New vignette begs end to elected police chiefs

 As if Louisiana policy-makers needed any more reminders of why every municipality should be rid of elected police chiefs, there is this story.

Last year, independent Michelle Lafont narrowly defeated incumbent no party Troy Dufrene for police chief of Golden Meadow. Dufrene had been appointed to a vacancy in 2020 and won the office later that year. He had served as a Lafourche Parish School Board member while employed with the Greater Lafourche Harbor Police for nearly three decades, where, interestingly, Lafont’s husband worked during that span.

Lafont had decided to run in the constituency of over 1,100 voters when she saw social media critical of Dufrene’s accountability launched by Republican Mayor Joey Bouziga, now in his seventh-plus term. This led to a confrontation between Dufrene and Lafont when he heard she was running to replace him, with him as the aggressor.

He reported no campaign expenses. She spent a couple of thousand dollars, mostly raised from her own resources. She was a school teacher who about 30 years ago had served for a brief time as a deputy sheriff. Bouziga backed her, and she ended up winning by 9 votes out of 789 cast.

Rather than get madder, Dufrene apparently got even. In the two months prior to her assuming office, he deleted on the departmental computer system all sorts of data, telling the small force to memorize records. By the time she took office, something on the order of 12 years of records were unavailable, although partially restored since. He since has been charged with felonies by the state Attorney General’s office. To add insult to injury, she was locked out of the chief’s office the day she took over.

In a system where the mayor appointed the police chief, whether confirmed by the city councilors/aldermen, it never would have come to this. Mayoral dissatisfaction with the chief would have led to the latter’s firing by the appointing mayor. One would hope that the mayor wouldn’t have appointed someone with that temperament, although the town council did in this instance to the interim post. And with termination, the fired chief never would have stayed on the job eight weeks to sabotage his successor, as the elected Dufrene is accused of doing.

Although Louisiana Revised Statutes has a number of exceptions written and that home rule charters overrides it, the governing statute 33:381 forces every other of the 304 municipalities in the state to have an elective police chief. Thus, the easiest solution is to amend out that requirement and have them all become appointive at the expiration of the current elective terms.

That doesn’t guarantee total absence of stupid actions on the part of a police chief anywhere in the state. But at least it would reduce the chances of such things happening. There’s no reason for state policy-makers not to act on this in time for 2028 elections.