Baton Rouge Area Law Enforcement Could Cooperate Better

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(TNS) — A new study suggests the city’s law enforcement agencies are duplicating efforts and a merger of the Baton Rouge Police Department and the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office might be the solution to local crime woes.

Commissioned by SafeBR, a coalition of local leaders, the study does not outright recommend a method for consolidating the two. But it lays out a number of ways in which a unified department might operate more efficiently.

“Our community stands at a critical juncture,” SafeBR member Nial Patel said in a statement after the study was released Wednesday. “Negative headlines, fiscal pressures and rising murder rates require an urgent response from our public leaders on how we can more comprehensively support and deliver on public safety. Whether through a unified force or other ideas, we as a community are coming together to demand and deliver solutions.”

Still, the oft-discussed merger of BRPD and EBRSO continues to prove controversial, including among some top local law enforcement officials.

“They keep going around using this word ‘consolidation.’ And this report is not consolidation,” said BRPD Chief Thomas Morse. “It is the elimination of the Baton Rouge Police Department, and the Baton Rouge Police Department has been here for over 100 years.”

More efficient services

Over several months, 21CP Solutions, a national public safety consulting firm, assessed BRPD and EBRSO practices and data and interviewed employees, residents and focus groups to identify ways in which a more unified approach might prove beneficial.

The Louisiana Constitution makes the sheriff the chief law enforcement official in each of the state’s parishes, so the study examined folding BRPD into EBRSO.

The consultants found redundant positions between the two agencies and identified a slew of places in which a merger could be cost-effective.

“By pooling resources through consolidation, an agency may be able to reduce overall capital and operational expenses by maintaining fewer facilities, a shared debt service and reduced facility overhead costs” like maintenance and supplies, the study said.

East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said a merger could result in cost savings, but it would also come with a larger initial hit.

“I guess there is a possibility of cutting cost with a handful of administrative positions, but the cost of combining the two (new facilities, retirement systems, uniforms, units, pre-employment screening, additional training, etc.) would far exceed any such savings related to administration,” he wrote in an email Wednesday.

The 110-page report says the city-parish spends about $210 million each year on police services between the two agencies — equating to about $467 per resident. This is much higher than the average per capita of $352 spent in the rest of Louisiana as well as the country, the study says.

Salaries for city-parish workers have been the subject of discussion of late. That includes BRPD officers, whose salary schedules start around $36,000 — far less than the $52,000 other markets are paying new officers, another recent study found.

While the take-home wages in BRPD are relatively low, a large portion of the city-parish budget goes to officers whose pensions are robust. The average gross annual cost of an officer is around $108,000, the consultants found.

According to SafeBR’s study, a partial or complete merger of BRPD into EBRSO could provide some reprieve for this issue.

Are there redundancies?

Though the study claims the two agencies also have redundancies when it comes to criminal response, Gautreaux disagrees.

“There are really no duplication of efforts that we are aware of between the two agencies,” he said, pointing out that the two oversee separate jurisdictions. “Therefore if two agencies were one, it would require divisions with personnel and equipment equal to the combination of what each agency currently has in place. For example, BRPD’s SWAT often assists our SWAT when additional personnel is needed, and vice versa. If the two agencies were combined, it would necessitate a SWAT the size of our two current divisions combined.”

Morse echoed the sheriff and said calling the two SWAT teams redundant is like calling the Louisiana State Police’s SWAT units redundant.

“We’re in our own lanes, and we have our own responsibilities,” he said.

‘Top-heavy’ agencies

Of the 124 vacant BRPD officer positions reported when the study took place, none of the vacancies were at sergeant, lieutenant or captain positions, the report’s authors wrote.

“As a result, 21CP observes that the department is even more top-heavy than normal,” the study said.

A merger into EBRSO could open up the possibility for high-end positions to better reflect patrol. While the study notes that EBRSO would need to be staffed to reflect an agency that would be at least double its current size, department and unit leadership would not need doubling in every case to make costs proportionate.

District 3 Metro Council member Rowdy Gaudet attended SafeBR’s presentation of the study Wednesday morning and called the discussion around the report’s implications “healthy.”

“100% think (a merger) is worthy of being explored,” Gaudet said. ” (SafeBR) were very transparent that this is not the final solution of anything, and this is very much starting a discussion and conversation.”

District 11 Metro Council member Laurie Adams had sponsored a presentation of the report to the council at a recent meeting. The presentation was ultimately postponed, but Adams said she expects it to be on the agenda in the near future.

Communication and shared information

Between 2019 and 2023, BRPD averaged about 124,000 calls for service each year for the nearly 220,000 residents it services.

Over the same period, EBRSO received nearly 68,000 calls for the more than 167,000 residents in its service area.

SafeBR argues communication problems between the two agencies are potentially lowering their overall clearance rates, meaning the number of crimes solved. They say it is a problem of criminal activity dipping in and out of each jurisdiction and troubles with sharing information, though there has been some improvement.

“Several interviewees from both agencies and the larger community noted that communication and collaboration between the two law enforcement entities have been problematic in the past but have improved more recently,” consultants wrote. “EBRSO reported that a recent BRPD change to its Records Management System has purportedly complicated information-sharing, but BRPD maintains that the RMS change was a direct result of difficulties associated with the RMS that EBRSO spearheaded for all agencies in the Communications District and BRPD was forced to accept at the time.”

But Morse and Gautreaux said these claims were also off base.

Morse — who himself conducted a one-hour interview with 21CP for the study — said BRPD’s switch of information-sharing software was to better fit the agency and it has mechanisms in place for units to share data and information with countless other agencies.

The sheriff said EBRSO and BRPD have worked together to find solutions to continue to share information.

Consolidating cultures

The discussion surrounding the consolidation of the two agencies has long been discussed, and District Attorney Hillar Moore is living proof of that.

Moore — who attended SafeBR’s Wednesday presentation of the report — said the last paper he wrote at LSU nearly 50 years ago was on the subject of a possible merger of BRPD and EBRSO.

The DA said a major hurdle of any merger effort would be the reconciliation of the two agency’s cultures and authorities, something also mentioned in the recent study.

“This is where the rubber hits the road on how the departments will accept any type of change,” Moore said. “Whether it’s a complete wholesale change, or if it’s a smaller divisional change.”

SafeBR’s study says research shows that mergers attempted in other American metropolitan areas in which insufficient attention was directed to agency cultures resulted in failure more times than not. The report goes on to say that initial resistance by one or both agencies can further complicate any attempts to consolidate.

“The places where they’ve done it and it’s failed is where the two departments, they wouldn’t accept the change,” Moore said, adding that any attempt would take extensive buy-in from both agencies top to bottom.

Apart from BRPD and EBRSO leadership, it would also require a handful of elected officials to be on the same page in relinquishing their power.

Currently, BRPD answers to the mayor-president as well as the Metro Council.

If BRPD were to merge into the Sheriff’s Office, all of the city’s law enforcement operations would answer to Gautreaux.

“Does a mayor, (Metro) council, chief of police, would they ever say ‘I’m willing to relinquish my authority to the sheriff’?” Moore said. “Would the sheriff say ‘I’m willing to accept all of the other authority’?”

Though BRPD personnel — including the police chief — cooperated with the study and gave a handful of interviews, Morse said he was left “disappointed” with the study’s findings or lack thereof.

“It leaves a lot more questions than it does answers. I wish I would have been communicated with a lot more than I was,” Morse said. “All of this talk, I think it’s just bad for law enforcement in general. It’s going to be bad for the Sheriff’s Office, and it’s going to be bad for us.”