Public Safety

Background

Safety isn't a talking point. It's a promise you make to the people in your life — your students, your neighbors, your kids. Lauren has spent 17 years in classrooms and knows what it feels like to run an active shooter drill with 10-year olds and pretend it's normal. It shouldn't be normal. And in Louisiana’s 1st District, on too many issues that touch our safety, the people we send to Washington have stopped showing up for us.

Gun Violence Prevention

Steve Scalise has an A+ rating from the NRA. He survived being shot on a baseball field in 2017. Yet months later, he led House Republican opposition to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major federal gun safety law in nearly 30 years. That bill funded crisis intervention, closed the "boyfriend loophole" for domestic abusers, and strengthened background checks for buyers under 21. He called it an attack on the Second Amendment. It passed anyway, with 14 Republican votes. His vote wasn't one of them.

And the numbers back up why that fight mattered. Louisiana has the second-highest rate of gun deaths in the country, just behind Mississippi. Nearly 1,300 people died from gun-related injuries here in 2023 alone. Firearms are the leading cause of death for Louisiana kids ages 1 to 17, and our child gun death rate is close to three times the national average. As a teacher, Lauren has experienced this personally, losing several students to gun violence during her career. And unlike the rest of the country, where gun suicide makes up the majority of gun deaths, in Louisiana the majority are homicides. This isn't primarily a mental health story, it's a community violence story. The trend is getting worse, not better: gun deaths in Louisiana rose 49% from 2014 to 2023, and gun homicides rose a staggering 86%, both far outpacing the national increase. In 2024, the state repealed its concealed carry permit requirement, meaning you can now carry a loaded gun in public with no background check and no training. Our gun law ranking dropped from 26th to 33rd in the country as a result.

Lauren is not interested in taking anyone's guns. She is interested in keeping them out of the wrong hands. Those are different things, and Louisiana voters know the difference.

Community violence

Real public safety isn't just about the moment a crime happens. It's about everything upstream of it including mental health care, youth programs, quality and stability in our schools, strong public infrastructure, economic opportunity, and law enforcement that has the staffing and training to do its job well. Cutting those investments doesn't make us safer. It just moves the cost somewhere else, usually onto emergency rooms and jails.

Over-policing and overcriminalization

Louisiana locks up more of its people, per capita, than any democracy on earth and we have an incarceration rate of roughly 1,067 per 100,000 residents. This is a distinction the state has held for decades. Louisiana's own bipartisan Justice Reinvestment Task Force looked at the numbers and found the honest answer: it isn't because Louisiana has more violent crime than its neighbors. It's because Louisiana sends people to prison for nonviolent offenses — drug possession most of all — far more often than almost anywhere else. That's not public safety. That's a policy choice, and it's an expensive, generational one that falls hardest on Black communities, who make up about a third of Louisiana's population but roughly two-thirds of the people behind bars.

And right here in Louisiana’s 1st District, we've seen where unchecked surveillance leads. Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies once arrested and jailed a man named Randal Reid for days for crimes he didn't commit because facial recognition software wrongly flagged him as a match even though he had never even been to Louisiana. The Sheriff's Office later settled the lawsuit. That's what happens when departments lean on unproven, racially biased technology instead of real investigative work. In New Orleans, police were caught running real-time facial recognition surveillance in violation of the city's own ordinance. This was done quietly, for years, without telling the public they were doing it. Watching everyone doesn't make anyone safer. It erodes the trust that actually keeps communities and police working together, and it's communities of color who pay the price first.

Lauren’s Priorities in Congress

• Pass sensible gun legislation that keeps everyone safe. This includes supporting universal background checks, red flag laws that give families and law enforcement a real tool to intervene before tragedy, and closing the loopholes that let domestic abusers and stalkers slip through.
• Fund school safety infrastructure and mental health staffing
• Invest in proactive measures that have been shown to prevent crime. Fully fund community mental health and crisis response, so police aren't the only number to call in a mental health emergency. Support competitive pay, real staffing levels, comprehensive sensitivity and de-escalation training, and body cameras for local and state law enforcement. Back proven community violence intervention programs, especially in the neighborhoods that need them most.
• Protect survivors and victims. Close remaining gaps in domestic violence protections and make sure survivors have a real path to safety, not just a restraining order and a prayer.
• Address over-policing and surveillance overreach by requiring real transparency and independent oversight before any department deploys facial recognition, license plate readers, or predictive policing tools– and ensure real consequences when they break their own rules.
• Oppose treating poverty, addiction, and homelessness as crimes when what people need is treatment and housing.
• Push to redirect Louisiana away from a nonviolent-offense pipeline toward diversion and treatment that actually reduces reoffending
• Eliminate all federal contracts with private prisons.
• Work to create a framework for national decriminalization of marijuana.