FBI referring fewer cases to Justice Department: study News
FBI referring fewer cases to Justice Department: study

[JURIST] The US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) [official website] is currently referring approximately 40 percent fewer criminal cases to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) for prosecution than it did 20 years ago, according to a study [text] released Friday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) [official websites] at Syracuse University. The study partly attributed the drop in referrals to the FBI's concentration on terror investigations in the wake of 9/11:

The FBI has frequently noted that because of the government's heightened concern about the threat of terrorism it has pulled a substantial number of agents away from the traditional kinds of enforcement of the past, assigning them to intelligence, national security and counterterrorism duties.

The study suggested that this was not the only reason for the drop in referrals, however, as other federal agencies that are not engaged in counterterrorism work, such as the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service and the Postal Inspection Service [official websites], are also referring fewer cases than they did 20 years ago.

In contrast, the study found that the number of immigration investigations from the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services [official website] has increased to four times that what it was two decades ago. Immigration investigations currently account for over one quarter of all criminal referrals, with almost 42,000 in 2007. AP has more.