Mayor Lemoine says City Hall hopes to make changes in police department, city marshal operations inside city limits

    Recent events have brought unwanted and unflattering attention to the City of Marksville, but Mayor John Lemoine said he hopes the city will be able to emerge from the furor and take the necessary action to correct problems he says have been allowed to exist for years.

    In a televised interview with CNN, Lemoine was asked about allegations of corruption in Marksville.

    “Is there corruption?” he was asked. Lemoine said it depends on “the way you look at it,” but that he would say there is.

    He told the reporter that he was going to meet with Col. Mike Edmonson, superintendent of State Police, about his concerns with police operations in the city.

    “I said there was corruption because of things that have been pointed out in the past that were never properly looked into,” Lemoine said. 

    “I have been getting questions from so many stations,” Lemoine said. “I never thought that in a town of 6,000 we would ever have the media here that we have had this past week, asking about something as tragic as this.

    “All I can say is that this Rambo stuff has to stop,” Lemoine asserted. “I just hope it never, ever, ever happens again.”

    Lemoine said efforts by the City Council to make reforms have been hampered.

    He said the city government has had two major issues involving the operation of the police department. 

    One is with the Civil Service Board, and determining which police employees are covered by Civil Service and which are not. He said the Civil Service Board has overruled the City Council in efforts to address issues in the Police Department.

    The other issue is the funding feud between City Hall and City Court, which is the subject of a lawsuit filed by City Judge Angelo Piazza III. Lemoine said that ever since the district court upheld the city’s position that the Police Jury should be paying half of the court and ward marshal’s operating expenses, the Ward 2/City Marshal’s Office has expanded its duties to include police work inside the city limits.

     “I have never known in 63 years of living in Marksville a city marshal doing what this one is doing,” Lemoine said. He said the previous marshal said his duties were to serve warrants issued by City/Ward Court.

    “A case in point is what happened the other night,” the mayor continued. “The marshal’s office went beyond the scope of a ward marshal.”

    Lemoine said the city has 24 police officers “and I don’t understand why the ward marshal would want to duplicate the services we are already doing.”

    As noted in other reports, the city has requested an attorney general’s opinion about the marshal’s office law enforcement operations inside the city limits without permission of the City Council. The city has not received an opinion on that request.