Proactive Policing Push: City of Hammond Police Chief Edwin Bergeron Jr.

Welcome back, everybody.

This week we are joined by the Hammond Police Chief.

Chief Bajron, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

We're going to talk a little bit about everything, Chief.

This is not a scripted podcast.

I don't script out my questions.

You can see there's nothing in my hand.

But the reason I wanted you on is Hammond has always kind of become, especially for Livingston Parish, with the crime being bad in Baton Rouge, a lot of people in Livingston Parish, depending on where you are, they're willing to make that 20, 30-minute drive to Hammond to go to the Walmarts, to go to the grocery store, to go to Home Depot instead of going to Baton Rouge.

You feel safe.

Lately, though, it just feels like all we're seeing is crime, crime, crime, crime, crime.

So I wanted to get you to come and talk about what's going on in Hammond.

So listen, first off, I'll tell you is when you see something that happens in Hammond and it's a one-off, people, I mean, it's a shocker, right? I mean, we don't have the crime of a Baton Rouge.

We don't have that.

So when you have something that happens, people are like, oh my gosh, crime's outrageous in Hammond.

But when you look at the numbers, when you have a city that is growing the size that we are, you know, our daily population is over 100,000 every day because of the people coming through town and in and out of town with the university and everything else.

And we may have three to five murders a year.

None of them are random.

It's usually something specific, a target of domestic violence or something like that.

So when we do have things that happen, people are like, oh, my gosh.

Now, let's just talk about the location of Hammond.

I mean, we sit in between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

to the biggest crime-ridden cities that are around.

And look, no knock on anybody, but it's the truth.

And it's a daily fight for us to make sure that we keep our community safe.