[4]
In August 2024, the facility was permanently shut down and the Brave unit was disbanded by Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome.[6] On February 1, 2025, as part of an exhibition with art gallery Yes We Cannibal, artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, 2025 Creative Capital awardee and inaugural Triple Canopy fellow, lead a collaborative performance outside the Brave Cave using a decommissioned LRAD to play DJ Casper's Cha Cha Slide for the purpose of gathering a crowd rather than dispersing it, an inversion of the technology's purpose.[8] Later that month, new Mayor-President Sid Edwards announced plans to partner with the YMCA to transform the facility into a community center.[9]