Attorney General Blanche Announces East Baton Rouge Parish as a Model Cities Initiative Winner
November 5, 2026 · The Justice Department · 0:41:30
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What happened
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that East Baton Rouge Parish had been designated a Model City by the U.S. Department of Justice and would receive nearly $64 million through the Model Cities Initiative over the next three years, according to the Department’s recording of the event. Blanche said the initiative, announced in June, would direct nearly $300 million in federal funding nationally, and that the selection had been competitive: 47 municipalities applied, 21 reached the semifinals, 11 interviewed before senior Justice Department officials, and four jurisdictions were ultimately chosen, as he stated the process.
Blanche said the funding would expand patrol and investigative capacity, add staffing for new specialized prosecution units, modernize the violent crime unit, and upgrade police technology and real-time crime-fighting capability in the parish. He cited the scale of the local problem as the Justice Department presented it: over two decades Baton Rouge’s homicide rate had averaged roughly three times that of large American cities, and from 2021 to 2025 police responded to more than 1,300 nonfatal shootings, more than 12,000 shots-fired reports, and more than 1,200 armed robberies, with aggravated assaults up 320 percent, as he stated the figures. He said resources would be concentrated especially in the ten hot spots where, he said, 46 percent of violent and drug crime occurs.
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, who also spoke at the event, said more than 1,100 lives had been lost to gun violence in East Baton Rouge Parish over the previous ten years and credited a federal-state operation in the parish with 185 arrests, dozens of fugitives apprehended, 45 firearms seized — 11 of them stolen — and 12 stolen vehicles recovered, as he stated the results. Landry also said homicides in the parish had fallen to their lowest levels ever this year, as he characterized the trend, and argued the parish had earned the designation by working across agencies rather than in isolation.
Why it matters
The Model Cities Initiative is the Justice Department’s flagship place-based violent-crime program under this administration, and the Baton Rouge award is its fullest single-city rollout: federal money tied to a locally built plan, with the operational planning and expanded enforcement slated to begin in the first weeks of 2027, as Blanche described the timeline.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard watch: the nearly $64 million Model Cities commitment to East Baton Rouge Parish over three years, announced November 5, 2026, with expanded law-enforcement operations slated to start in the first weeks of 2027 — a dated, checkable commitment flagged for the scoreboard editor; no verdict is entered here.
Sources: The Justice Department, “Attorney General Blanche Announces East Baton Rouge Parish as Winner of the Model Cities Initiative”, 2026-11-05 (official upload, embedded above; published 2026-11-05). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.
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