US President Donald Trump has signed three executive orders on "public safety", including handing more authority to the police. At the formal ceremony to appoint Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, the President outlined the new mandate that Sessions would have, including tackling crime and terrorism.
"I am directing the Department of Justice to reduce crimes and crimes of violence against law enforcement officers," he said. "It's a shame, what is happening to our law enforcement officers."
No mention was made of the hundreds of people who die in the hands of law enforcement every year. There were 968 deaths last year, according to the Washington Post, and close to 200 people so far in 2017, according to a database called killedbypolice.net
Trump added that the three orders, including ordering the Department of Homeland Security to "break the back of criminal cartels" and forming a task force to reduce violent crime, were a "clear sign" to criminals.
"Your day is over," he declared. "A new era of justice is starting and it begins right now."
Sessions, a longtime Senator from Alabama who was once deemed too racist to serve as a federal judge, told reporters that the US "has a crime problem". "I wish the rise we're seeing in America today were some sort of aberration or a blip," he said. "My best judgement is that this is a dangerous, permanent trend that puts America at risk."
Trump and Sessions' claims of permanent, rising crime have consistently been debunked. Despite a slight rise in crime over the past two years, it has gone down significantly over several decades and is much lower than the 1980s and 1990s.
Sessions added that he would fight terrorism and implement a "lawful system of immigration". "We need to end this lawlessness that threatens the safety and pulls down the wages of working Americans," he said.
Sessions was widely reported to be one of the key architects of the Muslim ban, an executive order signed on 27 January which banned all travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries in the name of fighting terrorism, despite these countries having produced no terrorist who killed a single American on US soil as part of a terrorist attack since 2001.
