Archive

Agency: Department of Justice

Title: Law Enforcement Coordination

Background Information

The analysis of the National Performance Review (NPR) with respect to the Department of Justice focused on a set of issues which have dominated any thoughtful assessment of this Department in its recent history: the unnecessary duplication and overlap in the responsibilities and functions of the Department's law enforcement investigative agencies.

Law enforcement investigations and prosecutions are the core functions of the Department of Justice, for which the public rightly expects and relies upon a high level of competence. Consequently, immediately upon taking office, Attorney General Janet Reno began a thorough review of Department programs to understand where there was unnecessary and wasteful duplication of law enforcement resources. In furtherance of the Attorney General's conclusions and in light of the recommendations of the NPR, the primary emphasis of this Department's implementation of the NPR, was to address the overriding questions of the effective and efficient use of law enforcement resources.

Consequently, on November 13, 1993, the Attorney General established the Office of Investigative Agency Policies (OIAP) and appointed FBI Director Free the Director of the Office (DIAP). She charged the office with "coordinating specified activities of the Department's criminal investigative agencies and with advising the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General on criminal investigative policies, procedures and activities that warrant uniform treatment or coordination."

The operating members of the OIAP are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the United States Marshals Service (USMS), and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The office is staffed by personnel detailed from those criminal investigative agencies as well as from the Criminal Division.

In the few months since its inception, the DIAP has issued several resolutions which address or establish rigorous processes to tackle many important law enforcement coordination priorities.

In its first resolution, the DIAP resolved three important issues. First, he created a common drug intelligence database to coordinate the investigative activities of the DEA and the FBI. The database will provide a "pointer system" which allows FBI and DEA agents to coordinate their investigative activities in a manner that maximizes law enforcement's impact on drug targets and ensures the integrity of the agencies' investigative files.

Second, he required the FBI to assign a sufficient complement of Special Agents and support personnel to EPIC in order to retrieve FBI data relative to EPIC's mission and provide FBI intelligence to EPIC's consumers on a continuous basis. At the same time, he required the EPIC Advisory Board to appoint an FBI representative as a Deputy Director of EPIC.

Third, the DIAP ordered the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) to coordinate with the offices of all DOJ law enforcement agencies every strategic organizational drug intelligence initiative which would have a multi-agency benefit within the Department of Justice, and ordered NDIC's Director of ensure Department of Justice coordination with the intelligence community and the Department of Defense concerning strategic organizational drug intelligence initiatives. The DIAP issued several other orders to ensure the effective integration of existing DOJ federal law enforcement resources in the execution of NDIC's mission.

The DIAP also established a working group of all investigative agency components, and invited the Bureau of Prisons and the United States Attorneys, to develop a unified Department of Justice law enforcement budget to create maximum efficiencies with respect to each agencies planned initiative and new technologies.

Another important DIAP initiative is a comprehensive review of the Department's law enforcement field structure. As with many agencies, much of the important work of the Department's components occurs throughout the country, but as with other agencies, Justice has determined that it is necessary to review the location of its offices and other facilities with an eye to achieving cost savings in administrative functions as well as operational efficiencies from the co-location of offices of various components.

Main NPR Category: Cutting Back to Basics

Related NPR Categories: Cutting Red Tape

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