The Sierra Vista Police Department put nearly $40,000 of asset forfeiture money from a federal program toward this $277,000 LENCO BearCat Tactical Vehicle. Deputy Chief Adam Thrasher said the budget approved by the city wouldn’t pay for an armored vehicle. (Cronkite News Photo by Emily Mahoney)

Mounting concern over recent violent crime surges in some U.S. cities has prompted the Justice Department to call a meeting next month of more than a dozen local law enforcement officials to deal with persistent public safety threats, ranging from criminal gangs to domestic violence, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates told USA TODAY in an interview.

The Justice summit builds on an increasing federal re-engagement with local police whose forces in the past two years have been buffeted by questions over lethal force policies and flagging public trust.

Earlier this year, in the face of rising tensions between the police and the public in communities across the nation, a special White House policing task force issued a slate of recommendations aimed at restoring public confidence. The Justice Department also has opened inquiries into the operations of more than 20 police departments across the country since 2009, including earlier this year in Baltimore where days of civil unrest was sparked by the death of a local man in police custody.

Although violent crime has been in decline in much of the country for years, federal authorities are re-committing resources, some of which were directed to address anti-terror concerns in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to battle troubling spikes in local crime.

Yates on Monday is set to identify five cities—Compton, Calif., Little Rock, Ark., West Memphis, Ark., Newark, N.J., and Flint, Mich.— which are poised to get an infusion of federal help to battle violence even as most of the country has enjoyed relative calm.

“Every community is different and every community has their own unique challenges,” Yates said. “For us to be most effective, we really need to be digging in at the local level… to fashion our response. This is not a one-size-fits-all kind of solution.”

The five cities represent the first expansion of the so-called Violence Reduction Network, launched last year by the Justice Department to address similar violent crime problems in Chicago, Detroit, Wilmington, Del., Camden, N.J., and in the Oakland-Richmond, Calif., area.

While no federal money is attached to inclusion in the network, Yates said the designation provides cities unique access to existing federal expertise in gang investigations, drug trafficking inquiries, the pursuit of violent fugitives, intelligence gathering and other strategies that may be lacking at local public safety agencies.

In some small departments, the deputy attorney general said, problems may be as fundamental as having no experience requesting federal grant money for use in hiring additional police officers or to purchase needed equipment.

Earlier this summer, while cities such as Chicago and Baltimore continued to battle worrisome rashes of violence, Attorney General Loretta Lynch directed the nation’s 93U.S. attorneys to begin gathering information about local crime trends in their jurisdictions to better measure the needs of state, county and municipal agencies.

In Chicago, homicides have been running at levels nearly 20% more than last year. And similar spikes have been recorded in Milwaukee and St. Louis.

Yates said there is “no indication” that the surges signal a possible return to the waves of violence that plagued the 1980s and early 1990s.

“It’s too early to know if this is a long-term shift or a short-term cyclical change,” Yates said. “But it doesn’t really matter from our perspective because our response is always going to be the same: that is to dig in to try to find out what the causes are.”

In Camden, Chief Scott Thomson credits federal help with contributing to a 50% reduction in shootings and homicides during the past two years.

Thomson said the federal violence reduction program has “reinvented the way cities, challenged with violent crime, work with federal law enforcement agencies.”

Camden authorities, Thomson said, specifically benefited from digital imaging training provided by the FBI, which allowed investigators to extract video from private security systems to quickly identify suspects in various local crimes.

Thomson said videos are being converted to “commercials” for broadcast on traditional and social media to solicit public assistance.

“We are now alerting the public within hours, rather than days, which has facilitated the identification and apprehension of dozens of individuals suspected of crimes ranging from child luring to murder,” he said.

Camden also was among a number of cities that benefited earlier this year from a broad U.S. Marshals Service operation, resulting in the arrest of 7,100 fugitives during a six-week sweep.

Among those arrested: 519 wanted on homicide charges and 583 for alleged sexual assault.

Yates cited the U.S. Marshals operation as the type of targeted assistance that the federal government can offer local agencies who lack resources.

The October meeting of law enforcement officials called by the Justice Department, Yates said, is another attempt to “try to find out what’s working and what is not working.”

A trial lawyer who testified last month before the House Committee on the Judiciary Over-Criminalization Task Force said the U.S. is “in danger of becoming a nation of criminals,” estimating that over 68 million Americans have criminal records – more than the population of France.

Rick Jones, executive director of Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, testified on June 26 on behalf of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, that “68 million people living with convictions – more than the entire population of France. We are in danger of becoming a nation of criminals, because we are policing from a place of fear.”

In written testimony, Jones estimated that “some 65 million people have a criminal record, citing a reportfrom the National Employment Law Project, titled, “65 Million Need Not Apply: The Case for Reforming Criminal Background Checks for Employment” – a product of NELP’s Second Chance Labor Project, “which promotes the employment rights of people with criminal records and fairer and more accurate criminal background checks for employment.”

The report’s findings were based on information from the 2008 “Survey of State Criminal History Information Systems” by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics Strategic Plan 2005-2008, under the heading “Criminal History Records,” 68 million people had criminal records at the close of 2003. “At the close of 2003, States and the FBI maintained criminal history records on approximately 68 million individuals. Of these, over 50 million records were available for interstate background checks.”

“Since the initiation of the BJS National Criminal History Record Improvement Program (NCHIP) in 1995, the number of criminal records has increased 35%, and the number of records which are now shareable among the States increased 97%,” BJS said.

According to the latest World Bank data, France has a population of 66 million as of 2013.

“68 million people in this country are living with a criminal record. That’s one in every four adults – 20 million people with felony convictions, 14 million new arrests every year, 2.2 million people residing in jail or prison. That’s more than anywhere else in the world,” Jones told the task force.

He proposed that the U.S. “move from penalty, prosecution and endless punishment to forgiveness, redemption and restoration,” specifically calling for a “national restoration of rights day.”

A once-a-year national restoration of rights day would consist of: “educational programs for employers, skills training workshops for the affected community, jobs fairs, certificate of relief programs at no-cost and … no-cost opportunities to clean up your rap sheet.”

By Melanie Hunter for cnsnews.com