Johnson Questioned on Deploying National Guard to His Louisiana Area

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Friday defended the Trump administration for mulling a broader deployment of National Guard troops to major cities to fight crime, but he was noncommittal when it came to a federal law enforcement crackdown in his own district.

“I don’t know, that’s not my call,” Johnson said in an interview on CNN’s “News Central” when asked if the National Guard should be deployed in Shreveport, La. “It may be necessary; I don’t know. Let’s take one city at a time and see.”

“We have to address the crime problem in any city where it is, if it’s a problem like that,” he added.

President Trump declared a public safety emergency, took control of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and activated National Guard troops in the District of Columbia earlier this month as part of a sweeping crimefighting endeavor.

The administration has hailed the effort as a success. The president also floated using similar tactics in other crime-plagued cities across the country but has primarily focused the idea on Democrat-led cities in states that lean blue.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) sent about 135 members of the state’s National Guard to the nation’s capital this month to aid Trump’s efforts in the district.

Shreveport the most populous city in the northwest Louisiana district that Johnson has represented since 2017 has a higher crime rate than D.C. and outpaces the state of Louisiana as a whole, according to FBI Uniform Crime Reporting statistics. CrimeRate, an independent analysis of crime statistics, deems Shreveport’s violent crime as being “higher versus other cities of the same size.”

“FBI statistics, actually, [show] violent crime per 100,000 residents higher in Shreveport last year than Washington, D.C.,” CNN’s John Berman told Johnson on air Friday.

The lawmaker pushed back, insisting that “there’s a lot of good work that’s been done,” but the Speaker conceded that the city has struggled.

“We have a Democrat [district attorney] there who has not been prosecuting crime as some other more aggressive D.A.’s have around the country,” Johnson said. “But I’ll say that it’s an urban area that has a lot of problems that are happening around the country, and we have to address it.”

The Caddo Parrish district attorney’s office, which covers the area, didn’t immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.