FBI Criminal Investigations Drop
Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the FBI has refocused its resources from white-collar crimes and drugs to anti-terrorism efforts. As a result, the total number of cases where the FBI was lead investigator have dropped 25% in the past five years. One former federal public defender hailed the statistics as representative of a "healthy step," by moving the U.S. "away from the federalization of (lesser) crimes and toward a focus on the truly big ones." Even so, while there has been a four-fold increase in terrorist cases, the Government Accountability Office reported in early 2003 that of 174 terrorism cases studied, three-fourths were inappropriately labeled. After evaluating the Justice Department's figures, a former federal prosecutor suspects that the Department could be designating low-level violations like immigration as terrorism cases.