There are people who will tell you that Republicans lost the mayorship of Baton Rouge because the city’s police department couldn’t catch Derrick Todd Lee before he’d harvested a not-small number of the city’s women for his sick purposes as a serial murderer. Lee’s rampage sent Louisiana’s capital city into an utter panic, and then-mayor Bobby Simpson was wholly inadequate to the challenge of stopping him.

Simpson and the BRPD were hindered more than helped, of course, by FBI profilers who turned out to be completely off-base in suggesting the killer on the loose was a white guy in a white pickup truck, which led to the fruitless harassment of hundreds if not thousands of plant workers and outdoorsmen as Lee killed again and again.

Of course, it ended up being a West Feliciana Sheriff’s Department deputy who ultimately cracked the Lee case. And in one of the greatest insults the community has ever seen, Lee’s attorney had him plead mental deficiency as a defense to the death penalty – meaning that the BRPD had been outwitted by a retarded man.

It was seen at the time as one of the worst debacles of local government that Louisiana has ever seen.

But now, two decades later, Baton Rouge is a far, far more dangerous city than even it was with Derrick Todd Lee roaming its neighborhoods looking for pretty girls to slaughter. We now rank #182 – out of 182 cities – in public safety. Our murder rate dwarfs even New Orleans.

And a case with a few similarities to those Lee generated stands out as a perfect example of just how inadequate Baton Rouge’s law enforcement is to the task of policing our population.

You’ll probably remember Allie Rice, the beautiful 21-year-old LSU student and part-time employee of a restaurant south of campus who was slaughtered at a railroad crossing on Government Street in the early-morning hours of September 16, 2022. The case gained national attention at the time, and it’s still fresh in lots of minds.

Which is ironic seeing as though the Allie Rice case has gone absolutely cold and the Baton Rouge Police don’t even have a lead.

What happened to Allie Rice, in the words of a witness, was reported by investigative journalist Kiran Chawla…

“I was bringing a friend home. When we got [to the tracks] on Government, the train was at a complete stop. Then two guys walked past my car. One of them was wearing dark clothes with long sleeves. [The other wore] a red hoodie over his head. They were both black males, mid 20’s, and both around 5’10 or 5’11.”

“At this time, [Allie’s] vehicle pulled up. I was going away from downtown (driving East) on Government, and [Allie] was coming towards downtown (driving West) when the two guys walked past my vehicle. The train was at a complete stop. They were walking through the train’s cars to get across the tracks. Then, not ten minutes later, I heard the gunshots.”

“I heard multiple gunshots, at least five to six or more, and after that, I could still see her car parked. As soon as the gunshots [started], she tried to turn around but stopped. I could not tell where the shots were coming from, but I knew they were very close, so I began backing out to leave.”

“The next morning, I saw (on the news) that someone had been found dead by the tracks. That’s when I [recognized Allie’s SUV as] the car I saw.”

Following the murder, the local cops posited a theory that it was a random carjacking. But it clearly wasn’t. If the murderers wanted her car they would have found a way not to shoot up the vehicle.

Another theory, one dismissed by the police, was probably closer to the truth – that this was a gang initiation. That killing a white girl was a ticket to membership in one of the myriad collections of criminal scum which dominate the northern half of Baton Rouge proper from the north gates of LSU’s campus to the old Cortana Mall to St. Jean Vianney, and Allie Rice happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time heading home from a bar in Mid-City.

Still again is a theory that this was an attempted kidnapping, as Baton Rouge is now one of the ten worst cities for human trafficking and sex slavery, and Allie Rice would have been a great prize for human traffickers. Street gangs, especially those connected to Mexican cartels (and there are multiple Baton Rouge gangs who fit that definition), are now the primary sources of flesh for the sex slavery trade in this country, even more so than the cartels and the migrants they control.

This is all going on without the Baton Rouge Police Department doing a damn thing about it.

Which isn’t an attack on the cops themselves, you understand. They’ve been utterly ignored by Sharon Broome, who has allowed that force’s morale and membership to sag terribly. BRPD doesn’t have the resources even to hold the line against the gangs growing in strength and activity, much less to shrink the murderous impact they have on Baton Rouge.

Which is why you see this. It’s a documentary on gang life in Baton Rouge (and in Monroe) which has almost two million views on YouTube in a month, and it is utterly sickening…

There is a septic culture which has set in among the people who live in a solid half of East Baton Rouge Parish, and it has turned the city into a living hell for those without the resources to escape it. We have our fellow Baton Rougeans living in fear and misery as a result of murderous gangs who now range out of their territory to engage in brazen violence – as was the case when a few gangsters decided to trade lead on Bluebonnet Boulevard in front of the Mall of Louisiana in broad daylight a couple of years ago – when they aren’t terrorizing their neighbors.

And the dirty little secret is that the “white flight” liberals decry isn’t really all that white at all; it’s the flight of productive middle-class citizens who don’t want to put up with this horror anymore, and it’s actually more pronounced and destructive in the black community than in the white community. You probably won’t see this elsewhere, but in the past 20 years as Livingston and Ascension Parishes have grown rapidly in population, the proportion of minority folks living in both parishes has also grown significantly.

Because what happened to Allie Rice, as shocking and outrageous as it was to see that beautiful girl dead in a hail of bullets from a couple of animals who were quite clearly members of groups like the ones depicted in that documentary, and almost surely carrying the same lifeless, reptilian stare in their eyes, wasn’t so shocking at all. One of the more depressing reactions to Rice’s murder was from black citizens in Baton Rouge who, though it was horrendously obnoxious to see, rightly noted that the nice white people in the southern parts of the parish finally cared about murders in Baton Rouge when it was one of their own, while a veritable holocaust is going on in front of everybody’s eyes in the blacker parts of the parish.

The equally obnoxious comeback, of course, is that it’s the leadership the lousy parts of town has chosen which is overseeing the holocaust and doing nothing about it.

We can have this argument, and we can tear each other apart over it. At the end of the day, though, what’s true is that leadership cannot continue.

Sharon Broome can’t be allowed to pretend away the murders of Allie Rice and so many countless others. She must be held accountable for eight years of mayhem in this city, on her watch.

And we have to make a change. Sid Edwards is her opponent in the runoff. He coached a high school football team to the state quarterfinals while running for mayor, which is a pretty good indication he’s a capable individual who can get things done. Maybe we should give him a chance to rebuild BRPD before the city drowns in the blood of more Allie Rices.

The election is Saturday.