BATON ROUGE, La (BRPROUD) – Another street racing event on Easter weekend landed more people in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison.
As of Tuesday morning, two people were arrested and 20 others were issued citations for drag racing in the downtown area of Baton Rouge over the Easter weekend.
“We were able to make numerous arrests. People got charged and arrested for drag racing,” said Baton Rouge Police Department Spokesperson Sgt. L’Jean McKneely. “What people don’t know is, you can get in trouble for being a drag racing spectator so we made at least ten to fifteen of those arrests.”
This is a problem the metro council has created harsher penalties for those who perform or participate in roadway stunts in the past.
“Statistically the numbers are coming down, there are more arrests in this,” said metro council member, Aaron Moak.
But some leaders and people in the community are now calling on state lawmakers to address the issue.
“Taking it to the next step state-wise legislatively, I have actually met with a couple of people yesterday evening and had a little discussion about you know changing the type of arrest and penalties and things like that on a state level and bringing that down to our level also to where we can enhance ours,” said Moak.
Sgt. McKneely said the department agrees.
“It would be a benefit to us, it gives us more teeth,” said McKneely. “It would be an additional help if we had something on the state level that would increase maybe the fines or they be penalized on their driver’s licenses for causing disrupting behavior in the community.”
“As far as I’m concerned you can take away their driver’s license, take away their car for a substantial amount of time that actually has them sitting on the sidelines wondering, I should never do this again,” Moak said.
If you have any information that can help the police, call Crime Stoppers at 344-7867 (STOP).
Leave a Reply