Lafayette sees the number of homicides decrease in 2024
LAFAYETTE, La. (KLFY) -- Lafayette police department said homicide numbers in the city decreased in 2024.
Paul Trouard, interim Lafayette chief of police, called 2024 a "great year."
“Over this last year, we've reported 18 homicides to the federal government. That is a reduction from the 29 homicides a year before,” Trouard said. “When it comes to homicide, there has been a national trend of violent crime dropping and to report violent crimes in the city and why it occurs and how it occurs is a complex social and economic factor to be determined in there."
Trouard gave three main reasons for the drop: An emphasis on recruiting, going after large drug dealers and using analytics to determine the needs of individual areas of the city.
“We did everything we could to put more patrol officers on the road, to have more officers proactively patrolling neighborhoods, responding to calls quicker,” he said.
Truards said he empowered the narcotics and street team to go after fentanyl, street level drugs, and large drug cases coming into town and weapons. He also empowered the precinct captains to go out and evaluate their precincts and see what's happening first-hand.
“The most calls of service have been in our Precinct 1 area, but each section of the city is different," Trouard said. "What happens in Precinct 1, which is the northwest corridor, might be different from Precinct 3, which is in the southeast, our southwest corridor. One area might have traffic. So we had our meeting today where we went over our areas of concern for the city and it's amazing to hear how each one has a different concern and how they're adapting and dealing with it and that's why each precinct has their own commander like their own portion of the city.”
He said there are three factors to running a police department: patrol, investigations and record-keeping.
“My record section is full, my investigative section is full. So we've been 100% patrol focused and we've been able to beef up the squads so officers can go to training and we can do proactive patrolling instead of reactive patrolling,” Trouard said. “We've said several times that law enforcement solving crimes isn't just a police function, it's a function of everybody. We have to have the community working with us."
Trouard said the community itself is helping fight violent crime.
"That's because of the public coming forward, because of our relationship with our investigative units, people coming in and talking," Trouard said. "You have to build those relationships to solve crime because we do it together.”
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