Committee to look at BBPD
By Ken Grissom
Breaux Bridge – A blue ribbon panel of citizens, yet unnamed, will spend the next three months, in concert with the chief of police, the district attorney’s office and the city administration, figuring out how to fix the police department.
The committee’s report is due in October.
Mayor Jack Dale Delhomme said Monday, June 30, he hopes Chief Charlie Thibodeaux doesn’t take the action the wrong way.
Thibodeaux had no public comment when the council, after a 20-minute executive session with city attorney and state district court prosecutor Chester Cedars, unanimously voted to put the operations of the police force under independent scrutiny.
Cedars, who has been critical of the department in the past, appealed to all involved not to let hard feelings color their actions.
“You don’t want to shoot from the hip,” Cedars said. “Let’s make this a positive thing for the public.”
The move comes in the wake of a grand jury report slamming BBPD detectives for incompetence in a murder investigation, and immediately after the council voted to spend $100,000 this fiscal year on help patrolling the streets from outside police agencies.
Councilman Albert Menard was the sole dissenter in the latter move, saying the money would be better-spent improving the city’s own police force.
“If we pay (the sheriff’s office and state police) $25 or $30 an hour, it’s going to dump the morale of our officers who are making $10 an hour,” Menard said.
His motion in opposition to the contract “task force” died for lace of a second.
“Something has to change,” said Councilman Howard Alexander, who initiated both the task force funding and the oversight committee.
“We are paying over $600,000 in police salaries right now and both Albert and I are getting slammed and hammered every day by people in our districts demanding police protection,” Alexander said.
Thibodeaux said his 20-man police force is not large enough to pator the city.
“I’ve got two men on at night, and the other night we had four wrecks, people calling about break-ins – we had 13 calls altogether,” Thibodeaux said. “What are you going to do with two patrolmen?”
Despite salaries that are comparable with similar size cities, the Breaux Bridge Police Department has difficulty recruiting new officers, the chief said.
“They don’t want to come here,” Thibodeaux said.
Councilman Gary Champagne suggested he use detectives for patrol, but Thibodeaux said he would then have to pay more overtime – already a significant item in the budget.
The council said it hopes the extra $100,000 for the task force will cut down on the need to pay overtime.
A St. Martin Parish grand jury last month indicted Deraficus Wilfred Williams for second degree murder in the March shooting death of Clarence Hypolite Jr. but added to the report a stinking rebuke of the Breaux Bridge detectives for the way they handed the investigation, saying their work was “substandard, incomplete, and void of any semblance of professionalism.”