Feds doing the job Chicago didn’t want.
It’s one of the rare things on which Mayor Rahm Emanuel and President Donald Trump agree: the need for more federal gun prosecutions in Chicago.
In 2014, Chicago’s Democratic mayor declared that federal prosecutors in Chicago, working under then-President Barack Obama, were doing a “horrible” job tackling gun crime.
Trump took up the issue, beginning as he campaigned for the Republican nomination for president. And just after he assumed office in early 2017, he tweeted that he would “send in the Feds” if the city didn’t “fix the horrible carnage.” Days later, Jeff Sessions, his attorney general at the time, promised to step up gun prosecutions in Chicago.
Now, a year and a half later, the mayor and the president seem to have gotten what they wanted. Federal gun prosecutions in Chicago are up, as they are nationally.
That’s according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of court data that also found that the number of federal fraud prosecutions in Chicago has fallen in recent years and that fewer illegal immigration cases are being brought here than a decade ago.
Days ago, John Lausch, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, noted the rising number of gun prosecutions. But Lausch also said: “We’re not patting ourselves on the back. I mean, we have a lot of work to do.”
In 2016, the Sun-Times found that the number of federal gun-crimes prosecutions in Chicago was lagging behind other urban areas even as the number of killings had shot up. With 771 murders, it was the city’s deadliest year in nearly two decades.
Gun-crimes prosecutions began to go up in Chicago after the spring of 2016, court records show.
The Sun-Times analysis found that the number of gun-crimes defendants rose by 75 percent from March 2016 to March 2017.
It went up another 29 percent over the next year, through March 2018. One hundred and 60 people were charged with gun crimes over that period.
The analysis was based on data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which counts defendants according to the most serious charge filed against them.
The U.S. attorney’s office released its own preliminary numbers this past week, showing 197 defendants have been charged with gun-related crimes in the year ending on Sept. 30, 2018, compared with 177 over the same period the previous 12 months.