Homicides fell 35% in East Baton Rouge during first quarter, city officials say

Homicides in East Baton Rouge Parish dropped nearly 36% and nonfatal shootings 24% during the first quarter compared to last year, city officials said, marking a steady downward trend following years of record-shattering violence. 

“We are seeing real progress,” said Mayor-President Sharon Weston-Broome Thursday during a press conference by the East Baton Rouge Public Safety Partnership, a coalition of local law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and community leaders who have been working alongside the U.S. Department of Justice to reduce gun violence throughout the parish.

The news comes months after law enforcement leaders celebrated a 23% reduction in overall killings in 2022. 

“We’re not here to take a victory lap. We have a lot of work to do still,” Broome said. “There are too many instances of gun violence in our community, and we’re going to keep working, keep pressing together to improve outcomes and shift the culture of violence.”

Like many cities across the U.S., the murder rate in East Baton Rouge rose to unprecedented levels in 2020, with records kept by The Advocate showing that 114 people lost their lives to violence within the parish between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, breaking the preexisting record of 106 set three years earlier. 

The bloodshed continued into 2021 as the city-parish shattered its previous record once again, ending the year with a total of 149 homicides before falling to 115 in 2022, according to Advocate records.  

In one attempt to tackle the still-high murder rate, District Attorney Hillar Moore III earlier this year proposed legislation cracking down on auto sears, or “Glock switches” — devices that turn pistols into machine guns — after more and more of the deadly gadgets started popping up in local investigations. 

Moore noted that even though Glock switches are already illegal at the federal level, the proposed legislation would close a gap in current state law, which does not include language targeting them directly. 

“We think this bill is going to help us state-wide,” he said Thursday.

Still, Mayor-President Broome said the parish needs to “find the root causes” of violence in areas most affected by crime. Like law enforcement leaders, she pointed to a number of city-led programs she said have made immense progress in identifying and tackling those issues, including the Baton Rouge Community Street Team, which launched in 2021 with the aim of providing people living in high-crime areas more community-led support. 

Jazzika Matthews, Director of Safe, Hopeful Healthy Baton Rouge, a program under Broome’s administration that brings together organizations focused on community-based public safety, including the Street Teams Unit, said the number of people engaging in their communities has increased, contributing to the decline in violence. 

Through boots-on-the-ground efforts, Matthews explained, community-led organizations now can do a better job connecting people with much-needed resources, including mental health support. 

“There’s a lot of trauma that we still continue to see in our city around violence,” she said. “Individuals who might be perpetrators of violence, they also need mental health (resources).”

With summer fast approaching, Matthews said local anti-violence groups are already preparing to ramp up their efforts. 

Last year was the first in recent memory that East Baton Rouge did not experience an uptick in homicides during its hottest months. 

“Last year we actually experienced a downturn in violence, in part due to what organizations were doing on the ground,” Matthews said. “We were in neighborhoods every week all summer last year, just putting joy and hope and love into those communities. We plan on doing the exact same this year.”