We’ll start this off with a video Jeff Landry’s team dropped this week highlighting Louisiana’s out-of-control crime problem…
Louisiana Has A #Crime Crisis! pic.twitter.com/hsNIfa3iHB
— AG Jeff Landry (@AGJeffLandry) January 4, 2023
We’ve talked about this before. Right after Landry announced he was running for governor this year he was on Tucker Carlson and he talked about the power of the governor in Louisiana to fix problems like the crime bacchanal in New Orleans.
It’s great politics, primarily in that Landry needs to get a foothold of support in Jefferson Parish, the most heavily-populated parish in the state and also the place with the most Republican voters. Jefferson has somehow been a problem for the GOP in the last two gubernatorial elections; in 2015, Democrat John Bel Edwards managed 51 percent of the vote there against David Vitter, and in 2019 it got staggeringly worse when Edwards beat Eddie Rispone in Jefferson by a 57-43 count and that was the definitive reason Rispone lost the race.
Talk to anybody from Jefferson, and they’ll tell you the number one problem they see in Louisiana is the insane amount of crime spilling out from New Orleans. The key to getting their votes is making them believe that problem can be addressed successfully.
And there are things a governor can do which would impact the problem.
The preferred option is to deploy the Louisiana State Police to New Orleans to supplement the ineffective and understaffed New Orleans Police Department. That’s been done at times before, particularly in tourist areas like the French Quarter. It’s what Landry would most likely do were he elected governor.
But there are concerns/limits/problems in using the State Police to fight crime in New Orleans, and those will have to be overcome.
The first of the issues with having the State Police ride to the rescue in New Orleans or elsewhere is that the current governorhas left the State Police in ruins. By his own admission it’s 300 troopers short of its budgeted strength. So the issue is whether there are enough troopers to spare to reinforce the cities, and to be able to sustain a State Police presence in places where crime is out of control Landry would have to refill the roster quickly enough to solve that troop strength problem.
That’s a heavy lift. There aren’t lots of applicants to become police these days, and you have to train recruits which takes time. Unless you’re going to try to poach them from other agencies, which is doable but now you’re trying to get cops from other states to come here.
And that isn’t easy. Because most cops aren’t like football players who want to play in the toughest and most competitive leagues they can. Most cops want to work a job where they have a good chance to go home and see their families when their shift is over. “Come and work in Louisiana where you’re more likely to get shot than anywhere else” isn’t the best sales pitch.
Money, perhaps, resolves most of this problem. And the state of Louisiana has lots of it, if the state ever got serious about squeezing the waste out of its budget. Nevertheless, this isn’t an easy obstacle to overcome.
The second problem also lies with the current state of the State Police, that being the likelihood that Edwards will enter into a consent decree with the feds as a result of the Department of Justice civil rights investigation that came out of the Ronald Greene case and others. If that happens the State Police will become just another worthless hug-a-thug police force and deploying them in New Orleans or North Baton Rouge or the worst parts of Shreveport will get you only more of the same. The new governor might have to repurpose or start up a totally new police agency to deploy in the cities rather than the State Police if Edwards colludes with the Biden Justice Department to de-fang the State Police.
Which, it must be said, is only 90 percent disastrous. Clearly the Ronald Greene case showed that there is corruption and rot in the State Police and its professionalism could use a bit of tuning up. You couldn’t surge state troopers into New Orleans only to have them savage some poor drunk who runs a red light; if that happened in New Orleans you’d have a George Floyd explosion for the ages, and it would be turbocharged by the narrative that it would be a white Republican governor dispatching brutal state cops who live in the suburbs into a mostly-black city to engage in oppression of innocent black men. It would be weaponized outrage and the state’s urban Democrats would do everything they could to play it up.
So before you could use the State Police as a game-changer for crime in the cities, you need guarantees that doing so would increase the professionalism of law enforcement there, rather than the opposite.
And the third problem which is perhaps the hardest to fix doesn’t even involve the cops. It’s the broken justice system. Louisiana’s cities, and New Orleans especially, have District Attorneys who won’t prosecute, juries who won’t convict and judges who won’t sentence. That’s especially acute in Orleans, and other than putting the city under martial law it’s tough to see how to fix that problem. It’s local voters, after all, who are the ones responsible for creating the mess by serving as pro-criminal jurors and electing the prosecutors and judges who are crook-friendly.
Landry has talked about sanctioning pro-criminal DA’s, in a vein similar (though not identical, as state law isn’t the same) to what Ron DeSantis has done in Florida. We’re not sure he can fire a district attorney as governor; he can’t do that as Attorney General either. Landry needs district attorneys to recuse themselves from cases in order to get jurisdiction of them.
It’s a messy situation which can only really be resolved with better local government. And the problem in Louisiana’s cities is that the locals have chosen pretty definitively to install pro-criminal people in all the key positions.
Then again, Tom Arceneaux is the new mayor of Shreveport and he’s a Republican. That could lead to cooperation with a new governor and perhaps a dent in that city’s crime problem.
In New Orleans and Baton Rouge? All we can see is the problem getting worse by the day. By the time Landry or someone else would take office things could be utterly out of control. He might need the National Guard, rather than the State Police, to regain control of the streets.
The post Let’s Talk About Crime And The Louisiana Governor’s Race appeared first on The Hayride.
