Remarks as Delivered
Thanks everybody. Thanks, Amy. Thanks to everybody from the team at the Office of Justice Programs. Thanks, Karhlton, and everybody from the Bureau of Justice Assistance.
I know how hard it is to put something like this together and how much work. And I greatly appreciative everyone’s efforts.
Thank you, Mayor Hogsett and Chief Taylor for welcoming us to Indianapolis. We are grateful to both of you for being here today and for hosting us. Mayor Hogsett, as a former U.S. Attorney, we regard you as one of our own, and we are grateful that you are here.
I also want to recognize the state and local law enforcement leaders, city and town leaders, and community partners who have traveled from across the country to be here for the next three days.
I speak for all of us at the Justice Department when I say that your perspectives and your insights are invaluable to us. We have an enormous amount of respect for the work you do every single day in your communities.
And speaking of all of us at the Justice Department, I really mean that. I am also joined here this morning by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, whom you all know well.
Also here are leaders from each of the Department’s law enforcement components, the ATF, FBI, DEA, and U.S. Marshals Service; 40 of our United States Attorneys and senior leaders from U.S. Attorneys’ Offices across the country; leaders from the Office on Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office), the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) , the Office for Access to Justice (ATJ); and many other components.
I am ERY pleased that all of them are here; I am very proud of their work.
Convenings like this one, with our law enforcement and community partners, are always important to us at the Justice Department. We know that the best time to build relationships across agencies and jurisdictions is before a crisis or an incident occurs in our communities.
But this is an especially critical time in our work together to keep our communities safe.
Today, we are confronting a global threat environment that makes it particularly urgent for us to remain vigilant in the face of risks of terrorism and hate-fueled violence.
We are closely monitoring the impact that the conflict in the Middle East may have in inspiring foreign terrorist organizations, homegrown violent extremists, and domestic violent extremists both in the United States and abroad.
And all of us have seen the extremely sharp increase in the volume and frequency of threats against Jewish, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities across our country since October 7. The fear that so many communities are feeling is palpable.
This comes at a time when law enforcement agencies and communities across the country have already been facing significant challenges in the form of violent crime.
We are here together today because we know that no one law enforcement agency, no one community, no one town or city can address these challenges on its own. We need each other. We need to work together.
We are also here in Indianapolis for the same reason that all of us came to public service in the first place: we believe that everyone in our country deserves to feel safe and to be safe in our communities.
Every person, in every neighborhood, deserves to feel protected. Every parent deserves to know that their children will be safe when they play outside.
Violent crime is not just a threat to people’s physical safety; it is a threat to their ability to freely go about their daily lives. Violent crime isolates people and their communities. It deepens the fractures in our public life. And when it is not addressed, it can undermine people’s trust in the government and in each other.
Combating the threat that violent crime poses to people’s safety, and to our shared future, is what motivates us at the Justice Department every day.
Shortly after I was sworn in as Attorney General, we launched our Department-wide Violent Crime Reduction Strategy aimed at addressing the spike in violent crime during the pandemic.
Central to that strategy is the importance of our partnerships.
That includes partnership among federal law enforcement agencies assisting in the fight against violent crime; partnership with the local communities harmed by that crime; and partnership with the state, local, Tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies protecting those local communities every day.
Another element of that strategy is the recognition that the best anti-violent crime strategies are tailored to the needs of, and are developed with, individual communities.
That’s why one of the first things we did was focus on strengthening Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). We oriented the program around a set of principles that put community partnerships, community trust, violence prevention, and measuring results at the center of our efforts.
Since then, each of our U.S. Attorneys’ Offices has worked with its partners in state and local law enforcement to develop and implement data-driven, district-specific, anti-violent crime efforts.
Our U.S. Attorneys have brought together law enforcement, research, and community partners to develop PSN programs designed to focus on the drivers of violent crime in their communities. And I am proud of the work they have done. To give just a few examples:
Right here in Indianapolis, less than two weeks ago, a PSN case out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana brought together its partners at the FBI’s Indianapolis Field Office and the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department to secure the conviction and sentencing of a repeat violent offender.
In the Middle District of Florida, the office’s PSN strategy has focused not only on the investigation, disruption, and prosecution of violent crime, but also on targeted outreach to members of the community, including students, community leaders, and people incarcerated in state prisons nearing their release dates. This outreach is aimed at preventing violence before it occurs.
And in the Northern District of Alabama, the office created a PSN program, the Operation Safe Families Initiative, to combat the domestic violence that is driving a significant part of the violent crime in that district. In Jefferson County, Alabama, domestic abusers annually commit more than 70% of the homicides.
The Northern District of Alabama’s PSN program brings together — in one building — federal and local prosecutors as well as law enforcement, victim service providers, and other partner agencies.
This program gives victims of domestic violence a place to go that can meet their needs — not just in terms of pursuing enforcement options against the perpetrator, but also in regaining a sense of safety and well-being.
Like PSN, the National Public Safety Partnership, or PSP, is focused on strengthening partnerships across communities to tackle violent crime.
PSP makes DOJ tools and expertise available to local law enforcement agencies as they work to address the unique challenges of their communities. Sites participating in this program are able to consult with and receive training, technical assistance, and an array of Department resources to combat violent crime.
Today I want to welcome the newest sites participating in PSP this year, all of which are represented here today.
- Knoxville, Tennessee;
- Minneapolis, Minnesota;
- Raleigh, North Carolina;
- San Antonio, Texas; and
- Vallejo, California;
You join more than 50 communities that have worked with DOJ personnel, outside experts, and each other to better understand and tackle the violent crime challenges specific to their communities. We look forward to working together with you.
In addition to PSN and PSP, the Justice Department is putting to use every resource at our disposal in the fight against violent crime.
This includes our prosecutors, who are going after the recidivists and gangs that are responsible for the greatest violence.
This includes our law enforcement components, each of which is working with its state and local law enforcement partners to seize illegal guns and deadly drugs.
And this includes our grantmaking components, which are working closely with communities across the country to provide targeted support and assistance.
We are funding evidence-based, community-centered initiatives aimed at preventing and disrupting violence. We are funding community policing efforts that build the public trust between law enforcement and the community that we know is essential to public safety.
And we are making critical investments in hiring more law enforcement officers in communities nationwide to address the crisis in recruitment and retention to support much-needed resources for law enforcement officer health and wellness.
As we work with our partners nationwide to implement community-tailored approaches to combating violent crime, we also recognize that there are universal challenges that require a comprehensive approach. That includes the epidemic of gun violence.
And that is why ATF is working with its state and local partners to trace more firearms than ever before in its history.
That is why we are operating Crime Gun Intelligence Centers in every ATF Field Division to coordinate comprehensive tracing and ballistics analysis. These centers, which are represented here today, allow state and local law enforcement agencies to harness the power of ATF’s ballistics database and firearms-tracing technologies. This information helps lead them to the repeat shooters who fuel violent crime.
In addition, all 94 of our U.S. Attorneys’ Offices are bringing gun trafficking cases under the new provisions of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Those provisions have given us new authorities to go after gun traffickers and straw purchasers responsible for flooding our communities with guns. Our prosecutors have now charged nearly 300 defendants under that Act and seized hundreds of firearms in connection with these cases.
I have mentioned several examples of how the Justice Department is working to implement our partnership-based violent crime strategy.
In implementing that strategy, we have generated a wealth of resources shaped heavily by the feedback we have received from all of you.
But information is only as helpful as it is accessible. That is why, today we are releasing a new publication through the Office of Justice Programs, our Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap.
We have spent two and a half years using every available resource to combat the violent crime spike, and this is a guide to the programs and strategies that we have seen work.
We have seen them work in the District of New Jersey. There, federal, state, and local law enforcement have worked together to target their resources on the individuals and organizations that were primarily driving violent crime in five target cities with the worst violent crime. These efforts have paid off, as the number of shootings have decreased significantly in New Jersey, statewide.
And we have seen them work in the Eastern District of Michigan, where the U.S. Attorney’s Office has partnered with both law enforcement and the community to drive down violent crime in Detroit.
Through the One Detroit Partnership, they have aggressively prosecuted the primary drivers of violence, worked with community groups to prevent violence from occurring, and collaborated with corrections experts to support those who are returning to the community to ensure they do not return to violence.
This kind of partnership works: recent data from the Detroit Police Department indicate that this year the city is on track for the fewest homicides in Detroit in over 60 years.
It is our hope that the Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap provides a starting point for communities across the country to learn about resources available to help them replicate these efforts.
As I said at the start of my remarks, all of our communities are facing urgent and unprecedented challenges today.
But I am encouraged by the data we have been seeing indicating a recent decline in homicides. The FBI has reported that the number of homicides fell over 6% nationally between 2021 and 2022.
And earlier this year, the Major Cities Chiefs Association reported an over 10% decrease in the number of murders across 69 major cities through September of this year, compared to the same time period last year. These developments are encouraging. But this is not a time to relax our efforts. We have so much more to do.
I am even more encouraged by your presence here.
We know that the only way to replicate what is working and to bring violent crime down in every community is learning from each other and by investing in our partnerships.
I know that is what you’re going to be doing over the next three days.
Our work together is our best hope to fulfill the promise that brought us all here — that we will protect each other.
Thank you for your commitment to that work.