Shreveport weighing new police headquarters in former Sears at Mall St. Vincent

The current SPD headquarters is in the former city hall. Its an old building and not in particularly good shape. The Shreveport City Council has been trying to come up with a replacement plan while the voters have rejected a couple of hundred million dollar bond issues that would have addressed it.

Their latest idea is to purchase and renovate the former Sears building attached to the still active Mall St. Vincent and renovate it at a cost of $33 million which the council says will be cheaper than building new.




Meanwhile the Shreveport Police Officers Association has come out and rejected the idea saying outright that spending millions on renovating a 60 year old building is putting lipstick on a pig and they deserve something new and state of the art.

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First of all, it’s way too expensive,” said Sgt. Michael Carter, SPOA president. “You’ve got a building structure that’s been there for over 50 years. It’s going to take you $27 million-$30 million to put lipstick on that building. That’s unacceptable to us. If you’re not going to buy a building that is fairly new, we deserve a new building.

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If you are going to ask the voters for hundreds of millions of dollars, include law enforcement in that package,” Carter said. “$240 plus million dollars and you’re going to give law enforcement $35 million? With $27 million of that going to remodel a 50-year-old building? That doesn’t make sense to us

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I was disgusted when I saw that statement from the SPOA. Frankly, $30 million seems to me like an exorbitant amount and when we're talking about $30 million in renovations, GTFO with whining about how old the building is. Its essentially 4 walls and gutting everything inside.

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