Dozens of senior law enforcement officials have urged Donald Trump to abandon his draconian crackdown on crime and to instead revive efforts to reform the criminal justice system.

In a report co-written by David Brown, the former Dallas police chief widely praised for his response to the killing of five officers last year, the officials said Trump should rethink his blunt law-and-order plans.



“Decades of experience have convinced us of a sobering reality: today’s crime policies, which too often rely only on jail and prison, are simply ineffective in preserving public safety,” they said.

The report was published on Friday by Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, a coalition of more than 200 current and former senior police officers and prosecutors.

They criticized an executive order on crime fighting signed by Trump on Thursday, saying that the president had encouraged police officers to focus on general lawbreaking rather than to target violent crime.

Too much of the justice department’s $5.5bn yearly funding for local policing is already spent on “antiquated law enforcement tools, such as dragnet enforcement of lower-level offenses”, the officials wrote.

Warning that Trump’s order threatens to “repeat this mistake”, the officials said the president should understand “we cannot fund all crime fighting tactics” and that police and prosecutors should focus their time and money on fighting a recent uptick in violent crime.

At the same time, Brown and his co-author, former New Orleans police chief Ronal Serpas, said that Trump should help bolster “community policing”, a philosophy that focuses on strengthening relations between officers and residents rather than promoting confrontation.

They expressed alarm about reports that the Trump administration intends to close the justice department’s community oriented policing services (Cops) office, which works on improving relations between police and residents and has recently reviewed embattled departments in places such as San Francisco and St Louis.

“We urge the president, instead, to request more funding in his next budget to Congress for the Cops Office to continue strengthening and expanding local community policing,” said the report.

The officials also asked Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to get behind attempts to reduce the US prison population. They noted that Sessions, in his previous job as a conservative senator for Alabama, played a significant role in blocking the passage of bipartisan sentencing reform legislation proposed in 2015.

The report suggested that Sessions might view the proposals differently as attorney general given that more than 25% of his justice department’s budget will be spent on funding federal prisons.

“The more dollars these prisons require, the less available to allocate to federal law enforcement in our fight to secure public safety,” the report said.



More resources should also be devoted to treatment of mental illness and drug addiction, according to the officials, who said the excessive imprisonment of those with such problems leads to the release of people who are “practically destined to commit more crimes and cycle into prison”.