AGENCIES TRADITIONALLY UNINVOLVED IN LOCAL CASES
Washington’s Superior Court handles local criminal cases, and it is where most people arrested in the city end up. Federal agencies were rarely involved in such cases before the crackdown.
Those cases do not include more than 30 filed in federal court in recent weeks – mostly for gun-possession offences or assaulting federal officers – or people detained for immigration violations. Its recent dockets also do not include some of the people picked up on warrants in older cases.
The records submitted by police and prosecutors in the Superior Court show federal agents assisting police with routine drug busts, searching people seen drinking alcohol in public or behaving suspiciously, and chasing down and arresting people who fled when they were approached by large groups of officers.
“The American taxpayer is not spending all this money for highly trained special agents to replicate local law enforcement. The idea is to do the cases that local law enforcement can’t,” said Jeff Cohen, who was until recently a top legal adviser at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said the effort removed more than 1,000 dangerous criminals from the streets in August, including gang members and people who have committed violent crimes, abused children and sold deadly drugs. Reuters could not verify that figure, in part because the government has not identified the people arrested.
“These are not ‘minor infractions,’ and any attempt to downplay the operation’s success is not only false, but an insult to the victims of these criminals,” Rogers said.
The Justice Department said in a statement that sending 2,500 personnel from 20 agencies to Washington has reduced crime and made the city safer, and that any suggestion to the contrary is “not based in reality”.
Notably, many of the cases reviewed by Reuters that resulted in gun and drug seizures began with police stopping people committing minor infractions. Sometimes agents from as many as six federal law enforcement agencies accompanied the police.
While some drug arrests were for small quantities, many involved large enough amounts to qualify for possession with intent to distribute charges. A vehicle search on Aug 20 yielded 1.65 pounds of marijuana and led to two arrests, and three days later, another turned up 36 ounces.
