BATON ROUGE — The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office on Thursday announced the creation of a new unit that will target gangs responsible for a large share of violence in the community.

Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, at a news conference, said the operation would be called the Gang Intelligence and Enforcement Unit. It will target street-level and upper-level drug dealers, gang members and others involved in violent crime, the sheriff said. Part of the effort will target gang activity at schools. 

Gautreaux said that local gangs and illicit drug dealers are responsible for 80 percent of the violent crime in East Baton Rouge Parish.

"These individuals and groups profit off of using violence and fear to control neighborhoods and boost their illegal activities," he said in a statement distributed at his news conference.

Homicide figures from the first quarter of this year indicate the parish is on a pace for its highest number of homicides ever. The WBRZ Investigative Unit reported that, with 32 killings in the first three months of the year, Baton Rouge is on a pace to have 128 homicides in 2024. The city had 120 in 2021, the most murderous year on record parish-wide.

Gautreaux said the unit expands on his agency's narcotics division, which he says seized more than 90,000 lethal doses of fentanyl over the past year. Also, he said, the division confiscated nearly 300 guns and more than $1 million and made 137 felony arrests over the same period.

Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome, who has seen the number of homicides climb and fall since taking office in 2017, praised the effort.

"Today's action by Sheriff Gautreaux was another significant step forward in the parish's collective endeavor to address public safety and steer crime statistics back to the downward trajectory they were on," Broome said in a statement. "Over the last few weeks I have had many conversations with our law enforcement partners to gain shared commitments to enhance collaboration and bolster efforts in tackling the root causes of criminal activity."

The Baton Rouge Police Department set up a special investigations unit last month to target "groups and gangs," Broome noted.