Louisiana Voice

I have written extensively about Louisiana’s sheriffs – on this website and in my book Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption. In fact, I have finished the manuscript for a sequel, tentatively entitled America’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption. In that book, I have taken each state alphabetically and related instances of corruption, malfeasance, theft, drug use, drug dealing, and sexual misconduct.

Along the way, LouisianaVoice has singled out several Louisiana sheriffs’ offices, namely Iberia, Terrebonne, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Winn, and Livingston for various sordid accounts involving deaths of inmates, drug dealing, illegal raids and arrests, and sexual assault against minors and animals.

Today, we add another parish sheriff’s office – Calcasieu – to our list and in the coming days, we will be taking a hard look at another, Ascension Parish.

LouisianaVoice has learned of the exodus of several deputies in Calcasieu, once the state’s second-largest sheriff’s department in terms of the number of deputies employed. At its peak, Calcasieu had 930 full-time deputies to patrol 1,063 square miles. Jefferson, with 1,409 deputies to patrol only 665 square miles, is the largest in the state.

With more than 441,000 residents, however, it has twice Calcasieu’s 220,000 residents. But the Calcasieu Sheriff’s Office (CPSO) patrols all the incorporated municipalities in the parish: Lake Charles, Vinton, Iowa, and Sulphur, whereas most sheriff’s departments patrol only unincorporated areas of a parish or county.

The parish nearest Calcasieu in terms of population and land area is St. Tammany, which has 1,124 square miles and 280,000 residents. That parish has 732 full-time deputies, nearly 200 fewer than Calcasieu had at its peak.

The problem is, deputies have been leaving CPSO in pretty large numbers – 23 in 2021 and 25 already this year. More are expected to resign this year as several have applied for positions at the petrochemical plants in the Lake Charles area and are waiting for calls from the plants

The reason: poor pay and low morale, according to one deputy who recently left the department. “Last year, I worked (private) security every day I was off and was barely able to clear $45,000,” he said. “My buddy, who doesn’t work security, and who has been at the CPSO for 10 years, made only $28,000 last year while some commanders in the department were pulling down $130,000.

“During Mardi Gras, every single deputy is required to work at least one parade but no one is compensated for it,” he said. No one is given extra time off and if you have a vacation or family event scheduled during this time, you have to cancel it or you will be disciplined. Lake Charles police, State Police and marshal’s office all pay overtime for working parades.”

He said captains and lieutenants in the department received pay raises of $15,000 a year before the Covid pandemic and before the hurricanes that devastated the Lake Charles area in 2020.

“The department as a whole went without a pay raise from 2006 until this month when everyone at the rank of sergeant and below got a $5,000 pay raise which in reality, amounted to a net of about and extra $150 per pay check,” he said.

He said deputies were assured by the CPSO administration that the sheriff’s office would see to the tarping of deputies’ roofs following the 2020 hurricanes since the deputies were having to work around the clock. “But that never happened,” he said. “Not long after the hurricanes, we found that they did have a tarping crew but that only the homes of administrative personnel were tarped.”

He said following those hurricanes, patrol personnel were assigned to schools in the parish and were left there, forced to eat food prepared by prisoners while administrative staff sheltered in the Laubege/Golden Nugget Casino-Hotel and dining on catered food.

He said Mancuso said some six years earlier that “we had a hurricane fund in the amount of more than $34 million for just purpose but when the hurricanes hit in 2020, we were told we’d have to wait for FEMA to reimburse the parish before we could get paid for our overtime work. “But Lake Charles found the funds to pay its officers for their overtime work following the storms,” he said.

He said now that Sheriff Tony Mancuso has announced that this is his last term, “his (Mancuso’s) cronies – and those they brought with them – are being promoted to ensure that they will get the full three years’ service at highest pay for retirement purposes.”

Deputies, like Louisiana civil service employees, receive defined retirement benefits based on a percentage of the three highest years average pay received on the job, so it benefits an employee to get promoted at least three years before retirement.

But it isn’t just the salaries for top brass that sticks in the former deputy’s throat. “The sheriff and several members of the administrative staff drive sheriff’s office trucks to Toledo Bend and to west Texas to their hunting camps on a routine basis,” he said. “They are able to do that because they had oversized fuel tanks installed on the vehicles and they fill up before they leave and the fuel lasts until they return to Calcasieu. And guess who pays for that diesel? The taxpayers of Calcasieu Parish.”

Patrol Commander Gene Pittman, he said, accepted $3000 from the FBI National Academy Graduates Fund following Laura when the funds were awarded to academy graduates impacted by the storms. “But he (Pittman) neglected to inform other academy graduates in the CPSO about the fund so no one else was able to receive that money, which could have really helped several hurricane victims,” he said.

“The road patrol at one time had 30 deputies per shift on patrol but now they’re operating with eight to nine deputies – if they’re lucky – for each of the four shifts per day,” he said. “Pittman has run that department into the ground. All he’s concerned about is the $75,000 swimming pool being built at his house and getting his wife a job at the sheriff’s office after she retired from the FBI.

“I love law enforcement,” he said, “but I’m fed up. I was a cop through-and-through but now I’m pursuing a career outside law enforcement. This is not a deputy problem. The deputies show up every day and do their jobs for next to nothing in pay. The administration has lost sight of what made this department so great.

“I never wanted to speak like this about a place I loved so much, but I care about the people I left behind and I pray something will eventually change. They’re not losing deputies because of the pay, but because of the leadership void. Deputies are deciding it’s not worth the stress and time away from family.”