Nobody in the United States should have to be concerned about personal safety in the city where they live, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton told Newsmax on Monday.
Sexton was commenting on President Donald Trump's decision to send the National Guard to Memphis to combat crime in the city, which has the fourth-highest murder rate in the country, six times higher than the national average.
Sexton, a Republican, told Newsmax's "Wake Up America" that Tennessee has already been reducing crime through various measures, but he stressed that "we are always welcome to additional resources from the federal government to help combat crime," pointing out that had already been done recently before the decision to deploy the National Guard.
Sexton added that over the past couple of years, the state has provided more funding to high-crime ZIP codes in an attempt to target money where it is most needed.
The Tennessee House speaker said that "I think there's a problem within the Democrat Party ... I think some do want to be tough on crime, but the vast majority want to be soft on crime."
Sexton said that Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, "is a tough on crime individual. I understand he is being pushed left, but I think what he said in the end is we are going to welcome the National Guard here, and we are going to work to turn Memphis around and we're going to show how great Memphis is."
The speaker also emphasized that there is "a problem of perception and reality. Even if crime is going down, the perception by the public is that crime is not going down, and they are still being impacted ... but there should not be a mother alive in the United States or in Tennessee who feels like their child cannot walk home from school in the inner city, and that has to be cleaned up."
Sexton explained that problems with Memphis "started back during COVID when schools shut down and what happened was the gangs started recruiting individuals in high school ... who had nothing else to do. So we now have more than 100 different gangs in Memphis. They are short hundreds of police officers."
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Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.