By Judith Roberts
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill visited Ruston on Tuesday to meet with various members of the community, including law enforcement officers and city officials, and to discuss the requirements and concerns of the parish.
When talking with individuals at the Lincoln Parish Public Safety Complex, Murrill said she understood needs in north Louisiana were often different from those in a larger city, such as Baton Rouge, but she wanted to understand and address them.
“It’s important for them to know that I’m here,” Murrill said, “and for you to know that I’m here for you in your town. You don’t just have to find me in Baton Rouge.”
In her discussion, Murrill covered topics of interest in her office, including a campaign to help sixth graders throughout the state to understand the dangers of vaping to using ICE to return illegal immigrants convicted of crimes back to their country of origin to facility needs for juvenile crime.
With vaping, Murrill said through NIL (Name, Image and Likeness), she had hired about 100 college athletes from every public university in the state to come talk to sixth graders about the dangers of vaping and THC.
“They’re just coming into middle school, and they are going to be faced with all of this if they haven’t already been when they’re in fifth grade or fourth grade,” she said. “The statistics are really shocking about the number of kids that are vaping. But we can still catch them in sixth grade when they’re kind of willing to listen to us, but they’re not going to really listen to me. I’m way too old for them to care about what I say. They think I sound like Mom or Daddy or more likely, Grandma and Grandpa. But they will listen to athletes.”
Murrill’s staff members confirmed that in Lincoln Parish, collegiate athletes were coming to speak to sixth graders at A.E. Phillips and Cedar Creek School.
“(The athletes) are somebody that (sixth graders) will listen to in order to deliver that message,” she said. “Let us know if you want to get us in your schools. We want to be out there. And we’ll keep coming back. We’ll keep coming back because next year we’ll have a whole bunch of sixth graders. It’s going to be an ongoing process for us.”
Another project her office is working on is using the Fugitive Apprehension Unit to coordinate more with ICE.
“One is that I’ve been discussing with the governor is enhancing our cooperation with ICE and using our Fugitive Apprehension Unit to be able cooperate more with ICE, to make sure that we are able to affect the final removal orders of people who are in our local and our state prisons,” she said. “There are 13,000 people in our state who have final removal orders just sitting out there waiting. About 8,000 of those are actually serving time in prison. We want to make sure that when they’ve released from prison, they’ve got a final deportation order. And then we want to make sure ICE comes in, picks them up and releases them.”
When Murrill asked Lincoln Parish Sheriff Stephen Williams what a pressing concern on his mind was, he answered juvenile crime, and she agreed.
“We continue to struggle with juvenile crime,” she said. “I don’t know how much y’all have up here, but we have kids, certainly in Baton Rouge and in New Orleans and in Shreveport, who are connected in some really violent crime.”
She said Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry was looking for solutions to juvenile holding facilities, and she would support him.
“There’s some money that I think is about to be put in to build some more juvenile facilities so that regionally we have more capacity,” Murrill said. “That is the biggest problem that we have is capacity and the right kind of facilities to be able to house them.”
Ruston Mayor Ronny Walker said having the state attorney general spend a half a day in the parish and engage with the community, from eating lunch with city officials to throwing out the first pitch at Tuesday evening’s Tech v. Grambling baseball game, showed her desire for engaging individuals in the parish.
“Just to come and be a part of our community speaks volumes about how much she really does care about this entire state,” Walker said. “It’s been great that she’s here and is willing to answer questions and be a part of law enforcement because we all need the help.”
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