Feds Push For More Federal Gun Charges
This week, NYPD commissioner William Bratton set his forces loose in Brooklyn and Queens as a part of Operation Summer All-Out, an effort to curb the rising number of shootings and murders. If the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office has its way, everyone nabbed with a gun by police will be prosecuted in federal court as opposed to state court. This method is seen as a way to discourage gun violence in the city of New York.
The Brooklyn U.S. Attorney will be joined by the NYPD, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the district attorneys’ offices to pull off this strategy. Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island are the points of interest for law enforcement. The powers that be see this strategy as effective because federal gun charges carry stiffer penalties than state charges. To shed a little light, if found guilty of possessing an illegal gun at the state level, a defendant can face about a year in prison. A federal conviction for the same crime would result in a sentence of five years or more in prison.
According to the NY Daily News:
Federal prosecutors working in the Eastern District of New York have modeled the push for more gun cases on a program called Project Exile that was the brainchild of FBI Director James Comey when he was the United States Attorney in Richmond, Va., in the late 1990s.
“The Eastern District’s anti-gun initiative is in response to the recently reported uptick in gun violence in New York City,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney James McGovern, chief of the criminal division for the EDNY.
Do you think this strategy of charging gun offenders at the federal level will have any effect on the violence in the city?
