GROWTH AND
EXPANSION
OF THE CADDO PARISH SHERIFF'S OFFICE
In
late 1939 Sheriff Hughes announced he would not seek
another term as sheriff. J. Howell Flournoy, son of
Sheriff James Patteson Flournoy, Hughes’ predecessor,
succeeded him. Flournoy, who would serve longer than
any other Caddo Parish Sheriff before or since, began
his 26 years in office on June 1, 1940.
Under Howell Flournoy, the Caddo
Parish Sheriff's Office came to be one of the most
highly regarded in the nation. His Office was ranked
among the best by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
and was often commended by J. Edgar Hoover himself.
Many of the skills Sheriff Flournoy
had learned in the Army were applied by him to his
office. His deputies were extensively trained in the
handling of all deadly weapons. Under Sheriff Flournoy
the first training in the diffusing of bombs was given
to specialists within the Sheriff's Office.
Sheriff Flournoy was a proponent of preventative law
enforcement and frequently lectured to students about
the importance of education and the perils of
delinquency. He also opened the Sheriff's Office's
and the parish jails to public inspection tours,
becoming the first sheriff to do this. Sheriff
Flournoy's focus on young people stemmed from his
personal philosophy that good citizens were made, not
born. His theories regarding these efforts were
published in a widely distributed booklet entitled
Winning Our Youth, which saw national
distribution in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Under Sheriff Flournoy's administration
the Caddo Parish Sheriff's Office was expanded to an
unprecedented level. In addition to its regular force
of nearly 150 highly trained deputies, by his tenth
year in office Sheriff Flournoy had over 500 volunteer
and auxiliary deputies available for emergencies. They
were thoroughly trained in first aid, firearms
handling, gas, and gas guns.
The Identification Bureau was
established in late 1940s shortly after Flournoy took
office. The Identification Bureau began the
fingerprinting of all prisoners brought to the jail,
keeping records of the prints on file using the same
classification system then employed by the FBI.
It was also during this era that the
second deputy to fall in the line of duty was fatally
wounded in the north Caddo Parish town of Belcher.
Will W. George, a deputy sheriff since 1926, was shot
in the stomach by Edward T. Krow.
The shooting occurred on May 21, 1945, as Deputies
George, W.H. Anderson and Cal Baines were arresting a
suspect for selling a stolen automobile. Krow, a night
watchman for several merchants, began verbally
castigating the suspect, accusing him of passing a bad
check, in addition to car theft.
Deputy George told Krow, who appeared intoxicated and
was waving his pistol, that the suspect was in custody
and that everything was under control. George then
instructed Krow to put his pistol away. Krow grew
angrier, telling the deputies to leave Belcher and
threatening to kill them if they did not. Almost
instantly, Krow raised his gun and fired on George,
striking him in the stomach.
As Deputy Anderson attempted to
retrieve his gun from the car, Krow began firing at
him as well, striking Anderson four times. Anderson
survived but George died three days later. Deputy
Baines finally succeeded in subduing Krow.
Just weeks prior to his own untimely
death, Deputy George was instrumental in the arrest of
Los Angeles fugitive Joseph Vernon Arenson, a
confessed mutilation killer who had eluded authorities
across the nation. George caught Arenson in Oil City
and he was detained in the Caddo Parish Jail in
Shreveport before being extradited to California.
By the 1950s the Sheriff's Office
Patrol Unit consisted of six marked and unmarked cars
manned by 11 deputies who maintained a 24-hour patrol
of the parish. All were equipped with two-way radios,
riot shotguns, rifles, first aid materials, and
various types of lights, rope, and other emergency
equipment. Sheriff Flournoy also appointed a dozen
resident deputies to cover the portions of the parish
in which they resided. Resident deputies were located
in Oil City, Vivian, Ida, Keithville, Mooringsport,
Belcher, Greenwood, Rodessa, Bethany, Springridge, and
Blanchard.
In May, 1956, the Juvenile Division of the Caddo
Parish Sheriff's Office was established. The first
head of this division was Captain George Wendell
D'Artois, later to become widely known as Shreveport's
Commissioner of Public Safety. Until the original
Juvenile Home (as the holding facility for juvenile
offenders annexed to the Juvenile Court was first
known) was completed in 1960, juvenile offenders were
detained in the parish jail. That same year, D’Artois
represented the International Juvenile Officers
Association at the White House Conference on Children
and Youth.
Several years later, while serving as Commissioner of
Public Safety, D’Artois was arrested by Caddo
sheriff’s deputies on a first-degree murder warrant
from East Baton Rouge Parish for the hired killing of
ad executive Jim Leslie. His arrest followed an
eight-hour standoff with deputies at D’Artois’ Spring
Lake residence. D’Artois died before going to trial.
Although in the 1940s and 1950s Caddo
Parish was a segregated community, Sheriff Flournoy
was the first Caddo Parish sheriff to appoint
African-American deputies to the force of the
Sheriff's Office. In that era the jail and juvenile
division of the Sheriff's Office segregated inmates
not only by gender, as is still done, but by race as
well. By 1957 the first five black Caddo deputies were
in uniform and serving in equal capacities to their
white counterparts. These first black deputies were:
Lieutenant A. W. "Jack" Walton, under whom were Buford
Norris (Civil and Criminal Department), Clinton Reeves
(Juvenile Division, Colored Section), Henry Bell
(Juvenile Division, school officer), and George
Birdsong (traffic officer).
Under Sheriff Flournoy the number of
jailers was expanded from two to eight, including one
female to supervise the women's facilities. All the
jailers were required to be graduates of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons' jailer's course.
During World War II the Sheriff's Office was
responsible for the parish's civil defense system.
Louisiana at this time was considered a prime
potential target for enemy attack. Of the handful of
parishes that ultimately put a civil defense program
into place, Caddo's was consistently recognized by the
U. S. and state governments alike as being among the
state's very best. Civil defense work included
scanning the skies for enemy aircraft 24 hours a day.
Were enemy planes to be detected, air raid sirens were
to be sounded parish-wide, alerting the public of the
approaching danger.
After the war's end the civil defense
program was continued in peacetime by the Caddo
Sheriff's Office as the Internal Security Organization
and in-service training program for auxiliary
deputies. By 1960 it had grown to include almost 1,500
members, three times the size it had been 10 years
before. The auxiliaries were also trained in defense
against atomic, biological, and chemical warfare as
understood at the time, mass disorder, riot and panic
control. Several auxiliary deputies additionally were
selected to receive special training in crime
detection and in the detection and prevention of
sabotage and espionage.
By the mid-1950s the Caddo Parish
Sheriff's Office had acquired high-tech emergency and
rescue equipment which included two airplanes, a
rescue truck, a trailer containing a five kilowatt
electrical generator, two motorboats, diving
equipment, and a wide variety of rescue equipment. And
in 1956, a special Aero Squadron with volunteer pilots
and planes was formed.
Volunteers also formed an amateur radio operators
squadron. The department also set up a short wave
radio station during the Flournoy era. The station
was initially equipped with a 250-watt transmitter for
contacting other stations or department automobiles
and other vehicles within a several hundred-mile
radius. Previously, radio communication had been
limited to very finite areas of operation and
transmissions were poor and easily drowned out.
Furthermore, radio communication of any sort
had been available for only a few short years at the
time the Sheriff's Office's station was established.
By 1958, the fleet of automobiles used
by the Sheriff’s Office had increased to 25 - more
than twice the number owned by the office a third of a
century before when cars first began to be widely
utilized by the Sheriff.
One vestige of previous sheriffs
maintained by Sheriff Flournoy during his days of
expanding and modernizing the Caddo Parish Sheriff's
Office was the Mounted Patrol. He also retained the
Sheriff's Office's stock officer, a post which
consisted of investigating livestock thefts,
impounding and disposing of livestock that had been
seized, and keeping the parish roads free of roaming
animals.
A new role undertaken by the department
was that of school crossing security. Originally, all
crossing guards were women and there was only one
exception to this early rule by the late 1950s.
On December 14, 1966, Sheriff Flournoy
died at Schumpert Hospital in Shreveport following a
heart attack. According to state law, the Parish
Coroner, Dr. Stuart DeLee, was sworn in to fill the
post of sheriff until an appointment by the governor
could be made. Tax collecting duties fell to the state
legislative auditor, J. B. Lancaster. DeLee and
Lancaster only filled the void left by Flournoy's
death for eight days before Governor McKeithen
fulfilled Sheriff Flournoy's wish that Chief Deputy
James Goslin become his successor. On December 22,
1966, Goslin was appointed Sheriff of Caddo Parish.
Among significant innovations during
the Goslin administration were the implementation of a
central purchasing system, revised book-keeping
procedures, the upgrading of the criminal records
system, and the complete revision of the office
insurance program to give better coverage at lower
cost. Additionally, Goslin set up a toll free
incoming telephone line for public use and a new
substation at Vivian to better serve the residents of
the northern part of the parish.
Additionally, the Sheriff's Office set
up its own training academy at this time, providing
classrooms for the training of personnel and an indoor
shooting range. He increased public education with
classes on narcotics and other drugs and their abuse,
self-defense training for women, water safety, and
student traffic and pedestrian safety programs.
The unfortunate loss of the third
deputy killed in the line of duty also occurred while
Sheriff Goslin was in office. On May 26, 1968, Deputy
Frank M. Normand was killed instantly when his patrol
car collided with a freight train at the crossing at
Flournoy-Lucas and Woolworth roads. According to
State Police reports, Normand's patrol car struck the
train, which had already crossed the poorly lit and
unmarked intersection. He was on his way to pick up
his partner, Mark Williams, when the wreck occurred.
One of the important milestones of
Sheriff Goslin's administration was the establishment
of a new parish jail, known as the Caddo Correctional
Institute, which opened in south Caddo Parish at
Springridge in 1971. The facility, which would serve
the parish for the next 25 years, replaced the old
facility on West 70th Street, which had been in
operation for 65 years. The jail was operated by the
parish Police Jury and employed correctional officers,
many of whom later became Caddo deputies.
Harold Monroe Terry, a longtime Caddo
Parish sheriff’s deputy who also served as Goslin’s
chief deputy, succeeded Sheriff Goslin in office.
Anyone who knew Harold Terry as sheriff will attest
that guns were his great passion. As a deputy under
Sheriff Flournoy, Terry ran the Junior Rifle Program,
which was set up by Flournoy to teach young people
marksmanship. He also served as Firearms Training
Officer and was in charge of the Sheriff's Office
pistol team
Sheriff Terry's tenure as sheriff was
marked by tight budget constraints and the unintended
reorganization of the Sheriff's Office's personnel
when almost half of the 150 deputies left, either
through retirement or resignation. Much of the blame
for the exits can be given to the financial crunch
experienced by the office at that time and to the
cutbacks it necessitated and the increased stresses it
precipitated. Those cutbacks included the downsizing
of the narcotics and criminal intelligence sections.
One of his first acts among taking
office was to implement a bid system for department
purchases. Sheriff Terry was among the first parish
sheriffs in Louisiana to voluntarily follow the same
public bid procedures required by law of all other
government offices but from which the Sheriff's
Offices of the state were then exempted. Sheriff Terry
helped lead the way to closing the bid exemption
loophole to avoid any future potential for mishandling
and to ensure that Sheriff's Offices state-wide would
be held to the same levels of accountability as other
offices involving the public's trust.
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