Maybe Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is on to something when he muses about Shreveport’s high crime rate.
Last week, GOP Pres. Donald Trump broached the idea of sending the National Guard into high-crime cities. It’s more complex than it sounds to pull that off, principally in that Democrat-run big cities with crime problems often are in Democrat-monopoly states, whose governors can mostly neuter the attempt, but it aggravated them to no end to hear that option, especially on the heels of Trump doing this with Washington, DC which immediately saw a significant reduction in violent crime.
Now, Trump and Johnson are floating the idea of a national crime bill, and one critique Democrats had was Johnson didn’t have credibility on the issue because of Shreveport’s crime numbers in his district. Johnson replied this was because a “progressive prosecutor” – namely Democrat District Attorney James Stewart – was gumming up the works. This kind of district attorney charges fewer and downgrades more cases, on the assumption that the criminal justice system is too punitive in a manner that discriminates against lower-income individuals, often non-whites – a recipe for higher crime, opponents of the idea say, with weakened deterrence, while advocates claim it’s a better use of resources.
Is Johnson right in the case of Stewart, who actually isn’t as “progressive” as others in the state such as Orleans’ Jason Williams who routinely downplays bail and drops charges even on serious matters? A review of Federal Bureau of Investigation crime data and records of court filings can provide some data to determine this.
Each year, thousands of cases are filed by Stewart in First District courts, and a handful go to trial. The Shreveport Police Department annually receives over 1,000 reports of violent crime. An analysis of the Stewart’s first eight years (2016-2023) divided into four-year segments on these numbers can be compared to the tenures of his elected predecessor Democrat Charles Scott and when he died unexpectedly including the record of the interim DA his deputy Dale Cox plus a year of his predecessor Democrat Paul Carmouche, from 2008-11 and 2012-15.
We should see ordinarily a rough equivalence between violent crime rate and number of criminal cases file, juvenile cases filed, and criminal trials; as crime goes up, so do these numbers. The four-year intervals are chosen to account for lagging data, as sometime it’s years before charges are filed for a crime, and perhaps later still for trials.
The 2008-11 and 2012-2015 periods reflect this. For the former, the annual average number of criminal charges was (rounded up) 9,404, of juvenile charges 640, and trials 44, with an average annual violent crime rate of 844 per 100,000 people. This compares to a rate nearly 100 lower (750) during the latter interval, with 8,571 criminal charges, 466 juvenile charges, and 35 trials – in the ballpark of what would be expected with a dip of over 10 percent in rate.
Stewart’s 2016-2019 numbers varied a little from this on criminal referrals. The rate went to 879 while criminal charges rose to 9,016 and juvenile to 670. That would be about on the pace of 2008-11 for juvenile but below that expected for criminal. Trials average was about the same at 42.
But the trickle downwards in his first four years turned into a landslide during his next. The rate shot up to average 951, or an increase of 8 percent, but average criminal charges dove 37 percent to 6,580 and average juvenile charges plunged 50 percent to 445. The trial average was 43.
In short, perhaps lightly in his first four years but indisputably in his next four, even as the violent crime was spiraling upward (a whopping 1,151 per 100,000 in the latest, 2023 statistics), Stewart began drastically bringing fewer criminal charges for both adults and juveniles. That is the very definition of a progressive prosecutor, and the predictable negative impact on crime fighting the reduced deterrent thereof produces. Johnson hit the nail on the head.
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