LPSO special unit plays the crime game

It was on the fourth stop that someone offered a verbal vindication of their work.

“That’s the best police you can ever find, right here,” the advocate says. “You want me to tell you something? I respect them more than any other police I see. My best, best buds.” 

Moe Nassar, who emigrated from Jordan to New Orleans, owns a New Orleans-style po-boy restaurant in Raceland. He’s speaking in reference to Sgt. Richard Reidel and Deputy Derek Champagne, the two-man crew that makes up the Lafourche Parish Sheriff Office’s Proactive Policing Unit.

For Nassar, the PPU offers stability, even if it is fleeting. On a nightly basis, he deals with loiterers, the worst of whom are young, carefree and get a sense of victory from staking claim to the restaurant’s parking lot when the sun sinks below the horizon. 

Some will beg for money and some will drink booze; some will play loud music and some will curse; and as a whole, they drive away business.

“[Loitering] can hurt a business because they beg for money,” Reidel said. “If you’ve got people who ain’t from here who are stopping, say to get gas, it could be a bit intimidating for somebody who’s not from the area to see the drinking out there. … It gets a little rough in this area.” 

“They have sh—y-a-s people over here,” Nassar said. “When [Champagne and Reidel] are in this area, I don’t worry about nothing, because they handle their business.

“When they come here, my best customers come here. When [customers] see the police protection and all that, they come here. They’ll be safe. One thing they know, Derek and Richard are here, that’s it, you can forget about everything.”

It was on the fourth stop of their shift, excluding a detour to the Lafourche Parish Detention Center to book a woman for an outstanding contempt of court warrant that someone testified on their behalf and offered a tangible benefit of the PPU’s efforts.

But that’s not to say the PPU’s impact was not otherwise evident. No, the aforementioned arrest, the officers’ banter with previously arrested and perpetually suspected residents, tips of criminal activity from familiar passer-bys and a phone call from a recently acquainted source were all versions of involuntary testimony on the PPU’s forged network, all gleaned during a four-hour ride-along with Champagne and Reidel.

As the sheriff’s office patrol car No. 181 comes to a halt in the E-Z Serve convenience store parking lot, Reidel forecasts the next event as if it’s scripted. 

“You see everybody’s out drinking,” he says, pointing to a group huddled on the right side of the convenience store. “They know they ain’t supposed to, so watch, they’ll start scattering as soon as we walk around the corner.”

If Reidel sounds like he’s seen it all before, it’s because he has served in a similar capacity for much of his career. The 12-year law enforcement veteran was on the sheriff’s office Problem-Oriented Patrol (POP) Squad before he relocated to Chattanooga, Tenn., in 2008. He returned in 2010, and the POP Squad was reformed and renamed as the Proactive Policing Unit in October of last year.

The Raceland quick stop is positioned “between the (La. Highway 182) bridges,” on La. Highway 1, and in the center of one of the PPU’s frequently targeted locations. Reidel says the area is referred to as Greentown, a moniker designated to the zone because of one of its most prominent streets, Greenville.

The duo walks around to the left side of the building, where there are more loiterers drinking beer. Champagne makes a beeline toward one, who the officer would later say he hadn’t previously met, and asks for identification. Drinking an alcoholic beverage in public gives the officer the right to run the man’s identification card and scan his file for arrest warrants.

In the meantime, Reidel socializes with the other beer-drinkers. He recognizes the faces, knows the names and knows they’re clean. He wants to be personable, in case they have information they are willing to part with, now or in the future, that can help him in another aspect of his job. 

“We know everybody around here, for the most part,” Reidel explains. “We know them by name, nickname, or by face or something. We’ve dealt with them one way or another or spoken to them or something.”

Once Champagne learns the newly met man has no outstanding criminal offenses, the duo tells the group to leave the premises. Loitering, after all, hurts the business, which is co-owned by Nassar and his brother.

By the time the PPU walks to the other side of the building, Reidel’s prophecy has come to fruition and the other group of drinking men is gone. “One or two of them probably had warrants,” he surmises.

The PPU walks inside and purchases a couple of 20-ounce energy drinks. They talk to Nassar’s brother, who only wants to be identified as “E.” Visibly shaken, E doesn’t talk much because he doesn’t want to be perceived as working with the police. 

On the right side of the patrol car, in a white truck parked in the E-Z Serve lot, Champagne spots a woman in the passenger’s seat holding an uncapped bottle of Bud Light. He points this out to his partner. “We’ll catch them when they leave,” Reidel responds.

The Proactive Policing Unit, to someone without a clear understanding, might seem like a couple of up-tight cops who prey on petty crimes. Champagne will say even judges shake their heads when they see some of the offenses, sometimes as banal as riding a bicycle at night with no headlight, on the docket sheet.

To a large extent, the petty-crime watching is true, as the PPU watches for activity designating probable cause to question potential troublemakers. Among a multitude of other offenses, the unit keeps an eye out for juveniles in public past curfew, a vehicle’s tag lights and sagging, baggy pants, which is outlawed by a parish ordinance.

For the most part, the minor violations that are detected are discarded, but in the case of an executed arrest warrant, the minor crime is often the facilitator. 

“The criminal element should be forewarned, if you think criminal charges are a joke, you are sadly mistaken. If you have a warrant for your arrest, we will find you and you will be held accountable by the system,” Sheriff Craig Webre said in a printed release regarding the PPU.

As of the day of the ride-along, June 10, the PPU had made 340 arrests, including 36 DWIs, and had confiscated 19 weapons since it was reconceived, more than any other team of officers.

Patrol Capt. J.P. DeGravelles said the department designates areas of high criminal activity through the LEDS computer system and statistic-based analysis. 

Once the crime markers, often theft, burglary or unexecuted warrants, become abundant, “the logical thing is go grab the people with the warrants,” he said. “If your issues continue, then obviously it’s not the people you picked up, so it leads you in a whole other direction. You can almost call it a process of elimination. But [the PPU] has the time to do that.

“The idea is, let’s face it, if you arrest 10 people, there’s 10 people waiting to take their place. It’s a constant chess match. We have to keep up the pressure on our end.”

Gaining the trust of a neighborhood’s residents, who often can point officers in the right direction despite not being directly involved with criminal activity, is attained by results, repetition and rapport. 

“It’s showing them you’re not just there one time,” Reidel said. “It’s a give-and-take kind of deal. Rapport definitely helps. When you start doing that, say you start clearing the warrants, people see. They know you’re good people, and your bad guys, they know, ‘Man, they’re coming,’ because they all talk. They’re all in the same network.”

Even when the officers do let the minor infractions go with a warning, the PPU feels like it has achieved a minor victory through dialogue with another person, a field interview and the subsequent broadening of the PPU-contact network.

That network, Reidel said, has proven helpful with a potential solution to one of the sheriff department’s recent high-profile unsolved cases, a crime that happened to be witnessed by he and his partner. 

While the PPU was patrolling the Thibodaux area in the early morning hours on May 5, a four-door pickup truck sped past and only increased its speed as red lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Patrol car No. 181 followed, at least until the truck left the road at 80 miles an hour and left the unit in a cloud of dust.

“They got lucky and hit a cane road,” Reidel recollected. “I stopped because the dust flew and I’m not … for nobody. I’m not getting in a crash.”

Although the suspects (three of the truck’s four doors were found open) got away, police located a .40-caliber handgun that had been reported stolen in Terrebonne Parish in 2009, shell casings and burglary tools. The truck had been reported stolen from Gretna three hours earlier. Reidel said he’s sure the suspects live in the Thibodaux area. “I can almost guarantee it,” he said.

Are the car chases as plentiful and as exciting as portrayed on a television show?

“We don’t like them, believe it or not, as much as people may think,” Reidel said. “They happen, though. People obviously take off, people with warrants or people who have drugs or weapons in their cars. … I don’t want to say it’s all the time, but more than what we would like because it’s definitely a safety issue with them and us. 

“Now the foot chases are quite often,” he continued. 

Champagne, who Reidel referred to as “the chaser,” drove home the point. “Very often.”

The 35-year-old woman in the backseat is hysterical. Her temperamental tone teeters from tears to laughter and from pleading to cheerleading, often in the same breathless sentence.

Her arms cuffed behind her back and her face inches from the barred separator in the patrol car, the words roll off her alcohol-addled tongue and out of her mouth like an unabated geyser. She leans forward as if her pitch couldn’t carry through the cramped quarters of a cop car.

“Arrest criminals. I’ve just got a missed court date, brah,” she says. “I was going to do it. Don’t make me feel bad.” The tone of her voice shifts from playfully abrasive to a meek derivative by the time she finishes her idea.

It’s a 20-plus minute ride to the Lafourche Parish Detention Center from Greentown, and the woman details her plight for the duration of the journey. 

She became aware of her warrant for disturbing the peace last night when she was questioned by officers in an unrelated case … She was going to pay the fine on Monday … Her lack of anxiety medication led her to turn to beer that day … She hates the back seat … Jail is not her thing … She swears that she’ll never drink in a vehicle again … She’s not a bad person … If she sees crime, she’s calling the PPU … They get s—t done … She’s not trying to suck you’re a— … Please don’t take her to jail.

She says she called Lafourche deputies to her residence the previous night, because some of the knuckleheads in her neighborhood were shooting Airsoft Guns at one of her sons. When the deputies arrived, they checked her for warrants and found a $500 contempt of court violation. 

The police made her aware of the warrant and told her to pay the fine, on a Thursday night, and because she couldn’t identify the alleged shooters, they were also let off with a warning.

“They might not have felt like dealing with you,” Reidel says jokingly of why she was not detained less than 24 hours earlier. 

“We’re the PPU,” Champagne adds. “We take everybody to jail.”

“Well, what was last night, the F— That Police Unit?” the woman responds. “I had the F— That Police last night, and [the knuckleheads with Airsoft Guns] shot my child. …They should have went to jail.”

“That’s part of our job,” Reidel says, emphasizing the point that the PPU actively looks for arrests.

“I respect that. When I call, next time, I’m going to ask for, what was that? The PPU. …Oh I’m serious, I’ll call you. Y’all are going to have me like a police dog.”

Patrol officers have discretion on whether or not to execute arrest warrants in some cases, but this was not one of them. When Champagne punches the woman’s name into the computer system, her file indicates that she is to be detained.

The woman’s arrest stems from an altercation with two juveniles. She says she was protecting her son, who was jumped. “They’re bad-a— kids,” she begins with a quick tempo. “They jumped my son, and I jumped in and I was fighting back with them. But my son never hit them. Because I wanted to press charges, it had to be pressed all the way around. 

“That’s why I’ve got a warrant,” she says feebly. “Because I wasn’t going to let nobody f— with my son. … Y’all think I’m crazy.”

Champagne and Reidel tell her they don’t think she’s crazy, but they do know the kids who she claims jumped her son. 

Once the patrol car reaches Thibodaux, Reidel points out a familiar face. A black man with dreadlocks, someone the PPU arrested last week, walks along a cane field. They point him out and carry on.

The woman in tow eventually gets around to telling the PPU of a suspected cocaine user. There is evidence in his house in the form of needles, which he uses to shoot up between his toes, she says.  For all the comedy of a rambling woman in the backseat of a patrol car, it becomes apparent that there is no shortage of substance in the trip to the Detention Center.

One of the PPU’s daily goals is to convince residents it is there to help clean up the neighborhood, and a seemingly petty arrest reinforces the notion with the concerned mom-turned-arrestee that the unit is motivated and it is afforded the time to handle cases that could be construed as mundane. She calls the PPU the friendliest police she’s dealt with. “I’m not going to lie to you; they’re good guys.”

She also introduced a new name to the PPU, and although the unit won’t beat down his door in the next couple of days, the revelation does add another blip to the radar. 

“He’s good at getting people to open up,” Champagne says about Reidel, and he adds that Reidel has drawn multiple confessions from the backseat of a patrol car, where every word and action is recorded.

Champagne and Reidel are like celebrities in the Detention Center’s booking office. The officer in charge of handling the paperwork greets them with respectful familiarity (“Already at it”), and as they get set to embark on the road for in a quest for more arrests, she sends them off (“I know you’ll be back”). The duo said it averages five arrests per shift.

Champagne shoves open the rear passenger door, jumps out and tears down a narrow road in Thibodaux’s Marydale Subdivision. He quickly disappears behind a series of trees and residences, just as the teenagers he chases did a moment before.

Reidel exits the vehicle and hustles the length of a driveway. He picks up a camouflaged bucket hat and four dollars. The suspects Champagne fruitlessly pursues had been throwing dice, gambling on the concrete slab in a public place, and they bolted as the patrol car screeched to a halt. 

When Reidel returns, he radios Champagne and drives around the corner to locate his partner. He peers into an abandoned trailer, and is joined by Champagne, who rests his right hand on his handgun. The two take note of the trailer’s graffiti-covered walls and see neither of the fleeing gamblers.

One hundred yards beyond the abandoned trailer, however, sits a group of teenagers, one of whom dons a camouflaged bucket hat. Champagne takes charge, and searches a hatless male on the hood of the patrol car, while an irate female barks out orders to others, “Go get Mom.” 

Reidel soothes the tension with quick, disarming smooth talk. He uses first names, and pretty soon, everyone is chuckling. Then, the dreadlocked black man from the cane field walks up. “I saw you pass,” he tells Reidel, and he smiles. 

Throughout the evening, when Reidel would explain the PPU’s purpose and its mechanisms, he continuously came back to one word, rapport. It was obvious at multiple times during the ride-along that this was not an exaggeration. 

When the PPU caught a young adult who had spun a doughnut in his champagne-colored Chevrolet Suburban later that night, Reidel knew what buttons to push. He asked him the cost of his tires … “Four thousand dollars, and you’re going to lay them down on the road?” he asked, appearing incredulous.

Moments later, the young adult admitted his fault, and Reidel scribed a ticket for careless operation of a vehicle. With an admission on record, and a witness’s statement, the ticket is airtight. 

Prior to joining the patrol unit, Reidel worked in narcotics. That’s where he says he picked up the “street” mannerisms. 

It’s hard to overstate the importance of communication between the PPU, and really, all police officers, and the communities it patrols. It takes more than words. It’s tone, and it’s mannerisms. It’s about setting examples and maintaining a sense of rationality. It’s using first names, and occasionally, it’s a little leniency.

Capt. DeGravelles referred to crime control as a chess match. It’s clear to anyone with a pulse that criminals and police officers are inherently at odds and crime will never cease to be, but the game within the game, the manipulation of perception, is riveting. 

Meanwhile, in Marydale, Champagne calls to Reidel and displays a pair of dice to everyone gathered. It appears they caught one of the gamblers, at the very least, and Champagne would later say he was certain the male he searched was one of the two who fled the scene. 

But when the file comes back without a warrant flag, the PPU says its goodbyes and continues on its shift. As they drive out of the subdivision, Champagne and Reidel rehash the situation. 

Back on the stoop in front of the house where one man wears a bucket hat, they are undoubtedly doing the same.

Deputy Derek Champagne (left) and Sgt. Richard Reidel load up their patrol car prior to their shift. The officers patrol high-crime areas in a quest to execute arrest warrants, develop a rapport with the communities and confiscate weapons. ERIC BESSON