The Baton Rouge Area Chamber will help coordinate efforts to organize business owners determined to help address the city-parish’s violent crime problem.
BRAC President and CEO Adam Knapp met last week with members of the Alford family, which owns Benny’s Car Wash, and East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore, after Justin Alford expressed his determination to do something about crime in the wake of a road rage-related fatal shooting in the parking lot of his Benny’s B-Quik on Perkins Road in early June.
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The June 7 shooting led Alford to call on the city to do more to protect the community. As of June 1, East Baton Rouge Parish saw a record 71 homicides recorded at the parish Coroner’s Office—up from the previous record in 2020 of 47 homicides during the same period.
“This just has to stop,” Alford told Daily Report. “Speaking as a business owner, give us some direction. We’ll be willing to support anything but we have to stop this violence. It’s killing our community.”
Read on for more on BRAC’s efforts to gather input from the business community in this story from the June 17 edition of Daily Report. To keep up with Baton Rouge business and politics, subscribe to the Daily Report e-newsletter here.