Top cops urge Trump to keep policies

Coalition implores president not to return to old course

WASHINGTON — A coalition of police chiefs and prosecutors from the nation’s biggest cities implored the Trump administration Wednesday not to return to the “lock ’em all up” crime-fighting policies of the 1980s and 1990s and not to waste resources on low-level drug offenders, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions has advocated recently.

The Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime & Incarceration sent a letter to Sessions and President Donald Trump, and held a summit meeting in Washington, D.C., in which they were adamant that crime has been steadily declining across America for a quarter-century, not spiraling upward as the president is sometimes inclined to claim. They think the decline is a result of smarter policing and more careful prosecution. But Sessions has called for increased drug prosecution and ordered federal prosecutors to seek the stiffest possible sentences in all cases, regardless of circumstance.

“The measure isn’t how many people we put in jail,” said Ronal Serpas, former superintendent of the New Orleans police and the founder of the Law Enforcement Leaders group. “The measure is whether the right people are put in jail. And that’s the people we’re afraid of, not the people we’re mad at.”

Police chiefs from Houston, San Francisco, Detroit and the District of Columbia, joined Serpas at the National Press Club in urging that the Trump administration support a recently introduced criminal justice reform bill, which would revamp federal sentencing guidelines and reduce mandatory minimums while giving judges greater sentencing discretion. Sessions strongly opposed the bill as a senator.

The presidents of the National District Attorneys Association, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, a board member of Law Enforcement Leaders, also appeared at the press club to endorse the call for more focus on violent offenders and less time spent on turnstile jumpers and drunks.

“The message to the president is very clear,” Vance said. When arresting or prosecuting a case, authorities must ask two questions, Vance said: “Does it make us safer, and is it fair?”