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 360aproko 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.
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“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.
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Landry and like-minded colleagues in the Republican Attorneys General Association are gearing up for their summer meeting, planned around the timing of the Republican National Convention. Democrats are winding down their convention this week, and Landry is not confident in how their candidates would address crime if elected to office.
Landry said the ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is the most liberal “that has ever been placed before the American voter in the history of this country.” He accused Harris of being “bipolar” on crime, saying that she was tough on crime in the past, but now appears to be changing her position.
Harris has supported the decision of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to slash funding for police by approximately $150 million, and has stated that she believes in reallocating money from police to other social programs. The movement to defund police gained momentum following the death of George in Minneapolis. Floyd’s death sparked a nationwide movement against police brutality and treatment of Black Americans in particular.
Landry took issue with Democrats’ claims that the criminal justice system is plagued by systemic racism, pointing out that many of the large cities where people claim racism is the problem are run by Democrats and have been for years.
“If there’s systemic racism in Chicago or in Minnesota, then that means Democrats are responsible for that systemic racism because they have been in control, they have been running those cities and those police departments for decades now,” he said.
