Gov. Mike Parson was against federal intervention before he was in favor of it.
It was 2013, and the Missouri Senate was debating the so-called Second Amendment Prevention Act. The name, like many legislative monikers, was a misnomer. The purpose of the bill was to nullify federal gun laws. All of them, past, present and future.
Parson was a state senator at the time, and like every other Republican in the Senate, he voted for the bill, more than once. Here’s why that matters today:
In the version of the bill that was vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, in 2013, and in some versions of it when it returned in 2014, the bill would have criminalized the act of federal officials coming into Missouri to enforce gun laws.
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I doubt the topic came up last week when Parson stood at the podium next to U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, and St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, as they announced that the federal government’s Operation Legend was coming to St. Louis to battle the rising homicide rate. About 50 federal agents will be coming to the city to help local police investigate violent crime. Never mind that just a few years ago, it was the policy of the Republican Party in Missouri — and almost became state law — that each of those agents could have been held liable in both civil and criminal court for daring to enforce federal gun laws, even in an attempt to reduce violent crime in St. Louis or Kansas City, or Hannibal or Springfield.
Here’s how then-Attorney General Chris Koster the law was in a letter to lawmakers before it died in a veto session:
“When a police officer in the City of St. Louis recovers a fully automatic machine gun from a drug dealer’s car, should the matter no longer be sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Office because the federal Gun Control Act of 1934 outlawed the weapon?†Koster wrote.
Even after Koster’s letter, Parson voted for the bill.
Now, facing a tough election battle in which he’s failed to stem the tide of two simultaneous pandemics — crime and the coronavirus — he’s falling back on that most ancient of Republican bromides, he’s acting as though he’s tough on crime. He’s asking for federal intervention and called a special session in which lawmakers are considering making it easier to put 14-year-olds in prison.
It’s the same as it ever was.
Like in 1993, when St. Louis had a spike of 267 homicides, and there was federal intervention, and legislative debate, and press conferences with the U.S. attorney and mayor and governor. This time it’s Operation Legend. Previously, it was Operation Cease Fire and Operation Safe Streets and Project Safe Neighborhoods. Officials name these surges after military operations because that’s the only solution they’ve ever tried.
But each time, in the ’80s, the ’90s, after another crime spike in 2001, and several times already in the new century, the solution is the same, only the names change. More cops. More jails. “Unprecedented†federal cooperation as though the exact same script followed a decade previously wasn’t precedent.
Crime will drop for a bit but then we’ll fail to invest in the neighborhoods where it happened, or prop up the local schools, or do anything about guns, or poverty, or systemic racism. In a month or two, right before the November election, Parson and Krewson and Jensen will stand before a big table with guns and drugs and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. And the next generation of young Black children will wake up in the same neighborhood where mom has to take two buses to get to work, and state lawmakers are doing everything they can to make sure the family can’t access food stamps or health care or after-school programs.
In 1993, amid that round of federal intervention into St. Louis crime, University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld had a suggestion:
“I’d like to see the state and our city respond to the 267th or 268th homicide with the same level of material and moral energy that we devoted to the Great Flood of 1993,†he said. “We have a flood of violence in our city.â€
It hasn’t happened, of course. These days, the local prosecutor doesn’t even get invited to the discussions, because she’s a Black woman trained as a nurse who would like to see crime treated more like the public health problem that it is.
Imagine if just once we treated the crime pandemic like we’re treating COVID-19, with billions of dollars invested in sustained housing, food and job aid, with suspended utility cutoffs and a moratorium on evictions.
No, let’s do the same old thing, and slap a new name on it.
Call it Operation Rinse and Repeat.