Justice Dept. stance worries some
WASHINGTON - For three decades, America got tough on crime.
Police used aggressive tactics and arrest rates soared. Small-time drug cases clogged the courts. Vigorous gun prosecutions sent young men from their communities to faraway prisons for long terms.
But as crime rates dropped since 2000, enforcement policies changed. Even conservative lawmakers sought to reduce mandatory minimum sentences and to lower prison populations, and law enforcement shifted to new models that emphasized community partnerships over mass arrests.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions often reflects fondly on the tough enforcement strategies of decades ago and sees today’s comparatively low crime rates as a sign they worked. He is preparing to revive some of those practices even as some involved in criminal justice during that period have come to believe those approaches went too far, for too long.
“In many ways with this administration, we are rolling back,” said David Baugh, who worked as a federal
prosecutor in the 1970s and 1980s before becoming a defense lawyer in Richmond, Virginia. “We are implementing plans that have been proven not to work.”
Sessions, who cut his teeth as a federal prosecutor in Mobile, Alabama, at the height of the drug war, favors strict enforcement of drug laws and mandatory minimum sentences. He says a recent spike in violence in some cities shows the need for more aggressive work. The Justice Department said there won’t be a repeat of past problems.
“The field of criminal justice has advanced leaps and bounds in the past several decades,” spokesman Ian Prior said. “It is not our intention to simply jettison every lesson learned from previous administrations.”
Sessions took another step back from recent practices when the Justice Department announced last week that it might back away from federal agreements that force cities to make major policing overhauls. His concern is that such deals might conflict with his crimefighting agenda.
Consent decrees were a staple of the Obama administration’s efforts to change troubled departments, but Sessions has said those agreements can unfairly malign an entire police force.
It’s the latest worry for civil rights activists fretting about a return to the kind of aggressive policing that grew out of the drug war, when officers were encouraged to make large numbers of stops, searches and arrests, including for minor offenses. That technique is increasingly seen as more of a strain on police-community relationships than an effective way to deter crime, said Ronal Serpas, former police chief in New Orleans. He was a young officer in the 1980s when crack cocaine ravaged some communities.
Sessions’ approach is embodied in his encouraging cities to send certain gun cases to tougher federal courts, where the penalties are more severe than in state courts, and defendants are often sent out of state to serve their terms.
He credits one such program, Project Exile, with slowing murders in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1990s. Its pioneer was FBI Director James Comey, who was then the lead federal prosecutor in the area. In the community, billboards and ads warned anyone caught with an illegal gun faced harsh punishment. Homicides fell more than 30 percent in the first year in Richmond, and other cities adopted similar approaches.
But studies reached mixed conclusions about its long-term success. Defense lawyers such as Baugh said the program disproportionately hurt the black community by putting gun suspects in front of mostly white federal juries, as opposed to state juries drawn from predominantly black Richmond jury pools that might be more sympathetic to black defendants.