Jeff Sessions: ‘We are in danger’ of rising violence
Attorney general cites increased access to drugs
WASHINGTON Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered a dark view of America’s crime problem Tuesday, suggesting that increasing access to heroin and marijuana has put the country at risk of returning to the drugfueled violence that ravaged the country more than a generation ago.
Despite data showing that murder is at its lowest in decades, Sessions seized on a recent uptick in violent crime and warned state law enforcement officials gathered here that the numbers were “driving this sense that we are in danger.”
“Now we are at a time, it seems to me, that crime is going back up again,” Sessions told the National Association of Attorneys General. “Maybe we got a bit overconfident.”
In his first major speech as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Sessions also signaled that the Justice Department would depart from a frequently used Obama administration practice of suing local police departments to force reforms related to violations of excessive force policies, racial discrimination and other misconduct.
During the Obama administration, more than two dozen local law enforcement agencies — among them Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore; and Chicago — were the subjects of federal investigations into misconduct. Those inquiries often resulted in so-called consent decrees in which required reforms to policing operations are overseen by a federal judge. Ferguson and Baltimore police operations are subject to such court oversight, but Sessions has not decided how to resolve deep problems uncovered last month by federal investigators in Chicago.
“We need to help police officers get better rather than reduce their effectiveness, and I’m afraid we’ve done some of that,” Sessions said. “So, we’re going to pull back a little on this. I don’t think that it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights. I think it’s out of concern to make the lives of those, especially in poorer communities and minority communities, live a safer, happier life.”
Sessions said earlier this week that tensions between police and the communities they patrol, particularly in Chicago, have likely resulted in a pullback on basic policing activities and may be a factor in driving violent crime up.
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 Donald Trump have repeatedly cited concern about violent crime, despite data that have shown sustained long-term declines.
While murder jumped by 11 percent 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.”
“I do not believe this pop in crime is a one-time aberration,” Sessions said. “I’m afraid it represents the beginning of a trend.”
The new attorney general said that he had been “shocked” by the waves of overdose deaths attributed to heroin and its synthetic form, fentanyl, that continue to cut a particularly deadly swath through the Northeast and Midwest.
He also cited the increased legalization of marijuana, an issue he long railed against while an Alabama senator, as contributing to a culture of acceptance.
“I’m not sure we’re going to be a better, healthier nation if (marijuana) is being sold from every corner grocery store,” he said. “We don’t need to be legalizing marijuana, and we need to be cracking down on heroin.”