Attorney General Jeff Sessions vows new violent crime fight
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions reaffirmed a commitment Monday to elevate violent crime reduction as one of his top priorities as the nation's chief law enforcement officer, suggesting that a recent uptick in murder likely foreshadowed deeper public safety problems across the country.
"We're going to focus on some things to reduce crime in America...Something is happening out there,'' Sessions told reporters, offering a preview of a scheduled Tuesday address before the National Association of Attorneys General.
From gun crime and illegal drugs, including marijuana, Sessions signaled that the Justice Department was poised to take tougher enforcement stands.
While the Obama Justice Department vowed not to challenge state laws that allow for medical and recreational marijuana use as long as it did not involve minors or cover for organized trafficking, Sessions said he was troubled by "violence'' associated with the drug's use and distribution.
"There is more violence around marijuana than one would think,'' he said, declining to elaborate.
Sessions, a former federal prosecutor and Alabama attorney general, said he was most troubled by a spike in violent crime in 2015 and preliminary data from last year that appear to reinforce those concerns.
Both the attorney general and President Trump have repeatedly cited concern for violent crime, despite data which has shown sustained long-term declines.
While murder jumped by 11% in 2015, the biggest one-year increase in more than 40 years, the overall rate remains the lowest in decades. A December analysis of the 2016 overall crime rate in the nation's 30 largest cities by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice found that the rate was expected to remain roughly the same as 2015, indicating that rates "will remain near historic lows.''
Read more:
Cannabis industry roiled by White House comments on enforcement
Trump: 'I haven't called Russia in 10 years'
Sessions, however, said he was following through on Trump's executive order to create a crime reduction task force. He said discussions about the mission of the panel already have taken place with the Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service.
"We are going to reinvigorate our department from top to bottom,'' the attorney general said. "I want to see (federal) gun prosecutions go up. I do think that aggressive prosecutions of federal gun laws will decrease the number of shootings and murders.''
Saying that he was "really worried about'' the continuing surge of gun violence in Chicago, Sessions declined to commit to pursuing a court-enforced consent decree to resolve the findings in a January Justice Department investigation, concluding that the local police department was beset by widespread racial bias, excessive use of force, poor training and feckless oversight of officers accused of misconduct.
"Community fear and police disengagement is the worst thing that could happen,'' Sessions said of policing problems that have emerged in cities across the nation in recent years. In Chicago, the attorney general said, a "dramatic reduction in (police) stops and arrests has to to be a factor in violence in the city.''
