Sessions vows to get tough on crime

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions promised Tuesday a return to more muscular law enforcement and a get-tough approach to drug trafficking and illegal immigration, saying a recent spike in violence in some cities is “driving this sense that we’re in danger.”

In his first official speech since he was sworn in this month, Sessions told members of the National Association of Attorneys General he was concerned the rise in violence in some cities was not “a one-time blip” but rather “the beginning of a trend.”

A rise in violence in some large cities, including Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis, drove a 10.8 percent increase in murders in 2015, according to the FBI’s most recent data from September.

Even so, crime remains far below the 1970s and 1980s, when illegal drugs and gang violence pushed crime rates to new heights. Some Democrats accuse Trump and Sessions of exaggerating the threat.

With Sessions as a key adviser, Trump used a return to law and order as one of the pillars of his presidential campaign, often speaking in dark and dystopian tones about crime. He sounded that theme at his inauguration as well, pledging to stop “this American carnage.”

In his talk Tuesday, Sessions laid out no specific new plans for combating crime, speaking instead in broad themes about what he described as a complacent national mood over crime. “Maybe we even got a bit overconfident” about safety as crime rates continued to plummet, beginning in the 1990s, he said.

Part of his agenda, he said, would be to improve relations between residents and the local police, whose mission he said had been undermined in recent years amid escalating tensions over police shootings of minorities.

Some Democratic officials in the audience Tuesday pushed back against Sessions, particularly over his pledges to increase deportations of unauthorized immigrants.

Xavier Becerra, the new California attorney general, told Sessions the Trump administration’s immigration policies were “causing a lot of fear throughout our state,” even among immigrants in the country legally, and had discouraged immigrants from coming forward as witnesses to crimes.