Three of the highest-profile contests in northwest Louisiana for this fall’s election involve offices most voters rarely consider, all with some controversy involved.
Two of the hottest will occur in Shreveport and Bossier City for the obscure office of marshal. Each city court in the state, whose judges are elected, also has a city marshal attached to it, who carries out the orders of the court. Often that isn’t a great deal to do, so, in line with Parkinson’s Law, they perform other tasks as by ordinance (and reap extra compensation).
These offices often draw competition, and there is a logical explanation as to why: they can turn into huge jackpots because statute allows a marshal to collect fees for a wide variety of actions. The office does have expenses, principally for deputies in larger jurisdictions, but above and beyond those the marshal can keep the rest for himself. Several in the state make more than any other elected official in their jurisdictions, into six figures.
In both cases, an insurgent is taking on an entrenched incumbent. In Bossier City, Republican City Councilor Brian Hammons is taking on GOP Marshal Jim Whitman, who has held the job for two terms and prior to that worked as a deputy, in a two-up race. To date, both have campaigned aggressively.
Whitman leans into his experience as a full-time law enforcement officer (Hammons hasn’t been) and a laundry list of Bossier establishment politicians and residents (which, very politically stupidly, Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler signed onto, which invites Hammons either to sabotage Chandler’s future initiatives – not that he has had many in five years – on the Council or if Hammons wins to set up a frosty relationship between the mayor’s and marshal’s offices), as one might expect an incumbent to do. And as one might expect a challenger to do, Hammons talks of creating more efficient operations for an office that does seem bloated and duplicative in comparison, especially as Whitman has drawn one of the highest salaries in the state for any elected official.
That emphasis on cost savings has been a hallmark of Hammons’ time on the Council. But he also broadens the field of battle by reminding of his avid support for meaningful term limits for city elected officials (except marshal and city judge) – embracing a popular measure but also a dig at Whitman, whose wife Vicki acted as part of a kangaroo court of a charter commission whose Jim Whitman’s political allies designed and tried to use to subvert the strict term limits measure eventually approved overwhelmingly by voters.
Across the river, once again Republican Shreveport City Councilor Grayson Boucher is taking on the now-incumbent James Jefferson. They originally met in a special election in 2023 and back then compensation also was an issue, with Boucher saying he would cut the marshal’s salary. Jefferson also was one of the highest paid elected officials in the state.
Like Hammons, Boucher has no full-time law enforcement experience, and like Hammons. besides coming from a council. also pledges to run things more efficiently. Like Whitman, although a Democrat, Jefferson is an incumbent with years of experience working in the marshal’s office and emphasizes that. Once difference is that Jefferson is black in a city with a majority black voting electorate, and that played a role in his comfortable past win over Boucher, who is term-limited on the Council
Yet the most contentious contest will come in the First District Attorney’s race (while the Twenty-Sixth will see incumbent Republican Schuyler Marvin win unopposed for a fifth term). Democrat incumbent James Stewart faces a challenge from Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh.
Stewart, perhaps predictably, is campaigning on his 12 years in office plus as an elected judge for many years prior, trying to bolster his experience credential with saying that he has improved operations that have led to reductions in crime. Seabaugh disputes that, arguing, for example, that endemic jail overcrowding in recent years has come from a four-fold increase in the amount of time Stewart’s office has taken to dispose of cases (through 2022) compared to four years prior to his assuming office. He also complains that too many lenient plea deals have emerged that release too many violent criminals, a contention which at least one statistical measure supports.
And the data do support Seabaugh’s claims that Stewart has not reacted well to stem crime through prosecutorial discretion. Comparing nine years of data (2016-2024) through Stewart’s terms – his first partial ending in 2020, and with data since 2024 incomplete – with the previous nine years of his predecessors, while annual violent crimes reported (using Shreveport and Caddo Parish data, which constitute almost every crime reported in the parish) per capita stayed around 0.0070 during his predecessors’ and his first term, it increased to 0.0082 during his current term. Yet his predecessors brought an annual average of 0.0316 criminal charges per capita while in his first term that dropped to 0.0269 and barely budged upwards to 0.0274 since.
In other words, in his first term charging by Stewart dropped 17 percent with a basically steady violent crime rate from his predecessors’ era, but when violent crime went up – possibly because of the previous decline in charging, which may be a product of “progressive prosecution” of not following through on arrests for minor crimes or pleading down violent crimes for lesser ones – by 17 percent, charging by him in the first two-thirds of his second term increased by just 2 percent. The argument is reasonable that Stewart slacked off and has responded insufficiently to escalating crime. Indeed, 2024 saw the violent crime rate at its highest level in this 2007-24 series at just under one per hundred, and 2023 at around 0.9 was third-highest, with 2007 in between.
Seabaugh is a superb campaigner who can make data like these stick with voters. But he will have his work cut out for him in facing Caddo voter demographics only a bit more favorable to a white Republican against a black Democrat than those of Shreveport. The presence of minor candidates in the contest makes it likely Seabaugh and Stewart will head to the December runoff election.
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