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Republican lawmakers push state control over Democratic cities
Alabama state Sen. Kirk Hatcher, a Democrat, speaks outside the Alabama State House in March against a Republican-sponsored bill that could allow the state to take control over Montgomery's police department. In recent years, Republican lawmakers in GOP-led states have pushed for state takeovers of police departments and other municipal agencies. (Photo by Ralph Chapoco/Alabama Reflector)
In late March, a handful of Black faith leaders gathered on the steps of the Alabama State House to protest a bill that could allow the state to seize control of the police force in the capital of Montgomery.
Supporters of the Republican-sponsored proposal cast it as a response to Montgomery’s police officer shortage and public concern over unchecked crime.
Opponents called it a power grab aimed at a Democratic-led, majority-Black city, pushed by Montgomery’s white Republican state senator over the objections of the city’s mayor, police chief and its other state senator, a Black Democrat who represents a larger swath of the city.
“We’ve seen this before. This is nothing new,” Richard Williams, lead pastor of Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Montgomery, told reporters and others gathered for the news conference. The bill “empowers the state to remove elected Black officials from their operational control of the Montgomery Police Department.”
The following day, the Alabama Senate’s Republican supermajority shut down any debate on the bill and approved it. Kirk Hatcher, Montgomery’s Black state senator, and other Democrats were not allowed to speak on the Senate floor until after it passed. The measure now awaits a vote in the House.
Similar efforts have played out in recent years in other states — including Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee — as Republican lawmakers push for state takeovers of police departments and other municipal agencies in Democratic cities that often have significant Black populations.
Society is collectively tolerating the loss of democracy in these limited pockets. They don’t understand it’s going to come for them eventually.
– Louise Seamster, a sociologist at the University of Iowa
Conservative lawmakers frame their proposals as necessary for improving public safety or financial accountability. Critics say the takeover efforts undermine democracy by overriding local control, exceeding the traditional bounds of state power while perpetuating racist stereotypes.
Many of the nation’s big cities with the highest murder rates are located in Republican-led states but are governed by Democrats — a dynamic that fuels tension between state and local leadership.
“It’s frustrating for the citizens of Montgomery whenever they’re the victims (of crime) and their neighbors are victims,” Alabama Republican state Sen. Will Barfoot, who represents a slice of Montgomery, told fellow legislators on the Senate floor in March. “You know that at the very least that it’s partially because Montgomery doesn’t have the law enforcement officers that they need.”
Barfoot did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.
The Montgomery Police Department hasn’t publicly released its staffing figures. Barfoot said on the floor that while he hadn’t been able to get those numbers, he estimated the department has around 220-230 officers, which he said falls short of the roughly 400 it would need to be staffed effectively.
In Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe put the St. Louis police department under the control of a state-appointed board last year. Kansas City, Missouri, is the only other major city police department under state control. That arrangement dates from 1939, when the state assumed authority to combat corruption.
In 2023, Mississippi’s white Republican supermajority gave the state-run Capitol Police expanded jurisdiction over the state capital of Jackson, which has been called the “Blackest City in America,” and created separate appointed courts for the affluent, whiter parts of the city.
In Tennessee, state lawmakers are trying to create a state-controlled tourism board to oversee millions in surplus cash generated by Nashville. It’s the latest in a line of moves by the Republican-controlled state legislature to exert more influence in Democratic-led Nashville, including over its metro council, airport authority, electrical utility, and even its sports authority.
“Society is collectively tolerating the loss of democracy in these limited pockets,” said Louise Seamster, a sociologist at the University of Iowa whose research has focused on politics and urban development. “They don’t understand it’s going to come for them eventually.”
Echoes of division
The state-local power struggle over the St. Louis police department dates to the eve of the Civil War. White secessionist leaders in Missouri took control of the St. Louis police to keep its officers from fighting against the Confederacy. Kansas City’s arrangement dates back to post-Civil War Reconstruction, when state lawmakers were trying to limit Black political influence and civil rights gains. Kansas City briefly regained control in 1932 before the state reasserted itself seven years later.
At the time of Reconstruction, the growth of Black governance was seen as a major threat to white political power at the local and state levels, Seamster said.
“All kinds of political arrangements, up to legalized and unsanctioned violence, were carried out to reset things to what white people in power thought was the norm, which was them in charge,” she said.
Fast-forward to the Obama era: In a 2012 ballot initiative, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved returning control of the St. Louis police department to the city.
But Republican state lawmakers tried in 2023 to repeal the measure, claiming St. Louis’ leaders at that time couldn’t decrease crime on their own. The effort failed after a nine-hour Democratic filibuster.
GOP lawmakers got it passed in 2025 with the backing of Kehoe, who’d made the effort a priority of his first year in office. He said state control would give law enforcement the tools it needed to combat high crime rates.
Missouri Democrats, noting that crime rates were decreasing, called the measure racist; Black Democrats held the city’s major offices at the time.
St. Louis has one of the highest homicide rates in the nation, though police officials said their data shows the murder rate dropped to its lowest level in two decades during the first three months of 2025.
In Michigan, researchers found, financial stress alone didn’t explain municipal takeovers. Residents’ race and economic status, as well as a city’s reliance on state funding, were better predictors of state intervention, according to a 2021 study from University of Michigan researchers.
“Black communities show signs of being successful or having access to resources that might increase their autonomy or ability to develop,” said Seamster, who has studied city-state conflicts over resources. “Then it is often a trend where, formally or informally, white communities step in to take it back.”
In 2019, the Republican-led Georgia state legislature tried to take over operation of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, one of the busiest in the world, citing concerns over safety and corruption. Atlanta City Hall had been embroiled in a sprawling corruption scandal that eventually resulted in federal charges against multiple city staffers.
Then-Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms denounced the move as an “act of war” against the Democratic city, long a national hub of Black culture and business.
Many of the cities targeted for state intervention struggle with the kind of persistent poverty and structural disadvantages that contribute to higher crime rates.
Cities’ finances and power get siphoned away in myriad ways, Seamster said, from reduced state financial support or required power-sharing with a larger county, to more subtle changes, such as state decisions on how federal block grant funding is distributed that give cities less to work with.
Taking back power
Baltimore regained control of its police department last year after voters twice approved a ballot measure in the wake of a decade-long fight for local control. The police department had been under some form of state control since the Civil War.
Lifelong resident Ray Kelly became interested in the issue when a student in his community was arrested. He soon learned that to lobby for changes in the department, he’d have to leave Baltimore for the state capitol in Annapolis, nearly an hour’s drive south.
“Accountability starts at home, so the first place we naturally think we should go if we have an issue in our community is to our local representative,” he said, “and for 160 years the local representative had no authority, so it was like banging your head against the wall.”
Kelly is now executive director of the Citizens Policing Project, a nonprofit that was part of a coalition of Maryland organizations that worked for years to get the ballot initiative passed.
In the year since Baltimore gained control of its police, the Baltimore City Council has been holding regular public hearings on public safety.
They’re “packed,” Kelly said, adding that one hearing had such a huge turnout that both the hearing room and the overflow room were full, with even more residents standing outside to listen.
Kelly counts that as one visible and positive result of getting local control restored.
“The ultimate goal is to have local people be able to shape how the operations of the police department happen on a day-to-day basis, and not have to travel all the way to Annapolis to do it,” he said.
“People will be more involved as they learn we don’t have to write the state senator anymore, and we can just go to City Hall.”
Missteps and breathing room
Barfoot, the Alabama Republican state senator who represents a portion of Montgomery, told lawmakers he’s gotten more calls and messages about his bill proposing a takeover of the Montgomery police department than any other piece of legislation in his eight years in office.
Most of them have been supportive, he said.
Montgomery citizens, he said on the Senate floor, are “tired of turning on the news and hearing about the violence that we’ve had here in Montgomery. We’re tired of having the thefts that are occurring. We’re tired of having the robberies, the home invasions. And believe me, that is across Montgomery.”
He pointed to other large cities in Alabama that he said had a much higher number of officers per 1,000 residents than Montgomery, and criticized the city for going through five different police chiefs in the past seven years.
Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed and Hatcher say Barfoot never consulted them before introducing the bill. Barfoot acknowledged those “missteps” on the Senate floor, but said he’d since held a public hearing and said those leaders didn’t reach out to him, either. The current police chief spoke against the bill before lawmakers.
Montgomery leaders say the bill unfairly singles out their city. As written, it applies only to Montgomery and Huntsville, a Republican-led city. It would give law enforcement in those cities five years to have a certain number of police officers per resident before the state steps in.
After Huntsville leadership approached lawmakers with concerns about the bill, sponsors lowered the staffing requirements to 1.9 officers per 1,000 residents to give Huntsville some “breathing room,” Barfoot told local media. Huntsville now meets the requirements.
But Montgomery is about 150 officers short of the bill’s mandate, Barfoot estimated. If it doesn’t hire the required number of officers within five years, the state can take over and charge the city for filling those vacancies.
Williams, the Montgomery pastor, called that restitution clause a “financial weapon.”
After the Senate passed the bill, Hatcher chastised his Republican colleagues for withholding resources from people who need it and voting against public safety measures that law enforcement wants. An Alabama law enacted in 2022 allows gun owners to carry a handgun without a permit, background check or safety training.
“What I’ve come to believe is that when everybody around you has everything they need, that’s the safest we will be,” Hatcher said. “When people have health care, when people have food, SNAP benefits, that’s the safest we’ll be.”
Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
