Thank you, Matt for that kind introduction and thank you for
your leadership at OJP. Thank you also
for your service as United States Attorney for the Northern District of
Iowa. Your colleague Matt Whitaker is
now my chief of staff and, perhaps more importantly, a former tight end who
helped take the Hawkeyes to the Rose Bowl.
It is good to be home.
And I’m especially happy to be with so many of Alabama’s law enforcement
leaders:
Attorney General
Steve Marshall
All three of our
U.S. Attorneys: Jay Town, Louis Franklin, and Richard Moore
U.S. Marshal Marty
Keely
Birmingham Police
Chief Patrick Smith
Jefferson County
Sheriff Mike Hale
Hoover Police
Chief Nick Derzis.
This is a distinguished crowd. We’ve also got law enforcement leaders here
from across the nation:
Head of ATF, Tom
Brandon
Director of our
COPS Office, Phil Keith
Jon Adler,
Director of BJA
Darlene
Hutchinson, Director of OVC and proud Alabamian
Paul Abbate of FBI
Associate Director
of Operations Derrick Driscoll of the Marshals Service
Southern Indiana
U.S. Marshal Dan McClain, and
Deputy Chief of
Operations Paul Knierim of DEA.
Of course I also want to thank the leaders of the PSP
program who made today possible: Co-Directors Kristie Brackens and Theodore
Miller.
There are many more law enforcement leaders here today. The people in this room represent some of the
finest law enforcement agencies anywhere in the world and I am proud to be here
with you.
We have with us today United States Attorneys, Police
Chiefs, and Prosecutors from the 21 PSP cities.
That includes U.S. Attorneys Benjamin Glassman, Josh
Minkler, Andrew Birge, Donald Cochran, Justin Herdman, Brandon Fremin, and
Trent Shores. Thank you all for being
here and thank you for your leadership as United States Attorneys.
On behalf of President Donald Trump I want to thank everyone
here for your efforts to maintain law and order in America. Make no mistake about it: President Trump is
a law and order president.
President Trump took office with a mission, a mandate from
the American people to restore public safety.
Big mistakes were made, some saw police as the problem. And
as a result, in the last two years of the previous administration, the violent
crime rate went up by nearly seven percent.
Assaults went up nearly 10 percent.
Rape went up by nearly 11 percent.
Murder shot up by more than 20 percent.
That’s what was happening when he took office.
This was especially shocking because from 1991 to 2014,
violent crime had dropped by half.
Murder dropped by half. So did
aggravated assault. Rape decreased by
more than a third, and robbery plummeted by nearly two-thirds.
From the beginning I have said, and let me say this loud and
clear again: we will not let that progress slip away. We are determined, resolutely to get back to
reducing crime rates.
The day I was sworn in as Attorney General, the President
sent me three Executive Orders that have guided the work of this Department
ever since. We embrace the orders.
First, he ordered me to enhance officer safety and to “back the
blue.” Second, he ordered me to
dismantle the transnational criminal organizations and the cartels that are
responsible for so much of the violent crime in this country. And third, he ordered me to reduce crime in
America—not to preside over ever-increasing levels of crime. Some people think that crime levels are like
the tides—going up and down and there’s nothing you can do about it. But not this President, and not this Attorney
General. He believes that law enforcement
can bring down crime rates—and he’s right.
PSP is one way the Department is helping you do that.
When I took office, it had already been tried on an
experimental basis in a few cities. As
the results came in, it became clear to me that PSP is effective. And that
effectively supports the centerpiece of the departments violent crime reduction
efforts, the successful Project Safe Neighborhoods Program.
For instance, in Compton—outside of Los Angeles—PSP helped
local police develop a five-year plan to reduce gang violence. Over the three year trial period, this led to
1,124 felony arrests, 445 seized firearms, 80 pounds of seized explosives, 88
pounds of seized cocaine, 13 pounds of seized heroin, and 18 pounds of seized
fentanyl—potentially enough to kill thousands of people.
In Milwaukee, PSP helped local police identify a violent
crime hot spot and then reallocate resources there. Homicides are down by 17 percent in the
hotspot and non-fatal shootings are down 38 percent. City-wide, police reduced non-fatal shootings
by 16 percent.
In Little Rock, PSP helped local police hire additional
crime analysts, improve access to data, and trace the connections between
crimes. As of July, homicides had
decreased by 22 percent. Aggravated
assaults were also down 16 percent and violent crime overall was down by a
quarter.
These are very significant results.
The evidence was clear to me—and so I decided that PSP was a
worthy investment for this Department.
PSP helps us carry out the President’s orders because it
supports our state and local partners—and that helps reduce violent crime. That’s a win-win.
PSP makes us a force-multiplier for you because it brings
together the expertise of our federal agents with the manpower of the 85
percent of law officers in this country who serve at the state and local
levels. It takes our resources and
provides them to the officers with the street-level intelligence that can lead
to national and even international cases.
Last summer, we started with 12 cities.
We sent our diagnostic teams to find out where violent crime
is rising—and why it is rising. Our
diagnostic teams are working in Baton Rouge, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Houston,
Lansing, Kansas City, Jackson, Tennessee and Springfield, Illinois.
We want to help you find the most violent criminals—and put
them behind bars.
In New York City, police call them the Alpha Criminals. These are often gang leaders and criminals
who recruit others to join their criminal activity. New York’s success shows clearly that if you
take these people off of the streets, it stops them from committing more crimes
and it stops them from recruiting others to a life of crime.
But we are not just diagnosing the problem. We are also helping to solve it.
Our operations teams are on the ground in Memphis, Toledo,
Indianapolis, and just down the road here in Birmingham.
And PSP is already delivering successes for your cities.
In Indianapolis, Josh Minkler assigned an AUSA to each
patrol district to focus on drug and gun crime cases. ATF has also placed one agent in each
district, and assigned a crime analyst to focus solely on NIBIN cases. As of July, Indianapolis reported that their
homicide clearance rate went from 40 percent last year to 70 percent so far
this year. We’re bringing more murderers
to justice.
In Memphis, police identified a crime hot spot where nearly
a quarter of the city’s homicides had occurred in 2016. Thanks to PSP, homicides are down by 27
percent in that precinct and business robberies are down 26 percent.
In Toledo, the ATF has helped local police use NIBIN to find
connections between shooting incidents.
After nine months, we had prosecuted 150 percent more firearm defendants
in Toledo than over the same period in 2017.
And right here in Birmingham, during a recent operation, ATF
arrested more than 20 violent gang members charged with more than 800 crimes,
averaging three felonies each. Officers
seized more than 70 firearms as part of this operation. Jay is working with local prosecutors to
determine the most appropriate jurisdiction in which to prosecute each of these
criminals.
There are a lot more successes we could talk about.
And I’m confident that there are a lot more successes ahead.
Last month I announced that we will be expanding PSP—sending
diagnostic teams to Saginaw and Salisbury and sending our operations teams to
Kansas City, Miami, and Tulsa.
Congratulations to each one of those cities—and thank you for making a commitment
to reduce violent crime. I’m pleased to
see that they are well-represented here today.
Congratulations to Chief Robert Ruth of Saginaw, Chief Jerry Stokes of
Salisbury, Deputy Chief David Bosworth of Kansas City, Deputy Chief Ronald
Papier of Miami, and Major Luther Breashears of Tulsa.
I am confident that each one of your cities will see the
kind of improvements that we have seen in places like Indianapolis, Memphis,
and right here in Birmingham.
We are going to keep supporting PSP—because PSP is
supporting you financially and morally.
Today I am announcing the next steps in our support for your
officers.
The Department will provide funding for ballistic technology
and improved investigative practices through Crime Gun Intelligence Centers in
the following cities:
$798,000 for
Indianapolis
$714,000 for
Memphis
$634,000 for Baton
Rouge, and
$800,000 for
Tulsa.
We are also providing funding for technology improvements
for the collection, storage, sharing and analysis of criminal justice
data. This includes:
$500,000 for Houston
$417,000 for
Memphis, and
$492,000 for
Toledo.
And while I am here in Birmingham, I want to mention another
initiative to provide federal expertise to local law enforcement.
Since 2013, 650 school resource officers have been trained
through our partnership with the National Association of School Resource
Officers, or NASRO, which is based right here in Hoover. We have also provided funding to NASRO to
expand and update their existing curriculum.
Today I am announcing that the Department will provide
$200,000 to NASRO, and that they will use this funding to train school resource
officers all across America. We are
currently in the process of developing an on-line training program with NASRO
to increase the reach of training efforts.
Today’s grant will result in training of approximately 230 school
resource officers.
That will help us follow through on President Trump’s
promise to make America’s schools safer.
Our efforts are having an impact.
I believe that the Trump administration’s policies are good
for law enforcement in your cities and good for the communities that we serve.
In 2017, the Department of Justice brought cases against the
greatest number of violent criminals in a quarter of a century—the most since
we started keeping track. It may even
have been the most ever.
We also charged the most federal firearm prosecutions in a
decade.
And we’re not just putting people in jail for the sake of
putting people in jail. The evidence is
already starting to come in that our efforts are bearing fruit.
Preliminary data show that both the violent crime rate and
the homicide rate are beginning to head back down.
Public data from 61 large cities suggest that violent crime
overall was down in those cities in the first six months of 2018 compared to
2017. The overall violent crime rate in
those cities is down nearly five percent and murder is down more than six
percent.
Our good friends at the Brennan Center project that the
murder rate in our 30 biggest cities will decline by 7.6 percent this
year—bringing the murder rate back down to 2015 levels in those cities.
And I am announcing today the FBI will release its annual
Uniform Crime Report, which will show that violent crime and murder have
stopped rising and actually declined in 2017.
That is something that we all should celebrate.
Those are the kind of results you get when you support law
enforcement. Those are the kind of
results we get when we work together.
And so we’re going to keep up this pace. We’re going to keep supporting you. We’re going to keep arming you with the
tools, resources, and expertise that you need to make your communities safe.
Each one of you can be certain about this: we have your back
and you have our thanks.
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