The Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is stepping up its efforts to combat the rise of violent crime in the United States, including anti-carjacking task forces and a new “gun intelligence center.”
According to ABC News, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco admitted in a recent interview that there is “absolutely much more to do” in the crusade against violent crime, which has been on the rise in the aftermath of the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic and the almost entirely unpunished race riots of 2020.
“No level of violence is acceptable,” said Monaco while on a trip to Chicago this week. “We are seeing progress, but we’re far from done. We have to double down on the strategies that work, by bringing federal resources to act as force multipliers.”
One such measure is the establishment of a new “gun intelligence center” in Chicago’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosive (ATF) office. The center will see federal agents work together with state and local authorities to share firearm intelligence in a bid to crack down on traffickers and the most frequent shooters in the violence-plagued city.
“The goal is to catch more violent people, truly violent. And, second, to do a better job at seeing if we can prevent them from getting armed in the first place,” said ATF Director Steve Dettelbach. “The first days and hours after an incident are crucial to the investigation, and being able to have everybody together, looking at that data every single day and making decisions, is a real game changer.”
There has been a slight decrease in violent crime, with the FBI’s most recent data, compiled from roughly 80% of all U.S. law enforcement agencies, showing that murders dropped by 13% in the last three months of 2023, compared to the last three months of 2022. In the same time period, violent crime overall dropped by 6%.
But as carjackings have remained dangerously high, the DOJ has created new task forces to combat this trend as well, setting them up in seven U.S. Attorneys’ offices across the country. This brings the total number of such task forces in the country to 11. These groups include FBI and ATF agents, federal prosecutors, and state and local law enforcement. The aim is to have federal officials be involved with the beginning of carjacking investigations in order to use the full scope of their resources to better identify and apprehend the suspects, who will then most likely be prosecuted by local authorities.