Trump sending federal agents to Chicago, Albuquerque and Kansas City as part of Operation Legend
A law enforcement panel reacts on 'Fox & Friends.'
President Trump announced Wednesday afternoon a “surge” in the federal effort to quell the violent crime that is spiking in major American cities.
The effort is along the lines of what Rich Lowry and I discussed on The McCarthy Report podcast last week, and in a column I wrote earlier this month about potential federal approaches to violent crime.
As we’ve noted, there was no need to re-create the wheel here. There is abundant law that gives federal agencies jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute violent crime.
PORTLAND BANS POLICE FROM WORKING WITH FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT
Just as significantly, the federal government (the U.S. attorneys’ offices, the FBI, DEA, other federal agencies, and the U.S. courts) not only has a longstanding presence in our nation’s biggest cities.
For decades, we’ve also had federal-state task forces, which are joint investigative efforts involving the police and prosecution agencies of the federal, state, and municipal governments to combat gang crime and its staples — street-level narcotics trafficking and gun crimes.
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The president, with elaboration from Attorney General Bill Barr, explained that the new effort is called “Operation Legend,” in honor of LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old boy who was senselessly shot to death in his sleep last month when a still-unidentified gunman opened fire on his family’s apartment in Kansas City.
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Barr detailed that Operation Legend had already commenced with a ramp-up of federal agents in Kansas City, where 200 arrests were made in a two-week period. The initiative is now being expanded to two other cities with soaring crime, Chicago and Albuquerque.
Amid a litany of bloody statistics, Trump noted that 23 people were shot in Chicago just Tuesday — 15 of them at a funeral home, where respects were being paid to a man who’d been killed in an earlier drive-by shooting.
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