Attorney General Merrick Garland visits Chicago and says feds are targeting gun trafficking in cities that are ‘really suffering’

A day after Chicago saw a series of mass shootings in a matter of hours, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared in the city Thursday to meet with police and community leaders as the Justice Department launches new efforts to stem the flow of illegal firearms here.

Garland, who grew up in north suburban Lincolnwood, began the day in Washington, D.C., to announce the formation of strike forces aimed at going after gun traffickers in several cities, including Chicago, at a time when urban America had seen spikes in gun violence.

He then traveled to Chicago to meet with U.S. Attorney John Lausch, who will oversee the local strike force, as well as police and community leaders, officials said.

Garland also traveled to the Harrison District police station on Chicago’s West Side to visit its “strategic decision support center,” a nerve center that crunches crime data and helps police supervisors determine where to deploy cops.

Flanked by numerous officials, Garland walked slowly through a hallway in the station where he was greeted by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, police Superintendent David Brown and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

Several local and federal law enforcement and city officials followed him into the cramped nerve center, where a police officer and crime analyst guided Garland through the numerous TV screens that crowded the room.

The screens showed video surveillance of street corners, a map and information about suspects accused of crimes on the West Side.

Asked about how the strike forces will be different from last federal efforts In Chicago, Garland said the feds are learning from past initiatives to be more effective here.

“We’re learning from the past. This is a particular tactic,” Garland said at his second stop of the day, at St. Agatha Catholic Church. The strike forces would work against networks of gun-trafficking, he said.

The networks “bringing the guns into the city, (and the strike forces) trying to take those down,” Garland said.

He was asked how the new initiative is different from Operation Legend, a federal law enforcement anti-violence strategy instituted by former President Donald Trump’s administration.

“This is just one piece of the overall package ... a set of tactics aimed at a particular kind of problem,” Garland said.

Late Thursday, Lightfoot said she had a “very good visit” with Garland and thinks the task force will make a significant difference by coordinating federal resources against gun trafficking across state lines.

Many guns in Chicago are streaming across the border from neighboring states and the South, and the task force will put more focus on the issue, Lightfoot said.

“I feel very, very confident of that,” the mayor said.

“(Some) have said, ‘Well, there’s no additional resources,’ that’s not the point,” Lightfoot said. “It’s focused coordination, collaboration, across state lines. That’s going to be a game-changer.”

Lightfoot also said people in Chicago neighborhoods are more afraid of federal prison time. Echoing Lightfoot, Brown said the “real benefit” of federal help is that it will allow illegal gun purchases to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Later in the day, Garland participated in a group discussion with a community organization that mediates gang conflicts and provides support for people most at risk of being a party to violence, either as a victim or perpetrator.

That meeting was held at St. Agatha, about a mile south of the police station.

That stop was symbolic for two reasons: It’s within a few blocks of two mass shootings that happened Wednesday evening, leaving nine people wounded and a 15-year-old boy dead. And it’s the headquarters for READI Chicago, an anti-violence organization that helps people at risk of being involved in violence with therapy, job training and other support.

President Joe Biden’s administration has pushed for $5 billion in funding for groups like READI, short for Rapid Employment and Development Initiative.

At a news conference during the visit, Garland walked jovially into a classroom at the church, remarking quietly about how it was “weird” that he was apparently told by his entourage to stand over an empty chair to address reporters. There, he alluded to his Chicago visit as a homecoming for him, but he sought to draw on his “considerable experience” prosecuting violent street gangs as a way of showing familiarity with the type of gang problem that has plagued Chicago for decades.

He said prosecutions of violent criminals these days are now contingent on “community support” coupled with advancements in technology to help law enforcement fight crime.

The strike forces will be led by Lausch and other U.S. attorneys in their respective cities.

“We’re going to try and mesh it up with grants for communities,” Garland said, “to prevent violence, to interrupt violence and to provide the kind of relationship from the police and the community necessary to build trust.”

Afterward, he walked into another part of the church appearing more relaxed without his blazer, and sat in a circle with Durbin and members of READI, including its Senior Director Eddie Bocanegra, and lauded the group’s efforts to prevent violence on Chicago’s streets.

“We do have money for violence prevention and violence intervention, and what we want to do is find the programs that really work, help them as much as we can in the cities which are really suffering, and then transport that policy around the country to other cities,” Garland told the group.

The strike forces — a mix of federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other law enforcement agencies — will be tasked with identifying and disrupting pipelines that are responsible for bringing illegal guns onto city streets. Law enforcement officials for years have blamed lax gun laws in neighboring states like Indiana and Wisconsin for making it easier for Chicago criminals to obtain guns when they’re not allowed to own them.

Biden’s administration announced similar strike forces being formed New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area/Sacramento region and Washington, D.C.

The teams are the latest strategy in the federal government’s effort to fight gun violence, and Chicago has been a focal point of that fight.

Last year, under the Trump administration, Chicago and other cities received a surge of federal agents to fight violence as part of Operation Legend, named in honor of 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed in Kansas City, Missouri. In Chicago, the operation involved a few hundred federal agents from the ATF, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service.

Chicago police and other big-city police departments routinely work with federal law enforcement on criminal investigations. Such partnerships over the years have included Project Exile, aimed at shifting more gun prosecutions to federal court for tougher penalties, and Project Safe Neighborhoods, designed to better coordinate federal resources and local intelligence on crime.

One of the key missions of the federal anti-violence effort is also to be more aggressive in going after straw purchasers, people who make legal purchases of guns on behalf of criminals. Such rogue purchases can potentially be made under the noses of licensed firearms dealers, even in Illinois where the gun laws are considerably stricter than Indiana and Wisconsin.

Garland’s visit comes as Brown on Monday announced a separate strategy to expand the department’s own firearm investigation efforts.

The Police Department announced that a dedicated 50-person unit, which started work last weekend and consists of already existing teams of cops, will go after illegal gun traffickers, including straw purchasers.

The department will also focus on people who have guns even though their state-issued firearm owner’s identification cards have been revoked, Brown said. He said his new effort, first organized in the spring, will “complement” the federal gun-trafficking strike forces.

Brown is facing pressure from aldermen and other critics of the Police Department who want a quick reduction in shootings and homicides that have crippled parts of the city this year.

Homicides were down 3% over 2020 with 410 homicides, statistics show, 11 fewer than last year. But shootings — incidents where at least one person was shot fatally or nonfatally — were up 9% over last year and 60% over 2019, according to official CPD statistics through Sunday.