In the autumn of 2017, Jeff Jensen—a former CPA who can handle a tactical weapon or prosecute a terrorist—became U.S. attorney, the highest-ranking federal law enforcement official in the Eastern District of Missouri. His mandate from the U.S. attorney general? Reduce violent crime—much of it drug-related, loosely organized or random. His staff was configured to emphasize white-collar crime, so his first step was to reorganize. His second step was to realize that his office would need much tighter relationships with other agencies, city and county prosecutors, and community organizations. The job was bigger than any of them.
How common is it for U.S. attorneys to focus on violent crime? Extremely common these days. It started with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and it’s continued without missing a beat. We’ve been given more resources, more authority—and more responsibility for the outcome.
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I thought you guys focused on public corruption, child exploitation, terrorism… Doesn’t violent crime require a different skill set? Very different. Essentially we’ve doubled the number of violent prosecutors in this office since October of 2017. We converted one of our two white-collar–crime groups to a violent-crime group and also added positions, so in total we’ve added 15 violent-crime prosecutors.
You even lured Paul D’Agrosa, famous as a criminal defense attorney, to the other side. And he’s doing an amazing job for us.
How’s the white-collar group managing, now that it’s been halved? They’re working much harder! It’s a fair question. Something has to give. We are doing fewer low-level program fraud cases where civil remedies are available—for Social Security fraud, they can just go back and collect the overpaid benefits—but we’re not turning away any substantial white-collar criminal cases.
You meet weekly with the circuit attorneys to decide who can best prosecute which cases. What sorts of violent crimes come under federal jurisdiction? Murders when there’s federal jurisdiction, which typically means a drug ring; carjacking cases; kidnapping if it crosses a state line; business robberies; any convicted felon in possession of a firearm. We’ve always handled those cases, but previously we were more selective. Now we’re much more aggressive.
Have offenders noticed your tactical shift? We listen to wiretaps and jailhouse calls, and we’ve been hearing criminals complaining about all the federal prosecution.
Are the rates of violent crimes beginning to drop? What I focus on is murder, because the stats are easiest to compare; other categories are defined differently in different jurisdictions or in the same jurisdiction over time. In the Eastern District, murders went down about 10 percent in 2018. That’s good news, but it’s not nearly good enough.
What will you do next? We are very aggressively prosecuting cases and then getting people jobs as they come out of prison. We focus on certain types of crimes, those that can be predicates to murder. We focus on certain individuals, those we deem likely to be violent offenders. And we focus on the area that’s become known as the [St. Louis Metropolitan Police] Chief’s Rectangle: less than 15 percent of the land in the city but about 67.5 percent of the murders. But there is no way we’re going to police and prosecute our way out of this problem. We partner with a number of community organizations, including the Urban League, which has a Save Our Sons program that’s generated hundreds of jobs; the Demetrious Johnson Foundation, which also provides jobs and helps train people as they come out of federal probation; and Better Family Life, which does de-escalations of ongoing conflicts.
How do they manage that? Have you watched one? I have. Basically, they get notification, typically from third parties, of an ongoing shooting battle or a dispute that’s likely to escalate. They identify the circle of care around the combatants, and through that they identify the person with the most influence over the combatant. Then they have a sit-down with the combatant and the influencer. Those can be challenging conversations. At the end, they get both sides to sign a truce. If they can’t, they move one of them out of town. The Brown School [of Social Work] at Washington University is studying the results. So far they’ve had more than 55 successful de-escalations, and their success rate is over 90 percent.
You have quite a few partners; even Civic Progress is wearing a crime-fighter’s cape. Civic Progress and the Regional Business Council have funded programs at Better Family Life and the Urban League, and they’ve also funded equipment that helps shot-spotter technology work better. Not only can you figure out where a bullet was fired, but police can [also] capture shell casings and put them into a national database to see if the same weapon has been used more than once. It’s kind of a fingerprint that the gun leaves on the shell.
What’s your “Top Shooters” program? We keep a running list of people we believe are potential active shooters, whether because of their criminal history, their participation in a violent gang, or their presence—in any capacity—at previous violent events. We don’t wait until a case comes to us; law enforcement agencies proactively investigate those people to see if they’re committing crimes. We might pull their social media, look at their phone records, send undercovers to purchase drugs from them.
What else has helped you reverse the trend? The probation office here in the Eastern District is the most successful in the country. They have recidivism rates of 7.5 percent after someone’s done with the federal system, compared to national averages of 75 to 80 percent, so they’re 10 times more successful.
Why? Simply stated, jobs stop bullets. The probation office has a 4.5 percent unemployment rate, because they work with many employers who are willing to give people a second chance, primarily in construction but also as commercial drivers, welders, certified nurse assistants: jobs that change lives. Having a legitimate source of income is part of it, but mostly it’s about having self-respect.
You’ve had an interesting career path. I definitely zigzagged. I started out as a CPA, because at the time I graduated from college, that was the most likely area to find employment. But then the FBI was hiring accountants, because of the savings and loan failures of the late 1980s, and I’d always wanted to be in the FBI.
So you focused on financial investigations? I was primarily in the white-collar crime group, and for a time I was a member of the FBI SWAT team. When I was an agent, I was just fascinated by what happened in the courtroom. I decided I’d like to be an assistant U.S. attorney. So after 10 years with the FBI, I took five years to go through law school at night. I was an assistant U.S. attorney for 10 years, and then I went into private practice doing corporate compliance work. I’ve got four kids, and I was trying to pay for them. Then this job opened.
