Back in 2020, as the country faced a summer surge in gun violence following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, then-President Donald Trump launched a federal operation to send Department of Justice agents to nearly a dozen cities. It was named Operation Legend, after a 4-year-old who had been shot and killed three weeks earlier in Kansas City, Missouri. The agents’ mandate was clear: Arrest violent criminals and take guns off the street.
Deployments like Operation Legend can lead to disproportionate enforcement and tactics that continue cycles of punishment and recidivism that have long plagued gun violence-stricken neighborhoods, activists and experts told The Trace’s Josiah Bates. And five years after federal agents fanned out across those cities, it’s not clear that the operation did anything to help. With Trump’s return to the White House this week — on the wings of the same rhetoric he spouted in 2020, pushing the narrative that crime is out of control despite evidence to the contrary — communities wonder what’s next.
On Monday, toward the bottom of an executive order mostly concerned with making it easier to impose capital punishment, we got a hint. A small section directs the attorney general to “appropriately prioritize public safety and the prosecution of violent crime” and “dismantle transnational criminal activity.” Furthermore, Trump directs the AG to “encourage” state attorneys general and district attorneys to adopt tough-on-crime policies, and federal law enforcement to coordinate with state and local police “to facilitate these objectives.”
From The Trace
What Happened When Trump Sent Scores of Federal Agents to Fight Crime in the Midwest in 2020?: Experts say deployments like Operation Legend often bring a rise in excessive enforcement.
The Ghost Gun Market’s Vanishing Act: Law enforcement gains against ghost guns were tenuous for some time. Then came the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO.
ATF Relaxes Zero-Tolerance Policy For Lawbreaking Gun Dealers: The change ends a federal court challenge and is expected to give inspectors more discretion in penalizing gun shops for violations.
Why Gun Violence Dropped in Philadelphia Last Year — And What Happens Next: City officials credit multiple factors for the historic declines in shootings, homicides, and other firearm-related crimes.
What to Know Today
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a case that could make it easier, or more difficult, to hold police accountable for killings. At issue is what’s known as the “moment of the threat” doctrine, or whether courts should take the events leading up to use of force into account when assessing an officer’s conduct. The case, a civil rights lawsuit, is centered on the death of Ashtian Barnes, a 24-year-old who was shot and killed in Houston during a routine traffic stop in 2016. [NBC]
The Colorado General Assembly is considering legislation to ban the manufacture, sale, and purchase — but not possession — of certain semiautomatic rifles, shotguns, and pistols that are capable of using detachable magazines. One of the bill’s main sponsors is state Senator Tom Sullivan, a staunch advocate for stricter gun laws who has previously expressed skepticism about bans on high-powered weapons. [The Colorado Sun]
President Donald Trump commuted the 18-year sentence of Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, part of a mass grant of clemency for some 1,500 people who were involved in the deadly 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning to violently stop President Joe Biden’s electoral certification, including through the use of guns. [The Guardian/The New York Times]
In his final days in office, Joe Biden set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. Among those Biden granted clemency were Darryl Chambers, a gun violence prevention advocate who was pardoned of a nonviolent crime, and Leonard Peltier, an Indigenous activist who has been incarcerated for nearly 50 years in connection to the 1975 shooting deaths of two FBI agents during a standoff with members of the American Indian Movement. Peltier, who has always maintained his innocence, received a commutation; the 80-year-old will serve the remainder of his sentence at home. [Associated Press/ICT]
The flurry of executive actions that Donald Trump signed on Monday were largely aimed at fulfilling his promise to make immigrating to the United States a more harrowing — and, in effect, dangerous — endeavor. That included an order to send members of the armed forces to the border and the declaration of a national emergency that directs the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to update their departments’ use of force policies to “prioritize the safety and security” of their personnel. Members of the military community have expressed fears that domestic deployment could lead to bloodshed, since troops are mainly trained to shoot and kill. [Associated Press/Politico]
Available data indicates that murder fell at the fastest pace ever recorded in the U.S. last year, driven by a significant drop in gun violence. It isn’t clear that the decline will continue at the same rate — it’s more likely, speculates crime analyst Jeff Asher, that the numbers will begin to plateau. [Jeff Asher]
Jackie Johnson, a former district attorney in Georgia, faces trial this week over allegations that she protected her former employee, Gregory McMichael, and his son, Travis, from criminal charges in the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery. The two men and their neighbor, who are white, chased and killed Arbery, who was Black, while Arbery was out for a jog; the men were found guilty of murder, and each received a federal hate crime conviction. [The Current]
Data Point
-12 percent — the decline in shooting deaths, excluding suicides, in 2024 compared to 2023. While still slightly above pre-pandemic levels, gun deaths last year were 21 percent lower than the pandemic-era peak in 2021. [The Trace]
Non Sequitur
What an Ancient Saguaro Can Teach Us
“Park officials measured Grandpa’s growth rings and examined his scars, and they determined that he was 200 years old — ancient for a saguaro, who have an average lifespan of around a century and a half.” [High Country News]
