(PresidentialWire.com)- In an interview with WLKY in Louisville, Kentucky, the new Special Agent in Charge of the Louisville FBI field office said her top priority as the new SAC will be tackling violent crime.
Over the last month, SAC Jodi Cohen has been touring the Louisville metro area and meeting with local agencies. And what she learned was violence in the city has gotten so bad, people are afraid to go out and about.
Louisville Metro Police Department is currently short-staffed, so Cohen is stepping into the breach to provide more federal resources to help get violent offenders off the streets. To do that, Cohen has instructed her agents at the Louisville field office to work on building relationships with the community.
She said she wants her agents out at community gatherings and other events in the city so that they are more a part of the community and not just the people who show up when something goes wrong. Cohen believes that the FBI’s intelligence-gathering nationwide has been hampered by widespread public distrust in law enforcement. To rectify that in Louisville, Cohen believes gaining the trust of the community is important.
She wants to increase intelligence-sharing between agencies to help connect cases and make arrests.
One such example of interagency cooperation, the Safe Streets Task Force, was already launched in Louisville earlier this year. It was through the work of this task force that federal charges were filed last month against ten suspects over their alleged ties to a local street gang called “Everybody Shines Together” or “EST.”
In that particular case, Cohen explained, federal drug and firearms charges allow for the suspects to face stiffer penalties which can have a greater impact on reducing violent crime.
Cohen will also be focusing on working with local law enforcement by providing more resources for investigating car-jackings when the suspects then use the stolen vehicles to commit more serious crimes.
It is Cohen’s hope that using resources in this manner will help to disrupt the larger crimes that have contributed to Louisville’s recent spike in violence.
Watch the interview HERE.
