DO ANTITERRORISM EFFORTS DETRACT FROM CRIMEFIGHTING?

Has fighting terrorism caused the FBI to shift its focus sharply away
from domestic organized crime, white-collar crime and drug crime?

If so, is that shift in the nation's interests?

An inquiring Justice Department and Congress should want to
know.

Any examination of changes in priorities since the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, should first recognize that the FBI plays a vital
role in deterring terrorism. In fact, had national security officials
paid more attention to warnings by FBI agents, the calamity of 9/11
might have been avoided.

Still, it's important to know whether the FBI has the resources and
the capabilities to do all the tasks its faces.

A starting point for an inquiry could be statistics from the Executive
Office for U.S. Attorneys. Those figures show:

Prosecutions in organized crime cases brought by the FBI dropped from
498 in fiscal year 2001 to 163 in fiscal year 2006.

FBI white-collar crime prosecutions in that period dropped from 5,031
to 2,693.

FBI drug prosecutions dropped from 4,884 to 2,389.

Overall, the FBI made almost 19,000 cases that were prosecuted in
2001. In 2006, the number was 12,700.

Yet, crime in the United States, in general, has fluctuated only a few
percentage points up and down in recent years, the FBI's statistics
show.

The data from U.S. prosecutors was compiled by the Transactional
Records Access Clearinghouse, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan research
organization associated with Syracuse University. (Its Web address is:
http://trac.syr.edu/.)

There are 2,104 FBI intelligence officers, up from 994 in 2001, the
clearinghouse found. The number of special agents is 12,418, up 1,390.

Numbers cannot tell the whole story, of course. But the figures
obtained by the clearinghouse raise questions about whether the FBI is
paying enough attention to domestic crimes.

Those are questions for the the Justice Department and Congress to
pursue and answer cooperatively, honestly and without acrimony, in the
interest of national security -- in all its forms.