Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s takeover of the city’s police force and the deployment of more than 2,200 members of the National Guard to the capital.
Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Ms. Pirro said that since the federal deployment began in early August, the authorities had made 1,528 arrests and seized 156 guns. “They can’t be used to shoot and kill other people,” she said of the confiscated weapons.
But a review by The New York Times of about a thousand arrests that were made during the first two weeks of the federal law enforcement surge suggests that the operation has been more of a sprawling dragnet than a targeted crime-fighting operation.
Ms. Pirro also sought to deflect criticism over a case in which federal prosecutors were unable to persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment against a man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent on the streets of Washington this month.
The grand jury’s rejection of the felony charge was a remarkable failure by Ms. Pirro’s office and the second time in recent days that a majority of grand jurors refused to vote to indict a person accused of felony assault on a federal agent.
“A lot of those people who sit on juries live in Georgetown or in Northwest or in some of these better areas, and they don’t see the reality of crime that is occurring,” Ms. Pirro said. “The grand jurors don’t take it so seriously.”
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
The post Pirro Defends Guard Deployment and Takeover of D.C. Police Force appeared first on New York Times.
