Republican-controlled state governments are opening an explosive new front in their decadelong drive to exert more control over the decisions – and decision makers – in Democratic-run cities and counties.
From Florida and Mississippi to Georgia, Texas and Missouri, an array of red states are taking aggressive new steps to seize authority over local prosecutors, city policing policies, or both. These range from Georgia legislation that would establish a new statewide commission to discipline or remove local prosecutors, to a Texas bill allowing the state to take control of prosecuting election fraud cases, to moves by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey to dismiss from office elected county prosecutors who are Democrats, and a Mississippi bill that would allow a state takeover of policing in the capital city of Jackson.
“If left unchecked, local jurisdictions in states with conservative legislatures whose political majority does not match their own may find themselves subject to commandeering on an unprecedented scale,” said Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a leading civil rights group.
The growing efforts by red states to seize authority over law enforcement in blue cities is drawing energy from the convergence of two powerful trends.
One is the increased tendency of red states to override the decisions of those blue metros on a wide array of issues – on everything from minimum wage and family leave laws to environmental regulations, mask requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, and even recycling policies for plastic bags. The other is the intensifying political struggle over crime that has produced an intense pushback against the demands for criminal justice reform that emerged in the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“A lot of this criminal justice reform preemption is in direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Marissa Roy, legal team lead for Local Solutions Support Center, a group opposing the broad range of state preemption efforts.
Many of the red state moves to preempt local district attorneys have targeted the so-called “progressive prosecutors” elected in many large cities over recent years. But there is also an unmistakable racial dimension to these confrontations: In many instances, state-level Republicans elected primarily with the support of White, non-urban voters are looking to seize power from, or remove from office, Black or Hispanic local officials elected by largely non-White urban and suburban voters.
“There’s a strong hint of discrimination because most of the prosecutors they are coming after are black women, or [other] people of color who don’t line up with a hard-core lock ‘em up philosophy,” said Gerald Griggs, a criminal defense attorney and president of the NAACP in Georgia.
