Yesterday there was a press conference at the Superdome in New Orleans at which Governor-elect Jeff Landry announced his choices for the leadership of the Louisiana State Police as well as state fire marshall and adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard, as well as a few others.
Governor-elect Jeff Landry on Wednesday (Nov. 29) unveiled his choices for state public safety chiefs, as well as plans to have the attorney general’s office assume control of more criminal prosecutions in New Orleans. Landry named New Orleans native Maj. Robert Hodges to head the Louisiana State Police, replacing Col. Lamar Davis, a Gov. John Bel Edwards selection who will retire in January. Landry also chose Jefferson Parish’s Bryan Adams as the new state fire marshal and Brigadier Gen. Thomas Friloux as Adjutant General to head the Louisiana National Guard.
But the real headline of the press conference wasn’t the personnel announcements. It was something else Landry said…
The long and short of this is that the state of Louisiana is no longer going to stand by while cops, prosecutors and judges in New Orleans treat the criminal class with kid gloves as it destroys the city.
Landry announced a deal with Orleans Parish DA Jason Williams, who we’ll talk about a little below, in which the new governor will be surging Louisiana State Police troopers into New Orleans to investigate crimes and make arrests, and any suspects touched by that surge will have their cases prosecuted not by Williams’ office, which let’s face it has not been super-aggressive in attacking criminals, but instead by the Louisiana Attorney General’s office.
Meaning that Liz Murrill is about to become as much the DA in New Orleans as Williams is.
That’s probably going to end the problem of there not being enough prosecutors to handle all the criminal cases in New Orleans. We’re not 100 percent sure that problem existed in the acuteness it was advertised to be, but either way that’s an excuse which is now gone. The AG’s office can pull in lawyers from all over the state to fill whatever personnel holes it might have, so if the Louisiana State Police surges in and starts sweeping up the hardened criminals who commit the vast majority of the crimes in that city, you can believe the balance of power is about to shift.
But of course, there’s a three-pronged problem in New Orleans, and this move only affects two of the three prongs.
New Orleans doesn’t have even remotely enough cops, and the NOPD has been getting routed on the streets of the Big Easy not just because of the manpower problem but also because of a stupid consent decree signed by former mayor Mitch Landrieu with then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder more than a decade ago. The city’s police force has been reduced to hug-a-thug tactics ever since, and crime has exploded as a result. It’s so bad that as of yesterday, there had been 6,355 car thefts in the city of New Orleans this year, a number it’s almost impossible to believe. Something like one out of every 30 cars in New Orleans will be stolen in 2023.
How you can get any insurance carriers to write auto insurance in that city is an interesting question.
In any event, Landry surging the State Police into New Orleans will only help that situation. His challenge is going to be to staff up LSP to meet the needs of that surge, though – a year ago in an interview with WDSU-TV in New Orleans Landry’s predecessor John Bel Edwards was asked if he would consider exactly the surge Landry is contemplating, and Edwards essentially said he couldn’t do it because LSP is short some 300 troopers from its funded strength.
That’s going to mean a whole lot of hiring.
Between NOPD and LSP, Landry will have to find another 400-500 law enforcement officers to staff up that surge. Don’t be surprised if one of the first things you see after he takes office is a recruitment drive in places like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and other big blue cities where cops are treated like dogs in an effort to incentivize some veteran cops coming to New Orleans to work for a police force whose leadership values their efforts over those of the criminal class.
And we’ve just talked about the prosecutors the AG’s office will be bringing to bear. Which brings us to Williams.
Everybody knows that Jason Williams is one of the Soros DA’s, in that it was George Soros’ money which got him elected to his current position. And Williams has so far been a typical Soros DA disaster, in that his office has utterly – and probably intentionally – failed to get tough with the criminal class. There have been a bunch of high-profile atrocities in the city resulting from that; the one everybody is looking to right now is the Linda Frickey case, in which a quartet of thugs carjacked Frickey on a residential street, and when her arm got caught in the seat belt as they were throwing her out of her car, they dragged her with such force that her arm was ripped off and she bled out on the street.
But perhaps more concerning to Williams was that a few weeks ago he himself was carjacked along with his mother. That was an especially humiliating episode for him.
Mugged by such a reality, Jason Williams might not actually want to function as a Soros DA anymore. It’s obviously not working the way he hoped, and with Landry coming into power the wind is obviously blowing in the opposite direction. So the fact that Williams showed up at Landry’s press conference in enthusiastic support of his plan to surge state cops and prosecutors into the city probably isn’t much of a surprise.
He’s smart enough to realize this is a win-win situation for him. There is no point in fighting Landry, and if he did fight the new governor he would then own all the crime in the city that followed. This way whatever goes wrong – high-profile acquittals, a failure to meaningfully affect the crime rate, a George Floyd/Alton Sterling-style mishap involving the State Police – has nothing to do with Williams, but he gets to share in the credit for whatever good is done.
It’s Landry taking all the risk here, not Williams.
And the big risk is that for all the work the cops and prosecutors Landry is surging into New Orleans might do, a corrupt judiciary in New Orleans will still let all the criminals out. That risk is real; New Orleans has some de facto and de jure Soros judges, too.
But – and Landry has not talked about this – there is something interesting going on in Mississippi which might make its way here before long.
Jackson, as our readers know, is beset with the same problem of crime that New Orleans is. Things got so bad that people visiting the Mississippi capitol would often come out to find stolen or broken-into cars, there were assaults and rapes and other violent crimes, and the scene was wholly unsafe for legislators, lobbyists and others plying their trade around that building.
So the state of Mississippi built a Capitol Police force, and then gave them jurisdiction not just on the capitol grounds but extending well out into the city.
And then it put state prosecutors in charge of handling cases the Capitol Police was involved in, similar to Landry’s announced plan, but also took the step of having the governor of Mississippi appoint judges to staff up a special court to adjudicate Capitol Police cases.
We’ve heard nothing about a similar court in Louisiana. But if the efforts to use state resources to stop crime in New Orleans hit a wall because local judges won’t put away criminals, don’t be surprised if that goes on the table.
And maybe the judges in the Big Easy already know it.
You might just find that some of the most bleeding-heart judges in that city are all of a sudden stern as can be for fear somebody else will horn in on their action.
Will all this work? Our guess is it probably will, though it’s a huge undertaking and without a doubt it’s going to run into a massive amount of resistance from the usual suspects on the Left. But that’s OK, because it’s past time for the activists and politicians who have quietly coddled the criminal class to be smoked out and exposed for what they are.
And one thing we’re positive about is Landry and his team will relish the opportunity to expose them.