Four-year-old LeGend Taliferro was asleep in the early hours of June 29, 2020, when a bullet tore through his room. It was meant for his mother, Charron Powell, and had been fired by a man who had been accused of assaulting her just days earlier. The shooter, Ryson Ellis, shared a child with Powell. After firing his weapon outside of their Kansas City, Missouri, apartment, a bullet passed through a sliding glass door and wall before striking LeGend, killing him. His mother said that LeGend had “loved” Ellis, who was arrested and ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. “He was a ball of joy,” Powell said of her son. “I want his legacy to live on.”
Three weeks after LeGend’s death, as the country faced a summer surge in gun violence following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Powell stood on a podium next to then-President Donald Trump as he launched a federal operation to send Department of Justice agents to nearly a dozen cities. It was named Operation Legend, in honor of Powell’s late son. The agents’ mandate was clear: Arrest violent criminals and take guns off the street.
“This rampage of violence shocks the conscience of our nation,” Trump said of the racial justice protests at the time, in what observers considered to be a dog whistle to his base. “And we will not stand by and watch it happen.”
President-elect Trump returns to the White House this week on the wings of the same rhetoric, continuing to push the narrative that crime is out of control, despite the nationwide decline in shooting deaths. On the campaign trail, he repeatedly promised to use force to address it.
Dujuan Kennedy, the public health and safety director for FORCE Detroit, a grassroots organization that primarily provides community violence intervention in Detroit, recalls the community’s unease when they found out federal agents were on their way in 2020.
“There was a lot of concern about what [the agents] would be doing and that they’d target everyone,” Kennedy said. His organization leaned on its relationship with the community liaison officials at the local U.S. Attorney’s Office to make residents aware of the increased presence, but he emphasized how those resources could be more beneficial on a community or preventative level. “I know they were focusing on the most violent offenders, but that was it. It wasn’t about resources and helping people.”
The operation was an offshoot of a previous initiative, Operation Relentless Pursuit, which began in Kansas City in December 2019. Working alongside local authorities, federal officials were instructed to identify the criminals driving the most violence and charge them federally, so they’d be at risk of heavier sentences. The deployment included agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Department of Homeland Security, and the United States Marshals Service.
With another looming federal response under Trump, activists, law enforcement experts, and others say a new, similar operation could lead to disproportionate enforcement and tactics that continue cycles of punishment and recidivism that have long plagued gun violence-stricken neighborhoods. Some deride the last operation as being solely punitive.
“I remember thinking this was really a political campaign promise,” said Thaddeus Johnson, a former Memphis police officer who is now a criminologist at Georgia State University. “When these task forces come in, it’s usually for a short period, and they don’t have a big impact on the landscape of gun violence.”
For Operation Legend, as some agents fanned out across Kansas City, others were sent to eight additional cities, including five in the Midwest: Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. In response, more than a dozen city mayors signed a letter of concern, saying the deployment of federal forces in their communities “has not been requested nor is it acceptable.” It goes on: “Furthermore, it is concerning that federal law enforcement is being deployed for political purposes.”
Despite those concerns, LeGend’s mother supported the efforts. “This operation is personal to us,” she told those gathered at the White House press conference with Trump. “We want justice for our son and others. We have to take a stand in our communities and speak up to help this operation be successful.” LeGend’s family did not respond to The Trace’s request for comment.
For others in communities facing gun violence, a renewed initiative in the vein of Operation Legend would likely do little to make things safer in their neighborhoods. “The feds don’t come in and lead that charge. They tend to bring that old-school, cowboy, military-style of policing,” Johnson said, pointing out that there’s no clear correlation between Operation Legend and a decline in crime. “It’s really unclear how many prosecutions and convictions came as a result of the operation. We never really found out what the impacts on violent crime were in those places.”
In a final report on the operation in December 2020, the Department of Justice said that over 6,000 arrests were made — approximately 467 for homicides — while 2,600 guns were seized. According to the DOJ, in Detroit, 64 people were charged with firearms offenses (which can carry up to 10 years in prison) as a result of the operation; 55 were charged in Cleveland; 64 in Indianapolis; and 34 in Milwaukee.
Some of those numbers have been contested, especially after former Attorney General William P. Barr misrepresented how many arrests were made in Kansas City in the weeks after the operation launched, claiming that the FBI made 200 arrests in the city just two weeks after it began. In reality, there had only been one federal arrest up to that point.
John Nantz, who spent 20 years with the FBI as an agent, said any future collaboration between federal agents and local law enforcement should be rooted in trust with local authorities who have familiarity with the community. The local authorities should take the investigative lead while the federal officials assist and provide additional support for enforcement tactics. “The FBI does some of its best work when it partners with local law enforcement,” Nantz said, “because they have the human intelligence that the FBI may not have.”
Crime researchers have said the federal government would be better suited to focus on funding efforts, like the money provided to various cities and violence prevention organizations from the American Rescue Plan Act. Gun violence has decreased significantly in Detroit, for example, thanks in part to the work of programs like FORCE Detroit, which is one of several community organizations in the city receiving millions in ARPA funding since 2023. “You have to allow the community to solve some of its own problems. We solve them with resources,” Kennedy said. “It can’t just be about the police and locking people up.”
Federal infrastructure put in place by the Biden administration, however, including the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and several executive actions, are all likely to disappear with the Trump presidency. Those initiatives helped fund community violence intervention, promulgate red flag laws, and improve data collection.
