Laravel - Mysql to JSON

At the moment I have a list of employees as a json file.

{
    "id": 1,
    "departments": "1",
    "name": "Bill Smith",
    "profilePic": "/img/people/Office/bill-smith.jpg",
    "title": "Office Manager"
  },

I now want to store these in the database but still return them as JSON.

How do I set this up with my routes? It will be a very basic filter, by department id.

I presume I would do a get request

Route::get('people/{department}', function () {

});

How do I return the json?

via Chebli Mohamed