The Baton Rouge Police Department has stepped up its communications and sensitivity training in an effort to make officers more aware of cultural diversity and respectful of those they interact with on the streets. At Tuesday’s Downtown Development District monthly meeting, Chief Carl Dabadie said he is trying to “continuously change the culture of the Baton Rouge Police Department.”
“The days of coming in with sticks and beating people is long gone,” Dabadie said. “That culture has changed. We’re trying to be more a community-based department.”
Asked later to elaborate, Dabadie explained that officers have undergone training in communications over the past several months to learn to be more compassionate towards victims and witnesses.
“We want to be more engaging and be more in touch with the community,” he says.
This year officers will also receive training in cultural diversity as part of their regular, periodic in-service training seminars.
“We’ve done this before but it’s probably been two or three years,” the police chief says. “So this is a refresher and a way to teach the importance of respecting people for their culture and just respecting them in general.”
The BRPD’s focus on improved communications and diversity training comes six months after a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, killed a black teenager, setting off weeks of race riots and a national debate about law enforcement tactics in the inner city. Dabadie says the situation in Ferguson played a role in the BRPD’s new training initiative, but that some of the courses were planned before the incident and subsequent controversy.
“We have a lot of areas we need to train in,” he says. “We just don’t have the time to do everything every year.”
As reported on Tuesday, BRPD is also planning to double the number of officers at its downtown precinct.
—Stephanie Riegel
