The special meeting was set to approve the recent hiring of three patrol officers.
Chief Albert LeBlanc said in addition to approvals, the meeting will also give council members a chance to discuss ways to cut the amount of time it takes to get new hires on the line of duty during this shortage.
“We have such a shortage of police officers as it is, pretty much every place in the country,” LeBlanc said. “We really are happy that they’re willing to try to help us to try and get these people on the line as quickly as possible.”
Chief LeBlanc said they are currently borrowing those in other units to help with the shortage.
“We’ve robbed from detectives to patrol because patrol is really the backbone of the police force,” LeBlanc said. “So, if you don’t have patrol doing the everyday affairs of police work you have nothing. So, it’s been a struggle from the beginning and we’re at a bad point. “
Breaux Bridge Assistant Police Chief Terry Latiolais said the shortage is nothing new, and the department should have 14 officers on staff. Currently, there are only six.
“Right now we have six patrol officers,” Latiolais said. “Adding three will help us out really good because we’ll have so many more compared to what we have percentage-wise. 50 percent.”
LeBlanc said they have people in line but they must pass their screenings. Usually, a third to a half of applicants are rejected.
“It’s an intensive screening,” LeBlanc said. “We want good people there’s a lot of people we could hire but in Breaux Bridge, we want to have good people.”
He said current patrol police rotate covering night shifts.
“We don’t have enough people to have full shifts,” LeBlanc said. “But, in this particular case it got so low we use people on the day. People that work days are filling in for some of the missing people. This will help alleviate that and they’ll come back to do their day time jobs.”
LeBlanc said when we could expect to see these patrol offices if this is approved tomorrow by the city council.
“The post certified, in a few weeks. The non-post certified probably much longer. And not fully trained and ready to go to go until they go to post certification.”
The meeting will be held at Breaux Bridge City Hall on October 31st at 8:30 a.m. and is open to the public.
