Andrew McCarthy: Trump's 'Operation Legend' relies on longstanding federal-local cooperation to quell crime
The initiative is now being expanded to two other cities with soaring crime.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}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.
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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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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}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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