BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – With Baton Rouge’s crime rate rising, what is it going to take to get more officers on the streets to keep families safe?
Officials believe it starts with keeping good officers already on the force and incentivizing them to stay with Baton Rouge Police Department and not shift to another agency.
For years, police departments in the Baton Rouge area and across the country have struggled to recruit, hire, and retain officers to fill their thinning ranks.
“Nationally, recruitment and retention has been a challenge for law enforcement agencies across America,” Baton Rouge Police Chief Murphy Paul said on Monday.
Chief Paul says right now they have about 100 vacancies within the department.
And over the last decade, the department averaged about 50 vacancies each year.
“And it’s not just officers, we have those same issues all across city government,” said Darryl Gissel, EBR chief administrative officer.
But is there a way to incentivize people to stay with BRPD or other first responder agencies across the city?
“It’s gotten very competitive when in terms of state police raising the pay for officers. So, we have people moving from one department to another. That’s been one of the issues we’ve experienced,” said Gissel.
An opinion from the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office supports a proposal by the mayor of New Orleans to help retain first responders there, using public funds for bonus pay
This could open the door for Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome’s administration to possibly do something similar.
“So this is one of the tools that we could use to help promote police pay to help retain officers. We’re also examining across the board pay raise. We’ve done two of those already,” said Gissel.
Back in 2020, the Metro Council approved those two raises totaling a 6% increase in pay across the board for police officers.
“It’s extremely important when we have a law enforcement agency here in our community. We keep good people employed to do this work, as long as they are able to do this work at a really high level,” said Lamont Cole, EBR Mayor Pro Tem.
But when it comes to another just downright pay raise for our officers, Cole says they’d have to crunch the numbers.
“Many of the council members both Republican and Democrat are always considering where the money comes from, what budget does the money come from in terms of providing the raise. If it were to come from the police budget, perhaps that is something we would look at. But I think more importantly we would look at it across the board,” said Cole.
The mayor plans to look at all of this immediately.
This comes as the 88th Basic Training Academy for BRPD is set to begin in a couple of weeks.
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