The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office has settled a federal civil rights lawsuit involving a former deputy with an extensive disciplinary history who attempted to illegally evict a woman from her Kenner home in 2021.
The woman, Frances Tapps, was pregnant at the time and said the stress and trauma from the incident caused her to give birth prematurely.
Sheriff Joe Lopinto agreed to the $100,000 settlement in September after a U.S. District Court Judge Mary Ann Vial Lemmon rejected his attempt to have the suit thrown out. Lemmon found there was evidence that the sheriff ignored “numerous red flags” and “acted recklessly” when he hired former Deputy Randy McClendon and put him in a position of power.
Prior to working in Jefferson Parish, McClendon spent more than five years as a St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s deputy, where he was the subject of more than 20 citizen complaints for, among other things, threatening to deport an immigrant, extorting a drunk person and spitting on an inmate, according to legal filings in Tapps’ case. During his time there, internal affairs investigators upheld numerous misconduct violations against him, finding that he abused his police power and illegally detained civilians. McClendon resigned from the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office in April 2019 and was hired by JPSO one month later.
During an April deposition in the Tapps lawsuit, McClendon testified that a human resources employee at JPSO had told him not to worry about his disciplinary history. The unnamed employee said that it’s “not odd to get bad reports from St. Charles” and “they’d be more concerned if they got a good report about a deputy,” according to court documents.
A few months after the Tapps incident, McClendon resigned from JPSO without discipline.
This is at least the third civil rights lawsuit involving alleged deputy misconduct that Lopinto has settled in the past several months, a pattern that has prompted renewed calls for a Department of Justice investigation into the office, potentially followed by a federal consent decree similar to the one that has governed New Orleans Police Department operations for a decade.
Two weeks after the Tapps settlement, Lopinto settled with the family of Eric Parsa, a 16-year-old boy with severe autism who died in January 2020 after deputies pinned him to the pavement and then sat on his back for more than 9 minutes. The $1.25 million settlement is one of the largest in the department’s history.
Following the Parsa settlement, JPSO also settled with the family of Tre’mall McGee for an undisclosed amount of money. Deputies shot McGee, then 14, in the shoulder while he was facedown on the ground, about two months after Parsa’s death. McGee’s wound was not life-threatening.
Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana and Tapps’ attorney, said the sheriff’s disregard for McClendon’s history of excessive force and unprofessional conduct is a longstanding problem within the department. Over a three-year period from 2017 to mid-2020, the JPSO sustained only one misconduct complaint against a deputy, according to a yearlong investigation by WWNO and ProPublica. During that same time, the NOPD sustained 247.
“There is a need for federal intervention when you have a local police agency that is creating such havoc,” Ahmed said. “There should be sufficient evidence for the federal government to get involved and to issue … a consent decree that mimics what we see with NOPD.”
The sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Efforts to reach McClendon were unsuccessful.
‘He’s gonna shoot us!’
On Jan. 7, 2021, McClendon arrived at Tapps’ home, in uniform and driving a marked patrol car. He pounded on her door and said he was sent by her landlord — who he described as “his partner” — to evict her because she was late on rent.
McClendon, however, did not have the right to remove her. Tapps’ landlord, HUM Management, hadn’t started proceedings to remove her from the apartment, according to court documents. Even if the company had tried to go through the normal process, it’s unlikely it would have been able to get an eviction order. There was a federal moratorium on evictions for non-payment of rent at the time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Tapps opened the door, McClendon had his hand on his unholstered gun, prompting her 4-year-old child to scream, “He’s gonna shoot us!”
Tapps, who was eight months pregnant, said she was terrified, and tried to flee her home with the child. But as she got into her vehicle and tried to pull out of the driveway, McClendon blocked her path with his patrol car.
According to the lawsuit, Tapps told McClendon that he was not her landlord, to which he replied, “I am.” When Tapps stated that a sheriff’s deputy had “no role in a private rent dispute, McClendon replied that he was at her home as a ‘private citizen.’”
At that point, Tapps called the Kenner Police Department and began to record the scene with her phone. Kenner Officer Keith Seals responded. He told McClendon he didn’t have any right to evict Tapps and that even if there were a legal eviction order, it was the job of a Jefferson Parish constable, not a sheriff’s deputy, to carry it out. McClendon then threatened to take Tapps to jail. Seals “quickly rebuked McClendon … and reassured Ms. Tapps that she would not” be arrested, according to Tapps’ suit.
This was not the first time McClendon harassed Tapps. In May 2020, he showed up at her doorstep and demanded rent. Looking into her home, he said, “If you can’t pay your rent, my things would look good in here,” according to the lawsuit. During that encounter, McClendon also referred to HUM Management as his “partner.”
In March 2021, a reporter with The Times-Picayune called a cell phone number belonging to HUM co-owner Abdul Siddiqui. The man who picked up said that McClendon was “not part of HUM Management, but he’s my partner.” An attorney for HUM management said on Tuesday (Nov. 28) that he was not able to respond to a request for comment by publication time. But in court filings, Siddiqui said that Tapps agreed to turn over a set of keys, and that McClendon offered to pick them up as a favor to Siddiqui.
Along with the sheriff’s office, HUM Management and McClendon each settled with Tapps for an undisclosed amount, Ahmed said.
The day after McClendon attempted to evict her, Tapps filed a complaint against him with the sheriff’s office. She was interviewed by a JPSO sergeant, who told her the deputy had “a history of misconduct and was assured that he would face discipline,” according to the suit.
That never happened. And several months later, McClendon resigned. He was allowed to maintain his Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST, certification, which is required for all law enforcement officers in Louisiana. As long as he keeps that certification, he’s eligible for work in law enforcement.
As part of Tapps’ lawsuit, her attorneys asked Lopinto to point out every instance in which he recommended a deputy’s POST certification be suspended or revoked. The sheriff responded, “Never.” He explained that he thought they were automatically revoked when a deputy resigned or was fired.
This is inaccurate, according to Bob Wertz, law enforcement training manager for the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, which administers POST certifications. An officer’s certification is not automatically revoked upon leaving a department, but someone from within that agency could request it.
The bar for decertification, however, is high in Louisiana. An officer’s certification can only be revoked if they are convicted of a felony, misdemeanor domestic abuse battery, malfeasance in office, or any crime that results in restrictions on their right to bear arms, among other reasons, none of which appear to apply to McClendon.
A long disciplinary history
The pain inflicted on Tapps could have been avoided, Ahmed said, if the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office heeded a litany of warnings it received prior to hiring McClendon, which included its own personnel records.
McClendon was first hired by JPSO in 2008 as a process server. At the same time, he was working as an account clerk for the Jefferson Parish Public School System. He was arrested the next year for allegedly stealing more than $9,000 from the school system.
“JPSO allowed McClendon to resign voluntarily from his position within days of his arrest, did not discipline him, and did not take any action that made him ineligible for rehire or prevented him from pursuing law enforcement work with other agencies and departments in Louisiana,” according to the lawsuit.
The district attorney did not pursue charges against McClendon, who went on to work for the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office from Sept. 2013 to April 2019. During that time, internal affairs officers investigated nearly two dozen complaints against him, upholding several of them.
In one upheld complaint, McClendon attempted to arrest an “impaired person” at a bar, leading witnesses to conclude he was “attempting to extort a bribe,” according to court documents. In another, he was accused of purchasing alcohol on the job, then “speeding in his SCPSO marked unit to initiate contact with the civilian” who saw him buy the alcohol. St. Charles also sustained complaints against him involving traffic stops, including one in which he was accused of threatening to deport an immigrant if they didn’t pay a traffic ticket.
As a result of the complaints, McClendon was placed in the St. Charles sheriff’s ”remedial leadership program” but apparently failed to improve. In a Dec. 18, 2018 memo, Capt. George Breedy said that McClendon “has still not come to the realization that our profession is about service to our community and our coworkers. In speaking with past and present supervisors, it is clear that this is a common action on his part.”
About four months later, in April 2019, St. Charles Chief Deputy Rodney Madere Jr. wrote that McClendon has a “pattern of unprofessional conduct” and that his “disciplinary history puts us at a liability for negligent retention by continuing to employ” him.
McClendon eventually resigned, after which Madere requested his file reflect that he did so while under investigation and was “scheduled to be terminated.” Later that same month, JPSO hired McClendon despite receiving concerning reports from his previous employer.
When JPSO requested references, St. Charles Parish Commander Kenneth Decorte wrote: “McClendon has an extensive disciplinary history, he resigned while under investigation and he isn’t eligible for rehire.” The human resources coordinator responded to JPSO, writing, “Contact IAD!” — the internal affairs division which conducted the investigations into McClendon.
JPSO was also informed that McClendon was “subject to a restraining order from his ex-wife in California” which prohibited him from carrying a gun in the state. There is no evidence that JPSO followed up on any of those warnings, according to court documents.
A few weeks before the incident with Tapps, McClendon was accused of accosting several women at the Louis Armstrong International Airport, according to Lemmon’s September order denying Lopinto’s request for a summary judgment against Tapps. He was off duty in an unmarked JPSO vehicle, waiting in the departure lane for his family when a woman pulled up in front of him. McClendon warned her to “stop and let me out,” then pulled his car forward to prevent her from parking. He called the woman’s daughter, who was waiting outside the baggage claim exit, a “b—-,” asked “if she knew who the f— he was” and if she wanted to go to jail for assault.
“The exchange ended with him speeding off almost hitting” the woman, according to court documents. JPSO sustained the complaint against him, finding that his conduct brought the department “into disrepute.”
Despite the infraction, McClendon remained on active duty with JPSO, giving him access to a police car, weapon and uniform when he attempted the illegal conviction in early 2021.
A few days afterwards, while she was applying for new housing at the Kenner Housing Authority, Tapps said she experienced severe stomach pain and was rushed to the hospital where she gave premature birth, undergoing a C-section. She blamed the experience, which threatened the health of her baby, on the trauma she suffered at the hands of McClendon.
This story has been updated with the amount of the JPSO settlement with Frances Tapps.