By Jeff Adelson
New Orleans, La. — The superintendent of Louisiana State Police promised to push for more troopers on the north shore and better coordination between state and local agencies during a visit Tuesday to St. Tammany Parish.
Col. Michael Edmonson, appointed to head the State Police and the Department of Public Safety by Gov. Bobby Jindal earlier this year, praised the work of troopers as he explained a vision for a more decentralized agency that provides greater flexibility to local troop commanders while encouraging better cooperation with parish sheriff’s offices and police departments.
“Not only does the public expect us to work together, they demand us to work together,” Edmonson said as he addressed about 50 law enforcement officers in State Police Troop L’s headquarters near Mandeville. Edmonson stressed the need for State Police to be proactive and visible in the community. The presence of units on the road can cut down on the number of serious accidents and traffic violations, a theory that has encouraged the department to reassign some troopers previously assigned to desk duties, he said.
“Our emphasis is putting people back in the troops,” Edmonson said.
But such a presence requires an increase in the number of troopers on the road, a problem for an agency that has had to call on agencies such as the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office to help with patrols in recent years.
Studies in the past four years have suggested State Police may need to more than double its traffic enforcement staff to meet the needs of a growing population and increases in crime and the amount of highway traffic.
A 2004 report by the agency called for 77 more troopers in the traffic division. The report suggested 20 of those troopers be assigned to Troop L, which covers St. Tammany, Washington, Tangipahoa and St. Helena parishes. Troop L’s allocation would be more than twice the number that would be assigned to any other troop.
There are now 55 troopers, including 14 lieutenants and sergeants, who work traffic enforcement in Troop L, Trooper Louis Calato said.
A 2006 report, noting that only 420 troopers were assigned to traffic enforcement statewide, called for hiring 250 more troopers statewide.
A bill before the Legislature would add 50 troopers statewide, said Dale Hall, Edmonson’s chief of staff. The department plans to focus the additional troopers in areas on the Interstate 10 and Interstate 12 corridors, Hall said.
“We’re really not going to take a one-size-fits-all approach to this,” Hall said. However, such an approach will likely require support of local agencies in those areas to persuade lawmakers not to pull for more troopers in their constituencies, he said.
Edmonson also called for greater inter-agency cooperation on two levels. First, he argued State Police should help local agencies make up for shortcomings in their own funding or training by using federal grants or state facilities. In one case, Edmonson said he worked to help buy radios for a small police department whose chief told him that any new equipment would have had to come out of his salary.
More broadly, Edmonson promoted an initiative to combine the state’s sex offender registry with records held by parish sheriff’s offices. To illustrate the drawbacks of the existing system, Edmonson noted that state officials were unable to find addresses for 600 to 800 sex offenders in a recent search of their database but were able to narrow that list to fewer than 100 names after combing through parish records.
Creating a single, statewide system was first proposed five years ago but was never implemented, Edmonson said. The new program is expected to be complete within a month, he said.
A similar project, which would make criminal records more readily available to departments statewide, is also in the works, he said.
Edmonson’s efforts on these issues received praise when he discussed them with the heads of several public safety agencies in Troop L’s coverage area Tuesday afternoon.
“The things you have done in a short period of time have been things we’ve fought for years to do,” St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain said.
In addition to his new programs, Edmonson called on troopers to take additional steps to reach out to the community, through efforts such as reading to schoolchildren.
“The true worth of a man or woman is what they do every day for people who can do nothing for them,” he said.
Copyright 2008 Times-Picayune (New Orleans)