As FBI fights terrorism, other prosecutions drop
FBI mission change brought 30 percent fewer cases to court since 9/11, including drug, organized-crime, and white-collar crime charges.
from the June 21, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Congressional scrutiny
The drop in prosecutions has also caught Congress's attention. At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs in May, Sen. Joseph Biden (D) of Delaware said that since 9/11, the number of violent-crime investigations by the FBI has dropped 60 percent – even though cities across the country are seeing an increase in murders and other violent crime, after a decade of steady declines.
Senator Biden, chairman of the subcommittee, blamed the White House for transferring about 1,000 agents to counterterrorism from traditional law-enforcement duties and not replacing them. He has introduced legislation to remedy that by adding 1,000 agents to the bureau, which currently has about 12,500 agents total.
"The federal government has taken its focus off street crime since 9/11, asking law enforcement to do more with less," he said at the hearing. "It's a false choice between fighting terrorism and fighting crime."
Drug prosecutions still make up about half of all cases the FBI brought to court in fiscal year 2006, about the same share as before 9/11. But there are simply half as many of them as in 2000: 2,380 now compared with 5,014 then, according to the TRAC analysis.
Organized-crime cases saw the biggest decline – a 73 percentage drop in prosecutions filed between fiscal 2000 and 2006. The study reported that the FBI filed 163 such cases last year, compared with 606 in 2000.
In addition, its prosecutions of white-collar crime against banks fell 62.5 percent over that time. Yet the study also showed an exception to the rule: Pursuit of pornography cases has become more zealous since 9/11, doubling from 385 in 2000 to 796 in 2006.
For some analysts, the overall drop in traditional prosecutions raises concerns about how the FBI is carrying out its new counterterrorism mandate, because much of its work is done in secret. They point to revelations this spring by the Justice Department's inspector general that the FBI had misused its authority to collect Americans' telephone and credit-card records without a warrant through the use of so-called national security letters (NSLs). Last week, an internal FBI review reported as many as 1,000 violations since 2002. As a result, the FBI issued 24 pages of guidelines for agents to follow so individual rights won't be compromised.
Still, civil libertarians are not satisfied.
"Unfortunately, these NSL guidelines are not enough," says Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union legislative office in Washington. "The IG report revealed that the FBI can't be trusted to follow the rule of law when the public is not watching."
Other analysts also point to a history of the FBI engaging in unconstitutional domestic surveillance, such as the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTEL). It was started in the 1950s and was designed to infiltrate communist organizations, but by the 1970s when it was shut down, it was keeping dossiers on tens of thousands of individuals.
"These activities were unlawful and a serious violation of individual rights, and threatened the civil liberties upon which our democracy is based," says David Burnham, co-founder of TRAC.
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