The Bossier City Council graybeards may be gone, but the negative impact of their misrule will reverberate for years, even decades, a recent story about public safety demonstrates.
It seems a home security firm called Reolink published data from the first part of 2025 that not only establishes Bossier City as more violent crime-ridden than Shreveport, but also concludes by these metrics that the city is the tenth-most dangerous municipality in Louisiana. It reviewed Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting data for violent and property crimes. (It must be noted that the majority, but not all, of the state’s 304 municipalities complete the UCR, and that crime figures can vary dramatically in different parts of the same city.)
The numbers show that almost five percent of residents will endure a property crime, such as larceny, burglary, and automobile theft, while almost one percent will suffer a violent offense. Shreveport didn’t appear on the list. This outcome turns the argument on its head, often floated by city boosters in and out of office, that a reason to move across the river to Bossier City is it is presumably safer.
Actually, this isn’t news, only something the mainstream media finally is discovering. For years, as elucidated in this space, city crime rates have slowly been on the rise. And the problem has been the old regime spent too little on public safety because it had to pay off the massive amount of debt it rolled up to pay for a money-losing arena, a parking garage for a withering outdoor mall, an underperforming high-tech office building, and a $50 million-a-mile road shortcut.
The first big debt binge occurred in 2006-08, but which began to subside by 2013-14. But then another surge came that would peak in 2018 that shot up $151 million or over 50 percent more in debt spending that since has slowly fallen. Interest due followed suit, increasing by 2019 to over $19 million annually, up 20 percent. As of 2023 (last data available), debt stood at $413 million, or over $6,600 per capita.
But you didn’t see the same increase on spending on policing. In 2013, the amount was around $17.4 million. It hardly changed until a bump up in 2018 to almost $19.3 million where it increased slowly from there until a million-dollar bump pushed it to $21.7 million in 2023. That amounted to about a 25 percent increase in the decade.
The problem is, that didn’t even beat the rate of price inflation, which in the time period moved 34 percent higher. And the slight population decrease over the decade doesn’t offsets little of that difference.
This was reflected in the chronic officer shortages throughout the period, which fluctuated between the 12 unfilled positions in 2013 to the 14 in 2023, but ranged from lows of 4 in 2014-15 but a high of 26 in 2022. Earlier this month, the city claimed to have reached 99 percent staffing, which would imply back to just 4 vacancies.
Simply put, over the past decade low pay has discouraged hiring and retention, with officers receiving below-average wages compared to peer organizations, a compensation study revealed last year. And pay didn’t keep up because the city was throwing away so much on principal and interest to pay for its capital outlay boondoggles. Thus, fewer officers and general spending on public safety allowed crime to creep higher until surpassing Shreveport and producing a violent crime rate 66 percent higher than the state average.
While this year police received a salary boost, unfortunately it took the form of a risky plan to engineer it. This risk-taking is another product of the high debt levels leaving no slack that hopefully won’t send the city into another tailspin as occurred around 2008 – in part triggered by an enormous $215 million debt splurge in the previous two years that nearly doubled interest expense, up over $4 million annually.
Increased criminal activity is just one time bomb that has gone off from the graybeards’ reign. Bossier Citians will have bated breath hoping there aren’t any more (but don’t hold your breath this is the last of these).
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