U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch spoke to 300 federal and state representatives convened in Little Rock on Monday morning about violent crime in American cities and announced millions of dollars in grant money for law enforcement agencies across the country.
Lynch's speech kicked off a conference sponsored by the Department of Justice to discuss the Violence Reduction Network, a federal program started in 2014 that now operates in 15 cities with high rates of violent crime.
The program does not give money or additional personnel to these cities but works to improve existing local policing practices, largely through additional training and data collection. Little Rock and West Memphis began the two-year program in 2015.
Lynch opened her speech by saying that constant violence affects all members of a community, not just those whose lives are personally touched by it.
“We all know that violent crime not only endangers lives but it destroys families and can literally paralyze neighborhoods,” she said.
The attorney general added that she knows tension can sometimes arise between law enforcement officers and the people they police.
Lynch took the stage at the Statehouse Convention Center roughly three hours after an armed man was fatally shot by a Pulaski County sheriff's deputy outside the city, Arkansas Online reported. Both the man and the deputy's identities were unknown Monday morning.
“We see the mistrust within the communities that we serve,” Lynch said. “We see the underlying fear in our friends and our neighbors.”
To help build that trust, she said, the Department of Justice will help fund two new federal grants: $20 million for 100 law enforcement agencies to increase their use of body cameras and $33 million for 28 jurisdictions to test and track backlogged sexual assault kits.
Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason also announced three additional grants, totaling $13.6 million, to help police departments share information with one another, revitalize run-down neighborhoods and find criminals who obtain and use firearms illegally.
Lynch also stressed the importance of continual collaboration between federal and local officers. The Violence Reduction Network has had successes, including eliminating a backlog of more than 1,000 firearms cases in Little Rock, because of that collaboration, Lynch said.
Read Tuesday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.
