SATIRE-APRIL FOOLS
Police departments across the country have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on police misconduct. The Legal Defense Fund (LDF), a non-profit database which tracks police brutality and misconduct settlements, estimates that since 2005, approximately $2,340,780,094 has been spent on such cases. Louisiana hopes to address this issue by introducing a new policing force of mutant bees.
One of the biggest contributors to that total is New York City who according to LDF, spent $945,200,000 on police settlements between 2010 and 2019. But police misconduct has been costly for Louisiana as well. In 2016 alone, the New Orleans Police Department spent $13,300,000 on a single settlement involving police brutality during Hurricane Katrina. And in 2021, Baton Rouge settled for $4,500,000 in Alton Sterling’s police misconduct case; Sterling was a Black man wrongly shot by an officer outside a convenience store.
Jeff Landry, Republican governor of Louisiana hopes to crack down on crime during his term with longer sentences, more executions, more officers and more state troopers. One recently proposed law would eliminate parole for all those arrested after August 1st of this year.
With more funding being given to both local and state police, the governor has a tough challenge ahead of him: how will he expand police activity while also preventing innocent people from being harmed or killed by officers, and more importantly, the state from being sued?
In an interview with The Vermillion Newspaper, Landry answered that very question.
“Crime is the number one issue on voters’ minds here in Louisiana, now we’ve had countless governors who were tough on crime who threw more funding at police departments without making any real systemic change, watching as the crime rate only climbed. My administration hopes to do something different and revolutionize policing at its core with a completely new kind of officer, this is what we hope to usher in with Operation Sting.”
Last week, Landry announced the revolutionary policing program and the state’s partner, the Techno Cosmic Research Institute (TCRI). TCRI was established in 1984 as an organization focusing on genetic research and animal mutation and came under controversy during its founding due to allegedly mutated turtles being found in Abbeville where one of their labs is stationed.
Operation Sting is the latest iteration of the company’s cutting edge research and can best be explained by the research director, Dr. Cynthia Ultrom.
“When searching for candidates for their force, what do police departments look for? Loyalty! Fearlessness! And of course, obedience! Now humans are good at these things, sure, but no member of the animal kingdom embodies these three qualities better than the American Honeybee. Which is why with our mutagenic ooze we will finally create the perfect American police officer!”
These new officers known as Louisianian Mutant Police Insects or LMPIs will be made by taking male honeybees, submerging them in TRCI’s mutating ooze, which will not only give them a more human shape and size but reasoning and intelligence proportional to a bee of their size, making them more than a match for the average police officer.
Unlike wasps, bees can only sting a single time, for once their stinger pierces their target it cannot be removed without also pulling out the bee’s vital organs, leaving them dead in mere minutes after stinging a target.
In other news, Jeff Landry is also proposing a new bill which will make it illegal to sue a police officer for misconduct if the officer dies in action.
The fiercely loyal attitudes and short lifespans of these “bees in blue” are also quite appealing to the governor. In the event of misconduct, the paid suspensions for these officers will be exponentially cheaper. And with their instinctual urge to stay with their hives, paying for their retirement will no longer be a concern.
Landry hopes to implement LMPI hives across the state, but reassures currently mammalian officers that their jobs are secured, as in a couple years, TRCI’s mutant hybrid program will be complete. Operation Sting’s pilot program, Hive NOLA, will involve the deployment of 400 Louisianian Mutant Police Insects in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter in order to control the crime that threatens the city’s greatest source of income.