By Brad Heath and Jack Queen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -One night last week, police officers in Washington stopped a man carrying a designer handbag after spotting a small, clear plastic bag poking out of it, which they suspected might contain marijuana.
It was the kind of encounter that is a staple of local police work, only this time the officers who asked to look inside the bag were accompanied by agents from five separate federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Secret Service, according to records filed in a local court.
They seized about three ounces of marijuana, an ounce more than people can legally possess in the U.S. capital. They charged the man with a misdemeanor, a crime punishable by a fine and a short jail sentence.
The arrest happened amid a crackdown on violent crime ordered by President Donald Trump, who has dispatched hundreds of federal agents and National Guard troops to Washington to combat what he has described as a crime epidemic, and which Democratic city leaders have derided as political theater.
While the two-week effort has turned up guns and drugs, records from Washington’s Superior Court show it has also included federal agents converging in large numbers on low-level crimes such as marijuana use and public alcohol consumption, cases that have seldom been a priority for U.S. law enforcement agencies tasked with targeting drug traffickers and gunrunners.
In the first such analysis, Reuters examined more than 500 criminal cases filed in local court since August 11, when Trump declared a crime emergency in the city. Together, they offer one of the clearest pictures of how the federal government is attempting to tackle crime in the capital.
The records show Trump’s anti-crime task force was involved in at least 69 local cases over the past two weeks, of which nearly half were comparatively minor offenses, including misdemeanors.
The rest were felonies under the local D.C. code, not the more serious federal felonies that agencies usually handle. About half of those were for carrying a firearm without a license, possessing drugs with intent to distribute, or both.
None of the cases Reuters reviewed involved someone being charged with a violent offense.
AGENCIES TRADITIONALLY UNINVOLVED IN LOCAL CASES
Washington’s Superior Court handles local criminal cases, and it is where most people arrested in the city end up. Federal agencies were rarely involved in such cases before the crackdown.
Those cases do not include more than 30 filed in federal court in recent weeks – mostly for gun-possession offenses or assaulting federal officers – or people detained for immigration violations. Its recent dockets also do not include some of the people picked up on warrants in older cases.
The records submitted by police and prosecutors in the Superior Court show federal agents assisting police with routine drug busts, searching people seen drinking alcohol in public or behaving suspiciously, and chasing down and arresting people who fled when they were approached by large groups of officers.
“The American taxpayer is not spending all this money for highly trained special agents to replicate local law enforcement. The idea is to do the cases that local law enforcement can’t,” said Jeff Cohen, who was until recently a top legal adviser at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said the effort removed more than 1,000 dangerous criminals from the streets in August, including gang members and people who have committed violent crimes, abused children, and sold deadly drugs. Reuters could not verify that figure, in part because the government has not identified the people arrested.
“These are not ‘minor infractions,’ and any attempt to downplay the operation’s success is not only false, but an insult to the victims of these criminals,” Rogers said.
The Justice Department said in a statement that sending 2,500 personnel from 20 agencies to Washington has reduced crime and made the city safer, and that any suggestion to the contrary is “not based in reality.”
Notably, many of the cases reviewed by Reuters that resulted in gun and drug seizures began with police stopping people committing minor infractions. Sometimes agents from as many as six federal law enforcement agencies accompanied the police.
While some drug arrests were for small quantities, many involved large enough amounts to qualify for possession with intent to distribute charges. A vehicle search on August 20 yielded 1.65 pounds of marijuana and led to two arrests, and three days later, another turned up 36 ounces.
GUN SEIZURES
Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia Law School professor, said it was unclear what the administration hoped to accomplish with the surge of federal officers and National Guard.
“What are these additional resources doing that local police were not doing before? Are they supplanting them? Are they freeing them to do more detailed investigations of homicides and more serious crimes? What’s the value added?” he said.
“If they’re doing stuff that people in the Metropolitan Police would’ve done anyway, then it’s cosmetic.”
In the past, federal efforts to target crime in U.S. cities have begun with months of investigative work to identify gun traffickers and repeat criminals, said Steven Dettelbach, who was director of the ATF until January.
“You focus on identifying trigger-pullers and putting them in jail, not low-level people.”
It is unclear from the documents what the highly paid, specially trained federal agents are contributing other than additional personnel, and only a handful of cases offer details.
Last Thursday, Homeland Security Investigations and Secret Service agents chased down a fleeing suspected drug dealer in a public park and caught him with four heroin capsules and 10 MDMA pills. The next day, a four-agency team helped police arrest a man for stealing a jeweled watch and Gucci clothing.
In one case, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents helped with an undercover operation to buy $25 worth of marijuana, according to the court records.
Still, the show of force alone appears to have jolted some suspects into confessing.
Shortly after midnight on August 15, a team of police officers and agents from four separate federal agencies approached two people watching a movie on a laptop in a parked car by the side of the road in a park that was closed for the night.
Unsettled by the large police presence, one of the people said, “I’m so fucked” and admitted he had a gun in the glove box. The officers charged him with carrying a pistol without a license.
(Reporting by Brad Heath and Jack Queen, editing by Ross Colvin and Rod Nickel)
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