This came from a Fox News interview Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry did this morning as chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which has unloaded on Kamala Harris as a Hard Left former AG in California, and it’s worth a quick watch because he touches on something that we expect to see a lot of this fall – namely, a GOP effort to recapture the “Silent Majority” narrative against crime and lawlessness that won for Richard Nixon in 1968.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry believes that it was inevitable that violent crime in the U.S. will get worse and warns that given the current state of affairs in cities across the country, the worst is yet to come.
In a phone interview with Fox News, Landry said that while he has tried to be tough on crime in his state, he realized years ago that in other parts of the country there were signs that crime would reach “epidemic” levels.
“When I became attorney general back in 2016, one of the first things that we tackled was we took a very proactive fight against crime,” Landry said. “I predicted four and five years ago that this country was headed towards an extreme violent crime outbreak, that it was going to become an epidemic.”
With homicides and gun violence on the rise in cities across the country, Landry said he is not surprised.
“I called that. And this thing is something that’s been building, and has only been heightened by this particular lawlessness,” he said. “I do believe that there’s a tipping point that’s coming in this country because I believe that every violent crime creates an exponential number of victims.”
Pushes to overhaul law enforcement across the country by stripping police department of funds will not help matters either, according to Landry, who is a Republican.
“I can tell you that defunding the police is certainly not an answer,” he said.
What he’s talking about with respect to the prediction of an explosion in violent crime is the Ferguson Effect, in which local police departments largely vacate the worst neighborhoods in town out of a sense that it’s too dangerous for police to aggressively fight criminals in those neighborhoods – they’re where you’re going to run into the Michael Browns, Alton Sterlings and George Floyds of the world, who need to be arrested but who will fight their arrests, get themselves killed in the process and touch off riots and criminal charges against cops put in impossible situations.
Landry recognized that was likely all the way back in 2015 when he was running for AG, and it came up again after the Alton Sterling mess the next year. As it turns out, the numbers from Baton Rouge alone give a pretty good indication he was right. Our buddy Chris Rials fashioned this chart a few days ago, and we’re stealing it for informational purposes…
So starting in 2017, the year following Alton Sterling’s death and Sharon Weston Broome’s election as mayor-president, you see the Ferguson Effect in Baton Rouge resulting in carnage all over the streets of the city.
This is everywhere: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, you name it.
In 1968 Nixon’s pitch was that he would rein in the far-left rioters who were burning America’s cities, and he’d help to get a handle on violent crime in the streets. It’s a pretty good bet, one that Landry and the other Republican Attorneys General are making and so is Team Trump, that a similar pitch will work this time. But there’s a bit of a tweak to it, because in 1968 it wasn’t apparent across the board that America’s cities were run by communists. In 2020, it’s hard to argue otherwise. So you’re not just running against the looters, rioters and criminals in the streets – you’re also running against the looters, rioters and criminals in city halls across America.
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Of which Kamala Harris is one, coming as she did from the San Francisco courthouse mob.
You can expect to see a lot more of this between now and November. You should. It’s a real issue.
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