Press Releases

(Alexandria, Louisiana) Two officers were provided pre-termination letters for their responses to three (3) unrelated calls for service the last weekend of July 2025.

The officers were placed on notice of the City of Alexandria’s intent to terminate their employment with the Alexandria Police Department (“APD”). The instances involved three distinct events. Each event—occurring within a 24-hour period— involved conduct that did not align with APD’s required standards, according to the APD Chief of Police, Chad Gremillion. To increase public confidence in the integrity of the result, by directive of the APD Chief of Police, each instance was turned over for further, independent investigation by the Louisiana State Police (“LSP”).

Procedural due process for public employees and specifically police officers entitle them to notice and the right to be meaningfully heard prior to termination. Officers of APD must receive the notice, be offered a hearing before the appointing authority’s designees, and be given appeal rights. The notice must spell out the evidence against the officers justifying any punishment, including termination.

WHAT HAPPENED AND WHEN:

Two officers were placed on administrative leave for actions of July 27, 2025, over a roughly 24-hour period. Leadership discovered the issue and began a review on July 29, 2025. The review did not arise from a complaint, but as a result of internal reporting systems used by APD whenever force is deployed. In this specific case, the interval of unacceptable behavior was brief (24 hours). Because of the Administration’s newly modified policies reviewing officer-citizen interactions in which force is deployed, the behavior was caught quickly. That is by design. Most importantly, senior leadership took immediate action also by design.

The Mayor and Chief Gremillion were fully informed July 30, 2025, and the Chief placed the officers on administrative leave on July 30, 2025.

“After reviewing the three incidents that I believed violated departmental policy, infringed on the civil rights of individuals, and potentially constituted criminal conduct, I referred the matter to the LSP Criminal Investigations Division. I trust they will conduct a thorough and independent investigation, and their findings will be turned over to the proper prosecuting authorities depending on what they find,” informed Chief Gremillion. “The instances were isolated and occurred over a short period. We reviewed past conduct over a significant period of time to ensure the behavior was, in fact, isolated. We must be accountable for our actions and we cannot accept anything but the highest standards of public service. It is extremely challenging that as we hire new officers we would lose officers, but substandard behavior is a threat to public safety.”

WHAT DID WE DO AND WHY:

1. After reviewing the documented events, per policy, Chief Gremillion requested that the Louisiana State Police, investigate the matter. The Mayor was informed by the two deputy chiefs of police of the events as required by executive orders issued by the Mayor and internal policies, outlining APD’s adherence to constitutional policing. On July 30, 2025, the Mayor reviewed all available video with the Chief.

WHAT WE WILL DO TO MAKE THIS RIGHT:

2. APD and the Mayor have commenced outreach to those victims involved in the three incidents. At this time there are no reported serious injuries; however, the attitudes exemplified, untaught tactics, and callousness by the officers are intolerable by APD.

3.The victims are two African-American males and a Caucasian. The two culpable officers are Caucasian. No racial slurs were made during any interaction leading to this discipline and no hate crime is apparent based on those factors.

4. After careful review the Mayor and APD concur the victims were neither engaged in any heated events nor had specific knowledge of special circumstances or dangers sufficient to constitute mitigating factors in deciding whether to punish the officers with discipline less than termination.

5. As a result of Executive Orders issued by this Administration and adopted by the APD, APD is aggressively incentivizing hiring while fully enforcing its zero tolerance of unconstitutional policing. While APD seeks new officers, it cannot tolerate unconstitutional policing or retain hires made without following this Administration’s standards—which are measurably different because of those Executive Both orders are necessary and make for a better department.¹

WHAT WE ARE DOING NOW IN SPITE OF CHALLENGES:

6. APD is covering zones, solving crime, making arrests, and has seen decreasing trends in homicides, violent crime, and property crime. APD is providing a separate report on these points of interest to maintain focus on the issue at hand.

•   Property crime January 1, 2022 – December 2024

• • • Vehicle burglaries: 11% decrease
    • Aggravated burglaries: 50% decrease
    • Unauthorized entries: 45% decrease
    • Felony thefts: 13% decrease
    • Overall property crimes: 12% decrease
    • Through June 2025 the property crime data continues to trend downward

•   Homicide and gun violence January 1, 2022 – June 2025

• • Gun-related Homicides: 60% decrease (through August, the number may fall to 47%-50%)
  • Non-fatal shootings: 41% decrease
  • Overall gun violence: 46% decrease
  • Overall homicides: 53% decrease
    • APD can report a 2024 homicide solve rate of 89%.

This period involves current administration policies and interventions beginning January 2023.

MAINTAINING TRUST:

As always, inappropriate policing adds challenges to properly acting law enforcement and becomes a danger to us all. Unconstitutional policing has profound effects on communities: erosion of trust and legitimacy, increases to social tension, diminution of cooperation, increased crime (especially through so-called street justice), and damaged relationships for all stakeholders creating a cycle of distrust. How do we maintain or rebuild trust?

1. Consistent with hiring difficulties faced by most American police departments, we are losing officers to discipline and retirement at a rate exceeding new hires. The current Administration has hired approximately 23 officers. However, we separated from service 36 officers over the same period due to termination, resignations or retirements in lieu of terminations, resignations, and retirements. Of the separations for cause, most officers were not hired under the standards of this Administration either currently or prior to December 2022. Accordingly, prior practices led to substandard hiring.

• Remind people not all officers are guilty of misconduct; use data and community support to show the good of APD and highlight how officers make a difference every single day. Do not minimize shortcomings, and show you take challenges seriously by your actions.
• In those cases in which additional time and investigation would not change the heart of the matter or conclusions, do not “sit on” the information “while a complete investigation” is totally finalized.
• Make the decisions and changes
• Hold supervisors accountable; learn from incident and implement better processes if necessary. If good process caught the issue (as appears to be the case, here), reiterate and retrain on it immediately.

This remains an active investigation, but we can confirm two things: the response to what is known was swift and based on clearly sufficient information to warrant the personnel actions taken.

We thank all our agency partners. The Mayor and Chief have made and will make themselves available to answer questions.

As a matter of transparency, the three incidents are described as follows:

1. Event One: Two officers arrive at a local motel July 27, 2025, on a disturbance call due to a “resident” playing music too loud and “disrupting others’ peace” in the motel. Officers make contact with the resident. He disagrees with them and, with minimal pushback, lawfully complies with all requests. The officers appear to manufacture the scenario in which they claim he batters one of them as he exits the room. Video evidence shown to the public does not support this claim. By reasonable inspection of the video evidence, the resident is compliant, minimally exhibiting frustration, carefully trying to exit through a doorway in which the officer apparently is standing to force a “touching,” and neither batters nor attempts to harm the officers. The officers threw away the residents’ important personal property needlessly, including his phone and DD Form 214 (Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty).
2. Event Two: The officers respond to a call at a facility dealing with mental health patients in which, in the light most favorable to officers, the two officers may have reasonably believed the facility was rioting or a unit was uncontrollable. Upon entering the unit, the situation was either deescalated or had been related initially to be more serious than was apparent on entry and investigation of the unit. Nonetheless, one of the two officers “dry stunned” a non-compliant patient with a taser who did not pose a threat justifying the deployed use of non-lethal force. The officers threw her through a doorway to the ground. In the circumstances the victim could have been scared or, more likely, minimally aware of what was happening. The force deployed was not required under the circumstances and was not made in good faith. The overall approach in the unit by the officers was needlessly escalatory under the circumstances.
3. Event Three: The officers responded to a call of a banned person refusing to leave a bar. The two officers seem to bait the banned individual into an escalated event from a deescalated situation. The man complied with officer commands at all When the man wanted to “see the K-9 unit,” officers incited rather than diminished curiosity with the K-9, ultimately taking the man to the ground and deploying unnecessary force.

Events One and Three were disclosed to the public by video with minimal editing of only language. Event Two is subject to multiple layers of legal privacy concerns.

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Contact:  Chief Chad Gremillion

Alexandria Police Department

OFFICE: (318) 441-6411