Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Monday that federal agents alone are not sufficient to solve violent crime problems like those seen in Chicago again last weekend.
Mr. Blanche drew a clear distinction between cooperation at the street level versus cooperation at the political leadership level, saying the bottleneck is entirely at the top.
“What you have is a situation in Chicago, and you can contrast that to Washington, D.C. So, in Chicago, yes, there’s federal agents there, and they’re working cases, and they’re doing great work,” Mr. Blanche said during an interview on Fox News.
“But when there’s not a partnership with local leadership, it’s not the cops on the ground,” he said.
Mr. Blanche said it is always more effective when local leadership encourages the federal government to come in and help with crime.
“When that happened in D.C., as you just showed, it worked. We did it in Memphis and it worked,” he said, adding that it is shocking that Chicago’s leaders refuse help from the federal government.
President Trump’s top cop made the remarks following a bloody weekend in Chicago where at least eight people died, including teens, and dozens more were wounded by gunfire.
Mr. Trump reacted to the violence, calling out Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, saying, “… why isn’t Governor Pritzker calling me for help? I can make Chicago a safe city in one month.”
“In one year, it would be one of the safest. D.C. went from one of the worst to one of the safest cities in the country,” he said, referencing the 800 National Guard troops he deployed to the District of Columbia last year.
He placed the city’s police department under emergency federal control in an unprecedented move to combat crime in the nation’s capital and remove homeless encampments.
Mr. Pritzker has said federal intervention was not needed when the city faced other periods of street violence in the past. The Washington Times reached out to Mr. Pritzker for comment.
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