18-Year-Old Running For Gretna Mayor
GRETNA, La. (AP) — The majority of Gretna's elected leadership — the five incumbents on the City Council and the police chief — have each been automatically returned to office after no one filed to run against them last week.
But things didn't go quite that way for Mayor Belinda Constant.
The Advocate (http://bit.ly/2iBZp9Z ) reports William Boartfield Jr., an 18-year-old high school senior and state Green Party co-chairman, qualified to run against Constant, a Democrat finishing her first term as mayor.
Boartfield says he will run on a platform of criminal justice reform, a decision he said was fueled by a recent profile of Gretna and its Police Department in the online publication Fusion. In the article, reporter Mark Gimein wrote that Gretna's 6,566 adult arrests in 2013 gave it an arrest rate 14 times that of a typical American city.
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Information from: The Advocate, http://theadvocate.com
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