Gov. John Bel Edwards will appoint interim State Police Col. Kevin Reeves to the permanent position, The USA Today Network of Louisiana reports.
Edwards will officially announce the appointment during a press conference later today.
“I’m certainly honored by the trust and confidence the governor has placed in me,” Reeves tells the USA Today Network. “I look forward to working with him and the Legislature and the citizens of our state to move forward in a positive direction. We want to move State Police forward with a sense of transparency.”
Reeves takes over following a scandal involving questionable travel by some troopers at the taxpayers’ expense that led to the retirement of longtime Col. Mike Edmonson. The new colonel says he welcomes the scrutiny, adding the results of an internal investigation into the matter “will come sooner than later.”
“We look forward to taking any findings and applying them to make State Police a better agency moving forward,” he says.
Edwards named Reeves as the interim in March, but his appointment created an ethics dilemma because existing law prevented Reeves’ son, a State Police cadet, from serving in the agency with his father as the boss.
