BATON ROUGE — The U.S. attorney's office in the Middle District filed more criminal cases over the past year than at any point in the last 10 years, according to the district's U.S. attorney.

According to U.S. Attorney Kurt Wall, the number of indictments rose about 200 percent within his first 4 months in office. He has been the U.S. attorney in the Middle District for one year tomorrow.

Wall's main goal has been to use his state and local connections to build a better team effort between federal, state and local agencies. The office gets most of its cases from East Baton Rouge Parish, which is the largest of the district's nine parishes.

According to Wall, most of the office's cases come from the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office and the Baton Rouge Police Department, with some from state police. Most of the cases the office prosecutes involve guns and drugs.

"If we can find that they violated a federal law in any way, shape, or form, I'm interested in bringing them over here to federal court," Wall said.

Wall also described cases involving child solicitation and a larger focus on fraud, including Medicaid fraud and PPP loan fraud. The office recovered millions of dollars in fraud cases over the past year.

According to Wall, the office is also seeing more cases involving people who were deported and then came back illegally. Wall also described a large increase in cases involving handguns converted into machine guns.

According to Wall, Baton Rouge's police chief designated a staff member to review cases every morning and coordinate with the office on whether a case could be prosecuted federally or by the state. Wall is also in constant touch with local district attorneys, including Hillar Moore.

"It's different than what they're used to rotating through state court. You know, they get arrested, they bond out, they get arrested, they bond out. Our laws are a little different on detention, and so we may have a better opportunity to hold them," Wall said.

Looking ahead, Wall wants the district to have the biggest impact on public safety that it can and leave it safer than he found it. According to Wall, he took office last October while the federal government was shut down, which slowed the office for about 45 days.