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Caddo deputy named Law Officer of the Year

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Caddo Sheriff's Sgt. Doug Smith was honored as Law Officer of the Year by the 40 and 8 Voiture Locale 137 during a ceremony Thursday in Shreveport. He was also selected as the state organization’s Louisiana Officer of the Year and will receive that award at the Grand Promenade in Lafayette this summer.

Smith is a 16-year employee of the Sheriff's Office and has served in Corrections, Patrol, Financial Crimes, and Cyber Crimes.  He is commissioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigations to investigate financial and cyber crimes on a federal task force and is the only F.B.I. Task Force Officer certified in computer forensics in Northwest Louisiana.  Immediately after being commissioned, he investigated a $200 million case assigned to him by the F.B.I. that resulted in an indictment. 

In 2018, he investigated several involved cases that stemmed from a compromised email scam. One scam caused four separate victims to collectively wire approximately $2.2 million to the offenders’ bank accounts.  Those banks accounts were filed with DBA (doing business as) letters to hide their true identities.  After months of state and federal investigation, Smith learned the identity of several “money mules” who were local to the Shreveport area.  They were paid to wire money across the world to different terrorist organizations. The investigation of the “money mules” led Smith to the identity of the organized scheme’s mid-level manager, who originated from Cameroon, Africa.  He too was located in the Shreveport area.  Several arrests were made, including the mid-level manager, and about $750,000 was recovered for the victims.

Over the last year, he investigated 79 cases that resulted in 64 felony arrests and over three-quarters of a million dollars in recovered money that was returned to victims.  In addition, he helped investigate 12 federal cases with the FBI where hundreds of millions of dollars had been stolen.

On Patrol, Smith was a Field Training Officer and taught new patrolmen how to safely and effectively serve and protect their community. For the past eight years he worked as a detective in Financial Crimes and most recently was selected to operate the CPSO’s new Cyber Crimes Unit.

He is often called upon to speak at public forums to help educate citizens, especially the elderly, about protecting themselves from financial crimes.  In addition, he instructs deputies and other officers at the Sheriff’s Regional Training Academy about financial crimes. 

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