Some veteran U.S. Justice Department employees and observers believe that national anticrime policies may not change radically despite mixed reactions to President-elect Trump's nominees to head DOJ in his administration, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his personal criminal defense lawyer, Todd Blanche.
The justice experts spoke on a panel discussion sponsored by the American Society of Criminology on Thursday at the group's annual meeting, held this year in San Francisco.
Ronald Davis, director of the U.S. Marshals Service and an appointee of President Biden, said that "core values [of law enforcement] don't bend" with a presidential transition.
Davis, whose agency dates to the nation's founding in 1789, declared himself "very optimistic," noting that police practices nationwide are in the hands of approximately 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, not the federal government.
U.S. marshals appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate are on duty in each of the 94 U.S. federal districts, and were appointed by four recent presidents, going back to George W. Bush, Davis noted.
Davis is a longtime former Oakland, Calif., police official and chief in East Palo Alto, Calif.
Trump does not have a consistently conservative record on crime issues, said Marc Levin, founder of the conservative organization Right on Crime and now chief policy counsel at the think tank Council on Criminal Justice.
Levin noted that the president-elect has endorsed the legalization of marijuana and signed the 2018 First Step Act, which is credited with reforming aspects of the federal sentencing and prison systems.
Gaetz also backed the First Step Act, winning passage of an amendment that required youth mentorship and prisoner dog training programs in at least 20 federal prisons for 5 years.
Laurie Robinson, who headed the Justice Department's Office of Justice Programs in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, said that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris did not make public safety a major issue in her campaign, allowing Republicans to achieve more prominence for their positions on crime issues.
Looking toward the future, Robinson said the recommendations of Trump's Justice Department transition teams could be crucial in determining details of federal anticrime leaders and policies. Blanche does have DOJ experience, having served as a federal prosecutor in New York City.
Trump said Blanche, who would serve as Deputy Attorney General, would work on "fixing what has been a broken System of Justice for far too long." (With some skepticism about Gaetz' appointment among Republicans and outright opposition from Democrats, it was not clear he would be confirmed.)
Republicans in Congress may try to cut federal grant funding by the Biden administration for local community antiviolence programs, however, as part of anticipated drive to reduce spending governmentwide.
Another speaker at the criminology meeting, reporter Marisa Lagos of public radio station KQED-FM in San Francisco, cautioned against concluding that votes last week in California signaled a broad public retrenchment on criminal justice reform.
Voters decisively approved a ballot measure that rolled back reforms in a decade-old initiative and ousted "progressive' district attorneys in Oakland and Los Angeles County.
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