Since Operation Legend launched in early July, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio Justin Herdman said the anti-crime mission has resulted in more than 2,000 arrests.
During a Thursday appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” Herdman said as of the end of August, more than 470 people have been charged with federal crimes across nine major cities, including nearly 150 people who were wanted for murder.
“We are not just arresting people for low-level warrants here,” Herdman said. “We’re talking about very violent fugitives, very violent criminals and we're getting them off the streets of these nine cities across the country.”
Attorney General William Barr started Operation Legend as “a sustained, systematic and coordinated law enforcement initiative in which federal law enforcement agencies work in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials to fight violent crime,” according to a news release issued by the Department of Justice.
It was first launched in Kansas City in honor of 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed while he slept in the early morning of June 29 in Kansas City, Missouri.
The program was then expanded throughout the summer to Chicago, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Memphis and then Indianapolis.
The federal government sent more than 1,000 additional agents from the FBI, ATF, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals Service to help state and local partners on homicide and assault squads solve cases and make arrests. On top of supplying extra personnel, the government set aside $78.5 million in grants to support additional police positions, hire more prosecutors and improve technology to solve firearms crimes.
“What we look for in terms of resources is exactly what the president and the attorney general have provided in these nine cities," Herdman said, "which is supplementing existing federal task forces with federal agents, providing a place for police officers to work with our federal agents to identify the most violent criminals on our streets, to take them off the streets and to ensure that the community has some breathing space here to get through the remainder of the summer and the remainder of the fall without the violent crime that we’ve seen surging across the country over the past several months.”
When host Emily Compagno asked whether Operation Legend is “leading to more divisiveness on the ground,” Herdman said agents "have the support of the community" in the nine cities they are helping out in.
“We have the support of the local leadership and we have the support of the local police departments, and what you’re seeing across the country are the results that speak to that support,” he said, adding the “2,000 violent fugitives and violent criminals” are now “off the streets because we have the support of the community.”
“We’ve taken over 500 guns off the street, we’ve charged almost 500 people federally under Operation Legend, we’ve even taken seven kilos of fentanyl off the street and that's enough fentanyl to kill the entire population of Chicago and Detroit combined," he said.
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