Federal Agencies Assist Local Law Enforcement Agencies With Crime

CBS St. Louis

May 27, 2021

As the St. Louis metro area heads toward a holiday weekend and summer, wheels are in motion to make the entire area safer. On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the Department of Justice is engaging federal workers to assist local St. Louis jurisdictions in reducing crime. This means police agencies across the St. Louis metro area will be able to lean on federal agencies like the DEA, ATF, and FBI to help reduce crime.
The strategy announced is three-pronged. Here's its details: First, it establishes a set of four fundamental principles to be applied department-wide to guide violent crime reduction:

1. Build trust and earn legitimacy. Meaningful law enforcement engagement with, and accountability to, the community are essential underpinnings of any effective strategy to address violent crime, as well as important ends in themselves. Accordingly, building trust and earning legitimacy within our communities is the foundation on which the strategy is built.
2. Invest in prevention and intervention programs. Violent crime is not a problem that can be solved by law enforcement alone. Accordingly, the Department must invest in community-based violence prevention and intervention programs that work to keep violence from happening before it occurs.
3. Target enforcement efforts and priorities. The Department is most effective when it focuses its limited enforcement resources on identifying, investigating, and prosecuting the most significant drivers of gun violence and other violent crime.
4. Measure results. Because the fundamental goal of this work is to reduce the level of violence in our communities, not to increase the number of arrests or prosecutions as if they were ends in themselves—we must measure the results of our efforts on these grounds.

Second, the strategy enhances the Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) program by directing all U.S. Attorneys across the country to update their PSN programs to be aligned with the Department’s guiding principles to improve community engagement, support proven community-violence intervention programs, develop strategic enforcement plans in coordination with state, local, and Tribal law enforcement partners as well as community groups, and measure the effectiveness of these collective efforts to reduce violence.