Red states are cracking down on their own blue cities.

Posted on: September 8, 2025 at 10:58:31 CT

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/it-s-not-just-trump-red-states-are-cracking-down-on-their-own-blue-cities/ar-AA1M6JR9?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=58e69cc2b25b4856a8e15cb234a3c8b9&ei=90

JACKSON, Miss. — Defendants who appear in this capital city’s dilapidated county courthouse often wait more than a year to have cases heard, a backlog that local officials blame on too few judges and a shortage of police and other resources.

Since January, though, some individuals charged under the same statutes have gotten their version of justice in a spacious new court nearby, a parallel operation created by the Republican-run legislature. It has a much smaller caseload, no delays, and new computers.

And unlike the Hinds County judges, who are elected, this court’s judges are chosen by the Republican chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court. Its prosecutors come from the office of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R).

State leaders defend the new system as necessary to address a spike in crime and Jackson’s court backlogs. Critics say it was imposed by White GOP lawmakers on an overwhelmingly Black, majority-Democratic city, with funding — more than $730,000 this fiscal year — that would have been better spent on additional Jackson police and an additional elected county judge.

Other red states have made similar moves in blue cities even as crime in those cities has decreased sharply from pandemic-era highs. And now President Donald Trump is borrowing from the playbook, sending federal agents and National Guard troops to patrol the nation’s capital and threatening to do the same elsewhere.

“It’s part of the narrative that these cities are incapable of administering public safety even though crime is on a downswing since the pandemic,” said Jorge Camacho, an associate research scholar in law at Yale Law School. “You still need a foil to blame for problems that are real and imagined. I expect to see that wielded for the foreseeable future.”

In Texas, for instance, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) deployed thousands of Texas National Guard troops and Department of Public Safety troopers in anticipation of immigration-related protests in Houston and other cities where federal deportation raids had occurred. On social media, Abbott framed his action as necessary to “ensure peace & order.”

In neighboring Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry (R) created a contingent of state troopers he dubbed “Troop NOLA” to police New Orleans, then used emergency powers in the wake of a deadly New Year’s Day truck attack in the French Quarter to surge state police into the city, patrol the French Quarter and sweep homeless people from downtown.

The president indicated last week that he might send the National Guard to New Orleans, calling the city “a very nice section of this country that’s become … quite tough, quite bad.” Landry, a former police officer and prosecutor, said he’d welcome “Trump’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport.”

Missouri lawmakers, citing an increase in homicides and case backlogs, voted in March to take over the St. Louis police department and voted two years ago to allow the Republican governor to appoint a special prosecutor there.

Georgia and Indiana, meanwhile, expanded the state police presence in blue cities and created state boards to investigate and discipline local prosecutors. In Indiana, that action was largely seen as a response to a Democratic prosecutor in Indianapolis who refused to enforce the state abortion ban and low-level drug offenses.

But Mississippi has arguably gone the furthest: Four years before the state-run court debuted, the legislature expanded the reach and staffing of the Capitol Police force in Jackson, building an agency that today is more than half the size of its municipal counterpart. Legislators empowered those officers to enforce the law anywhere in the city.

The risk of such moves, say national policing experts, is that resources are diverted from the local agencies that are most accountable to communities. The result is separate but unequal systems, according to Phillip Atiba Solomon of the Center for Policing Equity, a group that studies the impacts of policing and its alternatives.

“We’re creating, increasingly, systems that remove the resources from local cities and remove local control,” he said.

Recent polling from The Economist/YouGov suggests such efforts can be broadly popular with Republicans: 49 percent of poll respondents overall opposed the idea of Trump sending troops into cities to fight crime, compared with 42 percent who supported it. But 85 percent of Trump voters liked the idea, compared with only 9 percent of voters who supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

In Jackson, the Capitol Police district includes not just the statehouse and surrounding downtown, but also the historically White, wealthy neighborhoods of Belhaven, Eastover and Fondren north of the Capitol. The department’s SUVs have become commonplace on those streets, patrolling at all hours.

Some Jackson residents — Black and White — say they appreciate the greater numbers and presence.

“You have some people who see that as good news for businesses and creating a space where people feel more comfortable coming downtown,” said Cliff Johnson, a professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law.

Yet others are concerned, he said, noting allegations of excessive force and racial profiling by Capitol Police. Black residents in particular “don’t want to come into north Jackson, because they don’t want the hassle.”

The Capitol Complex Improvement District Court prompted protests and litigation as it was being created, with more protests and complaints when it opened in January. Civil rights advocates focused on the three new judges’ unique powers, including the ability to sentence those convicted of misdemeanors to state prison. (To date, none has.)

Johnson leads a legal team that regularly monitors the proceedings. During a week this spring when he attended sessions, the judges heard both misdemeanors and felonies, ranging from disorderly conduct to auto theft, drug possession and domestic assault.

A young man in a red jumpsuit was among the defendants one morning, charged with simple assault on a health care worker. He refused a lawyer and began to rant about his case. Judge James Holland, a former defense attorney, quickly stopped him.

“I’m working very hard to make sure you don’t harm yourself or your case,” he said before assigning the 18-year-old a public defender.

Johnson praised the court’s professionalism but said that doesn’t justify its existence. He noted that the state resources supporting its operations could have been provided to local officials to improve local courts.

“Ideally, you would have a situation where a concerned state government that cares about the capital city and realizes that a high-functioning Jackson benefits the whole state would lean into the process of supporting its existing structures,” Johnson said.

Gov. Tate Reeves (R) has supported state lawmakers’ interest in controlling the new Jackson court and its funding.

“It is our capital, it is our seat of government, it is a cultural hub for our state,” Reeves said in a social media post on the day he helped to launch the new court in January, calling it “another major addition to ensuring law and order in our capital city.”

Holland and his colleagues on the court have also argued that it’s necessary and fair.

“We are not in competition with other courts, we’re supporting them,” Holland, who lives in the city’s Fondren neighborhood, said during a break in hearing cases this spring. He explained that one of his goals is to reduce the backlog in other local courts.

“Our charge from the legislature was to address crime and the appearance of crime,” he said.

That legislative imperative includes not just the new court but also the Capitol Police. “Just seeing additional police — whether Capitol Police or Jackson police — is a plus,” Holland said. “When you see more officers on the street, that affects the appearance of crime. People need to feel safe when they come downtown.”

The legislature began increasing funding and staffing of the Capitol Police in Jackson in response to a record-shattering 160 homicides in 2021, at the time the highest per capita homicide rate in the nation. The murder rate has dropped significantly since, with 111 homicides in 2024 and 48 this year as of Sunday.

As of this month, the Capitol Police have 148 officers. They patrol about 24 square miles, a fraction of Jackson’s 114 square miles. The city police have 258 officers.

Earlier this year, a current and former Capitol Police officer were charged with manslaughter stemming from a 2022 car chase in which a young father was fatally shot. The current officer and another former officer were also charged with aggravated assault for allegedly shooting a mother of five during a traffic stop in 2022. In a separate case, that former officer was charged with civil rights violations alleging he beat a motorist after a pursuit that same year.

Mayor John Horhn (D), who took office July 1, was a state senator when the legislation to create the state-run court was approved. He voted against the bill, which he described then as an inappropriate intrusion into local control. “The question has been raised whether the state is trying to take over the city of Jackson,” he told WAPT-TV. “Well, if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck — it’s a duck.”

Just before taking office this summer, Horhn called the Capitol Police’s local expansion powers “a necessary evil.”

“Unfortunately, the resources that the city police department has are not enough to enforce and ensure that there’s order and safety throughout our community,” he said in an interview with WLBT-TV.

Sean Tindell, a Republican former judge and prosecutor, oversees the Capitol Police as commissioner of the state’s Department of Public Safety and acknowledges that the agency has faced “growing pains.” After lawmakers expanded the force and added the court, Tindell said, he attended town hall meetings where residents asked how they can hold the officers accountable. He advised them to contact legislators.

Overall, Tindell considers the Capitol Police’s expansion and the creation of the new court a success. Lawmakers had considered deploying the Mississippi National Guard in Jackson or using state police like Louisiana did in New Orleans, he said, but Mississippi’s governor conferred with Louisiana’s and ultimately decided against that.

“I don’t think we wanted to take over the underlying system. But we wanted to see a thriving system,” Tindell said. “If they just give money to the city of Jackson for police officers, they lose control over how that money is spent.”