Elle Magazine Publishes Sharon Weston Broome’s Narrative, And The Result Is…

…more or less precisely what one would expect both from Elle Magazine and from Baton Rouge’s mayor-president.

Elle is hardly a hard-hitting journalistic outfit, so you wouldn’t expect a whole lot in the way of a journalistic interview of Broome – like asking what happened with Troy Bell, her botched choice for the city’s chief administrative officer. Or what she expects to accomplish with her running war against police chief Carl Dabadie. Or whether her choice to surround herself with people like Arthur “Silky Slim” Reed, Gary Chambers and Cleve Dunn is instrumental in creating more of the racial division she says has to be bridged in this town. Or what she’s doing about traffic, which other than crime is the worst problem in Baton Rouge. Or whether she’s the best friend the St. George movement ever had.

Instead, Elle just published an 11-paragraph monologue by Broome which addresses precisely no issues of interest to her constituents.

What we do find out from the “interview” is that Broome says she thought about being a cop at one point…

And here’s a little known fact about Sharon Weston Broome: When I was in my early twenties, soon after I moved to Baton Rouge, I applied to be a Baton Rouge police officer. I did. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t want to go in that direction, but the principle behind that was that I thought and I still think that being a police officer is a high calling. It means you want to serve, to help people. We need to live up to that.

The snarkier reactors to that claim have taken it to mean BRPD turned Broome down.

Otherwise, there isn’t a lot of substance here. It’s a lot of this…

The decision to [criticize the Alton Sterling verdict] was one of those leadership moments. There was some applause and there was some criticism that came with that. But after living in this community for nearly 40 years and after experiencing what happened last year and knowing that I had inherited a community that was still healing, with many feeling their voices weren’t being heard around that situation, I felt that I had to speak up. I got so many emails from people who said, “You gave me hope again,” and, “I’m so glad that you spoke up.” And no matter what, at the end of the day, I know I followed what I have believed in my heart was the right thing to do, and so I am at peace.

This came right after a paragraph about the importance of listening to people. It’s pretty clear that Broome is listening to some of the people but not others. If she was, she’d understand that leadership doesn’t mean calling a press conference to bitch about the Justice Department, and talking about racial issues doesn’t solve crime, traffic or corruption problems or grow an economy.

Talking about race is easy. Anybody can do that. It takes more than puff pieces at Elle to run a decent-sized city.

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