Gov. Jeff Landry asked for soldiers on Bourbon Street and kept them there for eight months. The line cooks, dishwashers, and hotel housekeepers who work those blocks walked past them on their way to clock in every shift.
The last 120 troops finished their final French Quarter patrol Monday. Louisiana National Guard spokesperson Lt. Col. Noel Collins said the mission formally ends Aug. 31. It came to a close because the calendar ran out. The workers on the street never got a say in whether it should.
The deployment started in late December, when 350 troops rolled in ahead of New Year’s, one year after a New Year’s Day attack killed 14 revelers on Bourbon Street. The governor extended them through August after the original plan had been to pull out after Mardi Gras in February.
Here is what eight months of a “public safety” patrol looks like from inside the Quarter.
Take the line cook at the breakfast place off Bourbon who comes in at 5:30 a.m. She is making about $14.50 an hour. Her rent on a one-bedroom in the Marigny is around $1,650 a month, which eats close to half her take-home before she buys groceries. For eight months, her walk home at 2 p.m. has ended behind a Louisiana soldier in camouflage at the same back door she has used for nine years.
Take the dishwasher in the same kitchen. He is making about $12 an hour. He shares a two-bedroom in New Orleans East with three other men and sends as much as he can home. He takes the streetcar to work because he cannot afford a car, and for eight months now he has stepped off the streetcar at the same stop where a soldier is standing.
Take the hotel housekeeper on Royal Street, a mother of two in her thirties. She is making about $15 an hour. Her shift starts at 7 a.m. For eight months, her bus stop has been a stop where a soldier has been standing since the year turned over.
The soldiers were fine. Most of them were fine. The governor asked, the president answered, and the men and women who actually run the Quarter went on doing their shifts around the soldiers the way they had done their shifts around everything else that landed on those blocks — without being asked whether the troops should be there.
That is how a thing like this works, in plain words.
A friendly governor asks for federal troops. A friendly president sends them. Federal taxpayers, through the Title 32 mechanism this administration has used to put troops on the ground in other Democratic-led cities earlier — Washington and Memphis — pick up most of the bill. A comparable Guard deployment runs into the many millions a month in pay, lodging, meals, transportation, and equipment. The exact New Orleans figure has not been published, and may never be.
The guardsmen themselves are paid their regular military wages, plus Title 32 active-duty benefits. For a young Guardsman with a family, a deployment like this is real money. That part is not the wrong. The wrong is what the deployment was used for and how long it was kept.
The troops leave Aug. 31. What stays is the precedent. New Orleans had federal soldiers on its streets for eight months past a pretext that had already passed. The same thing happened in Washington and Memphis. The same friendly governor and the same friendly president can run it again whenever they want, against whoever runs whatever city next.
And the security gap the troops had been filling goes with them. NOPD has been short-staffed since before the deployment began. Whatever supplement NOPD got from the federal presence ends on Aug. 31. The city will pay for the next eight months out of its own pocket — either NOPD overtime and outside contracts, or a lower security baseline on the busiest tourist blocks in the South. The line cook, the dishwasher, and the housekeeper will be working through whichever version the city picks.
That is the negotiation they are never asked into. When next New Year’s rolls around, they will still be there, clocking in past whatever the soldiers do or do not. That is what the last eight months has proven about them.