Despite increasing fear of crime, federal prosecutions have decreased by 5 percent over the past year - and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kansas, are calling for Attorney General Janet Reno to explain why.
"These statistics suggest that the (Justice) Department is taking an approach to criminal law enforcement that is less aggressive than the approach taken during the Bush administration," the two complained in a letter to Reno.Between July 1, 1993, and June 30, 1994, they said the Justice Department had initiated 44,919 cases - which was a 5 percent drop from the previous year.
Dole and Hatch - the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee - said the decrease in prosecutions came while other studies said that the number of personal crimes in the nation increased an estimated 6.7 percent between 1992 and 1993.
"One can fairly draw the troubling conclusion that the number of criminal prosecutions initiated by the Justice Department has gone down, while crime continues to go up," the senators wrote.