Murphy Paul

CTL-E-6806 · Person · other · contemporary

PROVISIONAL evidence grade of this record

Murphy J. Paul Jr. was chief of the Baton Rouge Police Department from 2018 to 2023. A New Orleans native raised in the Lower Ninth Ward, Paul earned a criminal-justice degree from Loyola University, served three years with the Orleans Levee District police, and then spent more than twenty-three years with the Louisiana State Police, rising to lieutenant colonel with oversight of special and criminal operations. On December 29, 2017, Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome selected him — the only outside finalist — to lead a department eighteen months past the police killing of Alton Sterling and the retaliatory ambush murders of three Baton Rouge officers. He was sworn in on January 8, 2018. As chief, Paul built the department's Real Time Crime Center, presided over the administrative end of the Sterling case (firing Officer Blane Salamoni in March 2018), and, by the city's account, worked with the U.S. Department of Justice to close out the federal hiring-bias consent decree and secured a thirteen percent pay raise for officers; reporting during his tenure noted the Black share of the force rising from about twenty-nine to about thirty-six percent. He announced his resignation on July 12, 2023, and stayed through the fall while the city searched; his successor, Thomas Morse Jr., was chosen on December 21, 2023. A month after Paul's resignation announcement, the department shut down its 'BRAVE Cave' warehouse processing site after lawsuits alleged detainees were strip-searched and beaten there — a documented part of the department's record near the end of his tenure. A correction matters to this record: Paul was not Baton Rouge's first Black chief. Jeff LeDuff, a Black officer, led Baton Rouge police from 2005 to 2010, a fact LeDuff himself has stated on the record. After leaving office, Paul co-chaired the 2025–2026 transition team of Orleans Parish Sheriff-elect Michelle Woodfork.

Notes

Merged 2026-11-02 from the staged police chiefs packet (website/.build-work/scratch-v114/police/) under the GOV-006 founder gate opened 2026-11-02; the staged record is carried verbatim — no claim upgraded in transit (GOV-004). · Roles as staged: Police leadership — Chief, Baton Rouge Police Department (2018–2023) · Photo slot: HELD — No rights-clean image found on Wikimedia Commons across general and targeted passes.

Sources

• Wikipedia, 'Murphy Paul' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_Paul
• brla.gov — https://www.brla.gov/m/newsflash/home/detail/1154
• wafb.com — https://www.wafb.com/2025/01/03/jeff-leduff-hired-sid-edwards-administration/
• d3nqdp0e3r32g8.cloudfront.net — https://d3nqdp0e3r32g8.cloudfront.net/news/former-brpd-chief-to-serve-on-newly-elected-orleans-parish-sheriff-s-transition-team/

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