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In the early days of his administration, President Trump’s message was clear: the government must move swiftly to stop violent crime. In his inauguration address, Trump decried “the crime and gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” He went on to promise that “[t]his American carnage stops right here and stops right now” (Trump 2017). By February 9, 2017, Trump had signed three new executive orders directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to aggressively target and reduce violent crime (Zapotosky 2017). While Trump’s position on violent crime may be clear, the potential effectiveness of his rhetoric in changing the DOJ’s approach to targeting violent crime in the United States is less so.
We focus on one primary avenue where this question is ripe for consideration: DOJ prosecutors’ decisions whether to bring or decline to bring charges for federal violent crimes. Traditionally, federal and state prosecutors in this country assert that their charging decisions are independent and free from political pressure. After a California police officer recently fatally shot an unarmed homeless man, the Los Angeles County District Attorney announced that “[d]ecisions on whether or not to file criminal charges [in this matter] will be based solely on the facts and the law—not on emotion, anger or external pressure” (Mather 2016). And in discussing the potential prosecution of Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Loretta Lynch noted that “[w]e will review all the facts and all the evidence and come to an independent conclusion as how to best handle it” (Goldman 2016). While prosecutors may adamantly assert their decision-making independence, as political scientists, we have good reason to believe that political factors systematically affect the decisions of prosecutors to charge crimes. Prosecutors in the United States are selected through a political process (elections or appointments; Goelzhauser 2013; Nelson 2014; Nelson and Ostrander 2016; Scott 2007). They generally operate within the purview of the executive branch. They receive their funding from the legislature and their authority to prosecute many crimes through laws passed by the legislative and executive branches. And, of course, their prosecuted cases are decided and reviewed by a judiciary that is itself frequently political (L. Epstein and Knight 1998; Hettinger, Lindquist, and Martinek 2004;...