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Sessions Vows to Get Tough on Crime, Citing Rise in City Violence Sessions Indicates Justice Department Will Stop Monitoring Troubled Police Agencies
(about 9 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions promised on Tuesday a return to more muscular law enforcement and a get-tough approach to drug trafficking and illegal immigration, saying that a recent spike in violence in some cities is “driving this sense that we’re in danger.” WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions indicated on Tuesday that the federal government would back away from monitoring troubled police departments, which was the central strategy of the Obama administration to force accountability onto local law enforcement amid rising racial tensions.
His pledge to commit more federal energy to fighting crime — even as crime rates remain near historic lows — previewed a theme that President Trump is expected to emphasize during his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. In his first speech as attorney general, Mr. Sessions did not name any specific cities, but he blamed Justice Department scrutiny from afar for undermining the effectiveness of the police across the country. It was a clear reference to the aggressive efforts of the Obama administration to oversee law enforcement agencies charged with civil rights abuses.
In his first official speech since he was sworn in this month, Mr. Sessions told members of the National Association of Attorneys General that he was concerned that the rise in violence in some cities was not “a one-time blip” but rather “the beginning of a trend.” “We need, so far as we can, in my view, help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness,” Mr. Sessions said in remarks to the National Association of Attorneys General. “And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that. So we’re going to try to pull back on this, and I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.”
A rise in violence in some large cities, including Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis, drove a 10.8 percent increase in murders in 2015, according to the F.B.I.’s most recent data from September. The Trump administration, Mr. Sessions said, is working “out of a concern to make the lives of people in particularly the poor communities, minority communities, live a safer, happier life so that they’re able to have their children outside and go to school in safety and they can go to the grocery store in safety and not be accosted by drug dealers and get caught in cross-fires or have their children seduced into some gang.”
Even so, crime remains far below the 1970s and 1980s, when illegal drugs and gang violence pushed crime rates to new heights. Some Democrats accuse Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions of exaggerating the threat. Echoing President Trump’s dark vision of crime in the United States, Mr. Sessions said that rising violence in some big cities was “driving a sense that we’re in danger” — even as crime rates nationwide remain near historic lows. Monitoring police departments, Mr. Sessions added, did not help.
With Mr. Sessions as a key adviser, Mr. Trump used a return to law and order as one of the pillars of his presidential campaign, often speaking in dark and dystopian tones about crime. He sounded that theme at his inauguration as well, pledging to stop “this American carnage.” “One of the big things out there that’s, I think, causing trouble and where you see the greatest increase in violence and murders in cities is somehow, some way, we undermine the respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult,” he said.
In his talk on Tuesday, Mr. Sessions laid out no specific new plans for combating crime, speaking instead in broad themes about what he described as a complacent national mood over crime. “Maybe we even got a bit overconfident” about safety as crime rates continued to plummet, beginning in the 1990s, he said. A rise in violence in some large cities, including Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis, drove a 10.8 percent increase in murders nationwide in the most recent data from the F.B.I. last September. Even so, crime remains far below the 1970s and 1980s, when drugs and gang violence drove crime rates to new heights, and some Democrats accuse Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions of exaggerating the threat.
Part of his agenda, he said, would be to improve relations between residents and the local police, whose mission he said had been undermined in recent years amid escalating tensions over police shootings of minorities. At the close of the Obama administration, the Justice Department issued a scathing report on systemic civil rights abuses at the Chicago Police Department and set the stage for negotiations with the city for a federal monitoring agreement.
Some Democratic officials in the audience on Tuesday pushed back against Mr. Sessions, particularly over his pledges to increase deportations of illegal immigrants. But prospects for a deal now look doubtful, with Mr. Sessions saying this week that he was unimpressed by the report and openly questioning the value of such agreements.
Xavier Becerra, the new California attorney general, told Mr. Sessions that the Trump administration’s immigration policies were “causing a lot of fear throughout our state,” even among immigrants who were in the country legally, and had discouraged immigrants from coming forward as witnesses to crimes. Mr. Sessions spoke as his influence within the Trump administration has become increasingly apparent. In the past week, he has shunted aside two key Obama administration civil rights decisions — protecting transgender students and Texas minority voters — and vowed to recommit federal resources to fighting crime, drugs and illegal immigration, a theme he repeated on Tuesday in his address to the law enforcement officials.
After a bruising confirmation battle, Mr. Sessions appears poised to topple a range of other practices that he often challenged as a conservative senator from Alabama, including the Obama administration’s phasing out of new prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
Mr. Sessions was the first senator to support Mr. Trump’s campaign last year, and was picked to formally nominate him at the Republican National Convention in July. He has now leveraged his early loyalty to vault to a strong position in the cabinet: At an Oval Office meeting last week, the president sided with Mr. Sessions when Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, initially opposed rolling back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, officials said.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions bonded in the campaign over their shared desire to secure the borders, crack down on illegal immigration and reduce crime that both men depicted as out of control.
Mr. Sessions’s aggressive early steps at the Justice Department — promising that the federal government will do more on drugs and crime and leave civil rights issues to the states — has buoyed a number of conservatives.
“I think he’s right,” Doug Peterson, the Republican attorney general in Nebraska, said after listening to Mr. Sessions pledge what amounted to a new war on drugs at a speech on Tuesday in a Washington ballroom. He also said that he agreed with Mr. Sessions’s decisions to defer to the states on things like the use of bathrooms for transgender students. “I appreciate the attitude he’s taken,” said Mr. Peterson, whose state was among a dozen that challenged the transgender decision by the Obama administration. “It’s really a separation of powers issue.”
While civil rights advocates and liberal groups say that a number of the stances Mr. Sessions has taken were not unexpected, they remain troubled. The focus on states’ rights — which some see as a code phrase for segregation in the civil rights era — is particularly worrisome, they say.
“Trump went out of his way to select an attorney general who had a history of hostility” to immigrants’ rights, minority protections and other issues, said David Cole, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union who testified in the Senate against Mr. Sessions’s nomination. “Thus far, all signs are that Sessions is playing to type.”
Meanwhile, the department’s reversal of its legal policy this week in a major voting case in Texas signals that other voting rights cases could be in peril, as well.
One of the most closely watched cases is in North Carolina, where the courts have ruled that a state voting measure was designed specifically to disenfranchise minorities. The Obama administration helped fight to overturn the law, but Mr. Sessions has not said what he will do. That case is now bottled up by political infighting between the legislature and the governor.
As a former federal prosecutor and a senator for two decades, Mr. Sessions is one of the few Washington insiders in the Trump cabinet. The White House sees him as a man with the political experience to provide a legal framework for many of the president’s more controversial policies — such as his travel ban, which has been blocked by the courts.
Beyond Mr. Sessions’s influence, at least a half-dozen of his former Senate aides are entrenched in prominent spots in the administration. The most notable among them is Steven Miller, a White House aide who has pushed a hard-line stance on immigration and helped craft the president’s controversial travel ban targeting seven predominantly Muslim countries. The measure was blocked in federal court, and the administration is now rewriting it.
Mr. Sessions’s imprint can be seen in a number of the new administration’s directives on immigration restrictions, arrests and deportations, said Jayashri Srikantiah, a law professor at Stanford University specializing in immigration law. But not all of Mr. Sessions’s views on immigration have won favor in the White House: While he has pushed aggressively in the past to deport so-called Dreamers — those undocumented residents brought to the United States as young children — the Trump administration has left Obama-era protections for that group intact so far.