Memphis to be second city to get federal law enforcement program targeting violent crime

Memphis is now the second city in America to receive additional federal law enforcement assets to combat violent crime, and gang-related crime, through a program that was piloted, and saw success, in Houston just over a year ago, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday morning.

The program, known as the Violent Crime Initiative (VCI), combines manpower from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Department of Justice's Criminal Division and Memphis Police Department.

"In September of last year, we established the VCI in Houston, Texas, and focused on specific neighborhoods where data showed that gang-related violence was impacting the community," Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri, from the DOJ's criminal division, said at a press conference Tuesday. "In its first year, the Houston VCI made great strides. To date, we have prosecuted over 50 members and associates of violent gangs to hold accountable those who sought to harm and disrupt the Houston community."

Argentieri said the program focuses on specific areas where violent crime is concentrated most-heavily, and will bring seven additional prosecutors from the DOJ's criminal division to Memphis. The focus of the initiative, and heavy investigative work, is placed on the shoulders of the ATF, and its National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) that is used to connect crime scenes to the same firearm.

It was most recently used in Memphis to connect three different scenes that left four women dead, and another injured, after a family member shot each of them over the course of a day.

"We intend to use this information to make sure that we're focusing our efforts, focusing these resources, on the few people that are the trigger pullers," ATF Director Steven Dettelbach said Tuesday. "Because all the evidence shows that those individuals hurt people again and again and again. By interrupting that shooting cycle, interrupting that cycle of violence, we can actually make a difference."

According to Dettelbach, the ATF had tracked down 174,700 leads after evaluating 510,896 bullet casings across the country from Jan. 1 this year to Sep. 30. In Tennessee, he said, 30,400 shell casings translated to about 8,000 leads.

"The second point I want to make is actually not to the good people of Memphis, but to the very few who are out there doing these things, and it's a warning," Dettelbach said. "You need to stop...because it's not good for the people in Memphis. But, as importantly, you need to stop because it's not going to be good for you. We're not done by a longshot here. We're not going anywhere. And to the people who are doing these crimes, there's a lot more of us good people, who care about following the laws, than there are of you. And we're not anywhere near being finished, and you're going to find that out in the next month."

Though the initiative will not strictly target gang-related violence, FBI Memphis Special Agent in Charge Doug DePodesta said the violent crime Memphis is seeing rise is "overwhelmingly the result of violent gangs," though when asked to quantify the proportion of violent crimes that have been traced to gangs, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee Kevin Ritz said his office does not "have numbers to provide, but I can tell you that we have data and information about the threat that the gangs pos4e, and we are acting upon that information."

"...Director [Dettelbach] speaks very compellingly about all of these great, great tools, this new technology that we're bringing to bear from the ATF side," Ritz said. "We're able to sometimes locate where there are groups of violent acts have occurred and direct resources accordingly."

The initiative comes at a time when crime is nearing a new high since data was first published by the FBI in 1995, with Argentieri saying violent crime has reached "a 17-year high."

In addition to tracking and arresting people accused of committing violent crimes, and then prosecuting them, the initiative will also speak with community members to find out how violent crime has impacted them. It will also work to identify root causes, and try to engage community members with the criminal justice system, Argentieri said.

"We will work with the district's innovative reentry court program to assist offenders in reentering and reintegrating into their communities," she said. "We know that we cannot arrest our way out of this problem."

Lucas Finton is a criminal justice reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at Lucas.Finton@commercialappeal.com and followed on Twitter @LucasFinton.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis to host Violent Crime Initiative, receives federal assets