On Tuesday’s “CNN News Central,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul (D) said that there is a crime problem in Chicago and “I’m not happy until we don’t have any murders in the city of Chicago. I’m not happy until we don’t have any gun crime in the city of Chicago. And I will work at collaboration to try to get to that point.” And also argued that the Trump administration shouldn’t condition some crime funding on immigration policy.
Raoul stated that “if President Trump were talking about putting more resources into federal law enforcement agencies that already collaborate with local law enforcement, I would applaud it. I support more resources going into the ATF, for example, instead of trying to defund them like the White House’s budget proposal did. We’ve had a tremendous collaboration with the ATF here locally in Chicago and have reduced gun crimes and have been able to investigate and prosecute gun trafficking. And so, I would applaud the President if he said, hey, I’m going to fully fund those programs, I’m going to fully fund community violence interruption, I’m not going to condition funding for victims on immigration policy within any particular state. But that’s not what he’s doing.”
He added, “There are municipalities in red states that the President is not talking about with far higher crime rates per capita than the city of Chicago. And I’m not saying that we don’t have a crime problem in Chicago. We do. I’m not happy until we don’t have any murders in the city of Chicago. I’m not happy until we don’t have any gun crime in the city of Chicago. And I will work at collaboration to try to get to that point. And so, I’m not in denial of whether or not we have a crime problem. We do. But we, through collaboration and through great law enforcement leadership, have been chipping away at that problem.”
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