The list goes on. Just about every major U.S. city has seen mass shootings in recent weeks. But with the typical upswing in violent crime over the summer months just beginning, President Joe Biden also finds himself in the midst of a killing spree on pace to surpass the U.S. spiraling of gun violence from last year.

For a White House that has been intensely focused on stamping out Covid-19 and shepherding trillions of dollars in spending on infrastructure and social-welfare programs through Congress, the violence presents a host of challenges that administration officials have so far struggled to get their arms around. First and foremost: determining how to stanch the bloodshed without exacerbating existing tensions on policing or hampering criminal justice reform efforts — a top Democratic priority.

For now, the White House’s main response is to focus on the weapons doing most of the killing.

Homicides in the first quarter of 2021 were 24 percent higher than during the same period in 2020, and 49 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2019. And according to the Gun Violence Archive, guns are driving much of that spike.

“It is staggering. It is sobering,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco acknowledged Tuesday in a town hall with police chiefs. “It is something that DOJ is committed to do all we can to reverse what are profoundly troubling trends and a really bad trajectory that we’re on.”

For weeks, the White House has been in touch with major cities to gauge the severity of the issue. That has included a discussion in May between domestic policy adviser Susan Rice and Lightfoot, in which the mayor laid out ways the federal government could help. On June 15, Lightfoot was among more than two dozen mayors who signed a letter asking the White House to take further action, ranging from investigating federally-licensed gun dealers and cracking down on illegal gun sales over social media platforms.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced five strike forces that will target the flow of illegal firearms into places like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. While Chicago, for example, has its own gun control measures in place, it has historically contended with the illegal trafficking of weapons from nearby Indiana, as well as southern states.

The DOJ announcement was in advance of Biden’s speech Wednesday on the rise of shootings and other violent crime. The president is expected to unveil additional measures targeting guns and crime, including giving cities the ability to tap funding from his American Rescue Plan to help combat violence, imposing a new zero tolerance policy toward gun dealers who break the law, and investing in community policing, among other initiatives, according to a senior administration official.

Still, stemming the violence in major cities will be far more complicated, involving a delicate balancing act with both the left flank of the president’s party and law enforcement.

Republicans, led by former President Donald Trump, are already attempting to pin the rash of violence on the White House, even though increases in gun violence happened during the previous administration. Conservative media outlets are carrying a steady stream of foreboding headlines highlighting the rise of year-over-year shootings and homicides.

“As we gather tonight, our country is being destroyed before our very own eyes,” Trump said in a recent speech before the North Carolina Republican Party Convention. “Crime is exploding. Police departments are being ripped apart and defunded. Can you believe that?”

Though Biden has proposed increasing police funding — and campaigned on that platform — a Republican National Committee spokesperson blamed the president for failing to hold his own party accountable for pushing to defund the police, “endangering communities and triggering a spike in crime across the country.”

“American small businesses, families, and communities are experiencing the devastating effects of anti-police rhetoric and police department budget cuts at the hands of Democrat politicians,” RNC spokesperson Emma Vaughn said.

Republicans attempted to use this playbook in a recent special congressional election in New Mexico, which the Democratic candidate won handedly. But there are early signs that the attacks may be having some impact on Biden’s standing. A new poll in Iowa, for instance, showed just 35 percent of those polled in the state approved of Biden’s approach on criminal justice and 52 percent disapproved.

Concern among Democrats is starting to echo from cities across the country. In the New York City mayor’s race, rising crime has at times dominated the debate. Democrat Eric Adams, a former cop and local official, is the favorite to win the Democratic primary that was held yesterday.

Already, White House officials are pushing back on attempts to paint the violence as a partisan issue, with aides and allies pointing to statistics showing a rise in violent crime during the Trump administration, including a 33 percent surge in homicides in major cities in 2020. In consecutive briefings this week, press secretary Jen Psaki has mentioned that the rise in violent crime started 18 months ago, with some crimes on an upward march for five years.

“When we talk about defunding the police, that has become a dog whistle attack,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist and former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesperson. Finney said Trump, who during the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” inflamed tensions with divisive language. “I would remind them that when Trump had the opportunity, he chose to make it worse by throwing gasoline on the fire when he was president.”

The Republican attacks have focused to a large extent on cities that curtailed their police budgets only to seek to reinstate, or even expand, funding for law enforcement in 2021. Biden himself, aides and allies note, has advocated for more community policing, which focuses on deepening relations with an area to reduce lower-level offenses, even when the tactic fell out of favor with some Democrats.

Yet he’s also had to manage and respond to the liberal wing of his party, which has pressed for tighter standards governing police officers, and the liberalization of local and state prosecutors’ offices — changes that law enforcement officials blame for dispiriting officers and contributing to violence.

“I’ve been in policing 25 years and I don’t remember it ever being so unappealing to new hires,” Louisville Police Chief Erika Shields said Tuesday during a panel discussion of police chiefs in advance of a session with top Justice Department officials.

Shields said the intensified criticism and scrutiny of law enforcement had taken a toll on officers, some of whom complained of protesters coming to their homes.

“It’s really tough because while Biden’s been doing what he clearly politically thought he had to do, at the same time, law enforcement, writ large, has become significantly more conservative,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police and former lobbyist for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which worked with Biden on the 1994 crime bill. “It’s an evolving Joe Biden but while he’s evolving in one direction, law enforcement is evolving in another, which heightens the difficulty.”

Biden’s evolution on the topic has, to a degree, mirrored the country’s. What brought him to national prominence in the 80s and 90s was a tough-on-crime approach that was an explicit attempt to rid the Democratic Party of its politically perilous soft-on-crime image. But the major bill he helped shephard, which put more cops on the streets and included tougher sentencing guidelines, became a complication by the 2020 Democratic primary as the candidates denounced the mass incarceration that resulted from it.

“Whether you like the things that he’s done or not, he has led and he has acted and done by his license and by the majorities at the time what seemed like the best course of action. I just hope that he’ll channel the Joe Biden of the 80s and 90s and let’s roll up our sleeves and go after these criminals,” Pasco said.

Several people in law enforcement said in interviews they are less sympathetic to big city mayors, contending that their own policies are to blame for the increase in gun violence and homicides.

“It’s really the natural and foreseeable consequence of the disempowerment of law enforcement,” said Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and the former deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department.

Many of the mayors, in turn, are pleading with the federal government for help, especially as the violence continues to surge as cities have reopened post-pandemic.

“This is at least a way of recognizing that there is a problem and the White House and potentially Congress may have some role in helping cities and states get their arms around it,” Johnson said of Biden’s speech on Wednesday.

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.