Danger in Creating Too Many Federal Crimes.

• Position: Brief Article

Tracing dramatic growth in the number and variety of Federal crimes, an American Bar Association (ABA) task force warns of the dangers in subjecting local crimes to potential Federal control, rather than leaving them to state law. The panel expressed concern about the increasing tendency of Congress to create Federal crimes out of local conduct already covered by state criminal laws, such as drive-by shootings and street crime.

"It is a recognized constitutional principle, deeply rooted in the American criminal justice system, that the general police power resides in the states, not the Federal government," argues the task force's chairman, former Attorney General Edwin Meese. "This current phenomenon is capable of altering the careful decentralization of criminal law authority that has worked well in America."

The panel that was assembled by the ABA's Criminal Justice Section examined the consequences of this trend and called upon Congress to exercise greater caution in enacting Federal laws that overlap state criminal law and to focus Federal resources on dealing with the important problems of distinctly Federal crime. "One of the most striking things about the panel's work was the consistency between the data and the observations of the criminal justice professionals. Many of the organizations we talked with indicated that Federal crimes are created without a demand for them by law enforcement, and for no other reason than that the conduct is serious," explains panel member William Taylor, a defense attorney and former chairman of the section. "The panel found no persuasive evidence that federalizing crime makes the streets safer."

In fact, it concluded that "increased federalization is rarely, if ever, likely to have any appreciable effect on the categories of...