Call in the National Guard?

7 October 2025

It’s like something out of a Jello Biafra song. The governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, has made a big show of his obsequiousness by asking for federal assistance, on the federal taxpayers’ dime, to deploy the Louisiana National Guard to the state’s three largest cities: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport. Landry cites escalating rates of crime, especially gang violence, and chronically understaffed police departments as his reason for choosing these three cities. Surely, it has nothing to do with the fact that these three cities are, at least relatively speaking, bastions of liberal politics, who the Landry administration is committed to crushing.

Landry, also, wants to display his loyalty to the Trump administration by being a “friendly” governor to the idea of deploying the Guard to “liberal cities”. The idea has been rejected by the governors of California, Illinois, and Oregon, who have resisted the deployment of the military in their cities through the judicial process, and who have publicly denounced the deployment of foreign state Guard soldiers to their cities.

Like the mayor of Shreveport, I can’t speak for the other cities targeted in Louisiana, but the city of Shreveport has seen crime fall steadily since 2022, with about 40% fewer murders and about 50% fewer shootings this year compared to the same time last year. 2024 itself represented a 9-year record low in crime in the city, with 2025 so far being even more peaceful. The city has achieved this despite vacancies in the Shreveport police, which has struggled to recruit officers. One lesson from this might be that there is no causal relationship between the appearance of cops on the beat and the level of violent crime. Crime rates in Shreveport fluctuate wildly from year to year, and often have more to do with things like economic precarity and insecurity, poverty, and a lack of employment opportunities available to young men. Crime rates rose in Shreveport last when federal pandemic relief stopped, and when Shreveport’s economy was in the doldrums. With renewed investment in Shreveport in recent years, the local economy has grown, opportunities outside of a life of crime have popped up, and fewer people are pressured to eke out a living through, for example, the drug trade and prostitution. As a result of this progress, Shreveport is no longer in the top 10 most dangerous cities and towns in Louisiana, while neighboring Bossier City – a hive of reactionaries and white flight refuse – made that list for the first time in who knows how long.

But this decline in crime is evidently not enough for reactionaries. In fact, crime is clearly not what really motivates the deployment. Louisiana’s cities are being targeted because they are places in which the arch rivals of the Louisiana GOP, the Louisiana Democrats, still have some sway and some autonomy from the GOP’s statewide one-party rule. If Shreveport had just two more Republicans on its city council to complement our white Republican mayor, we might not have made the list at all. It’s important to recognize the statist ambitions of the Louisiana GOP, who are, among other things, in the process of establishing christianity as a state religion in defiance of the First Amendment. The deployment of the Guard is an attempt to consolidate more policing power under the governor, who the Louisiana GOP seems to be sure will never again be from outside their party. Another partial aim of this is to hassle people to leave the state, in particular liberals and leftists who don’t want to put up with all this reactionary nonsense. Landry himself has told political opponents to simply leave if they don’t like the direction the state is going. The GOP nationally seems to believe that it is at war with “blue cities”, and the cities seem to slowly be realizing that they are at war with Republican governors and legislatures as well as the federal government under a constitutionally unbound executive.

City leaders have been pretty unanimous in rejecting the Guard’s deployment. The police chief and mayor have settled on a line that extra “resources” would be helpful, but that there’s not much for the Guard itself to do to help. Not that there isn’t crime, but that the Guard’s deployment would jeopardize the relationship that the SPD has built with the communities most affected by violent crime, whose cooperation is needed especially in fighting organized crime. Really I can’t imagine a much more effective way to re-introduce a schism between Shreveport’s most oppressed communities and the police department than to have armed soldiers patrol the streets on the lookout for crimes in progress, who will inevitably hassle and potentially shoot innocent people.

I haven’t spoken to a single person who lives in Shreveport who supports the Guard’s deployment, but I have heard from a few people outside of the city who spoke in glowing terms about it. It should not be forgotten that the rank-and-file of the GOP really wants to see urban heads smashed. There is a sadistic element to this deployment which the reactionary rank-and-file of the GOP are eager to make explicit. Rural reactionaries who haven’t lived in the city in years, if ever, operate only under the impression created by local media, which covers urban crime relentlessly. If one’s impression of Shreveport only came from depictions given by the six o’clock news, it very much would appear to be a lawless wasteland with daily homicides, where residents are constantly living in fear of victimization by roving gangs of “street thugs”. After a shooting at the Cane’s on Youree Drive, I even witnessed people say that it’s “too dangerous” to drive down that way, as if shootings on Youree were some kind of daily occurrence to beware of. This is quite honestly media-driven paranoia, as any given person is about as likely to be shot on Youree Drive as they are to be struck by lightning. The real danger on Youree is the threat of car accidents, which are an order of magnitude more common than shootings in that part of Shreveport.

It still remains to be seen what exactly the Guard plans on doing upon deployment. Patrols would not be particularly effective, since Shreveport is a sprawling city, with many places to conduct ilicit business. The Guard can’t be everywhere at once and can’t post up at every nocturnal cookout waiting for someone suspicious to arrive, and catching them in the critical juncture between when a gun is drawn and when it’s fired. The logistics just don’t work.

But the Guard could have a very chilling effect on free speech and free movement. In DC, this has been the main impact of the deployment of soldiers. Nightlife has died as people don’t want to run the risk of getting hassled by armed agents of the state. Because nightlife is a big part of the local economy here, if this is reflected in Shreveport after the Guard’s deployment, it will likely create a greater risk of crime.

Shreveport obviously doesn’t need the Guard. How long, however, will we allow the rural reactionaries to kick us around before we fight back?