While in her early twenties, soon after she moved to Baton Rouge, Mayor Sharon Weston Broome tells Elle she took a shot at joining the police department.
“I applied to be a Baton Rouge police officer. I did,” she tells the magazine in a new interview. “Ultimately, I decided I didn’t want to go in that direction, but the principle behind that was that I thought and I still think that being a police officer is a high calling. It means you want to serve, to help people. We need to live up to that.”
Broome—who has called for replacing Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr. for months—also discusses police reform efforts in the interview.
“We have begun to take some steps here; we will soon be having implicit bias training for our police officers and our BRPD police department,” she says. “Earlier this year, we adhered to best standards and practices by establishing use of force policies within our department. And we’ve also implemented a dialogue on race in our police department. That’s where we’re going to start.”
Broome is profiled in the magazine as part of its weekly series highlighting women who have run successful political campaigns. The mayor says she sometimes feels underestimated.
“I think as you pursue higher office, you begin to encounter different obstacles as a female, and those, I encountered as a female and as an African-American female,” she says. “Because let’s face it—politics, for the most part, has been pretty much a male-dominated environment. And while there are certainly men who accept women as leaders, there are still some who wonder if a woman can govern effectively, if a woman has the business acumen that’s needed to be CEO of a city. I believe that there is heightened scrutiny that exists. That’s what we deal with.”
