more of the Clinton Bullshit that is finally being put under the
light of truth. you LIBS out there who still are kissing this guys ass WAKE UP!!!!!!
COPS plan falls short of
100,000-officer goal
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Clinton's goal of putting 100,000 more police
officers on the street by the end of the year 2000 — a
promise he made during two presidential campaigns and in an
address before Congress — was not met.
There also are questions of
whether the $8.8 billion federal
grant program, known as the
Community Oriented Policing
Services (COPS) plan, will ever
meet that expectation and if the
strategy actually has resulted in a
lower crime rate as claimed by the
administration.
Approved as part of the
Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act of 1994, the
grant program was expected to
account for only about half the 100,000 new officers
promised by the end of 2000.
While more than 30,000 police agencies nationwide have
accepted federal grant monies to take part in the program
and total spending so far has passed $6.3 billion, both
opponents and proponents expect some of the new hires to
leave after the three-year government grants expire.
Many cities, they say, don't have the funds to pick up the
tab for the new officers. Some police agencies already have
terminated officers hired under the COPS grants, after failing
to find local money to supplant the federal cash.
Further, no actual assessments have been made to
substantiate Mr. Clinton's claims that the program has been a
factor in a reduction of violent crime nationwide. Independent
studies have shown that crime rates in comparable cities were
unaffected by decisions to accept or reject COPS grants.
The Urban Institute, which produced a study in
September favorable toward the COPS program despite
what it described as shortfalls in meeting hiring goals,
acknowledged in its report a need for further study on the
program's "link to crime reduction."
Just how many new police officers will be on the streets
across the nation under the program by the time Mr. Clinton
leaves office is a matter of continuing debate, but no one has
projected the total will reach his promised 100,000-officer
level.
Those who have made estimates based on extensive
studies and independent audits include:
• The Justice Department's Office of Inspector General,
which said in a July report that Mr. Clinton's goal of 100,000
new police officers nationwide by the end of 2000 would fall
short by more than 40,000. The agency said 59,765 new
officers could be in place by the end of the year, although it
was uncertain how many of them could be attributed to the
COPS program.
• The Urban Institute, which said in its September study
that the number of new officers hired and deployed under the
COPS program would not reach more than 57,200 by the
end of 2000. The study, funded by the Justice Department's
National Institute of Justice, said the program had a "broad
national impact on levels and styles of policing" but it
acknowledged it was "falling short of some objectives."
• The Heritage Foundation, which said in a separate
independent study in September that the number of new
officers hired and deployed under the COPS program would
peak at 57,175 by the end of 2000. The report, noting that
only about 40,000 officers were hired during the program's
first five years, was critical of the COPS plan, saying under
even the "most optimistic scenario" the number of officers
would never reach the promised 100,000 mark in 2000.
The administration has not disputed the projections, but
has changed its public stance on the program over the past
two years. It now says it never intended to deploy 100,000
new officers nationwide before the end of 2000, only to have
approved grant applications by that time so new officers
could be hired at a later date.
Mr. Clinton is one of those who has altered his public
statements on the program. He now agrees he only intended
to fund the hirings, not necessarily assign officers to the street
by the year 2000. With regard to the hiring goal, the
president says the program is "ahead of schedule and under
budget."
In two presidential campaigns Mr. Clinton claimed that
assigning new police officers on the street would make
Americans "freer from fear" and that "there is simply no better
crime-fighting tool to be found" than multiplying the number of
law enforcement authorities on the street.
During a 1996 campaign speech, Mr. Clinton credited the
COPS program as one reason violent crime had declined
nationwide since 1993: "The 100,000 police, the Brady Bill,
the assault-weapons ban, the other supports have led to
drops in violent crime," he said.
In 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno presented an even
clearer assessment in her annual report, saying: "By 2000, all
100,000 [officers] will be hired and serving on the streets of
America."
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of
1994 authorized Miss Reno to implement over the next six
years an $8.8 billion grant program for state and local law
enforcement agencies to hire 100,000 new police officers.
"In reality, the program has overpromised and
underperformed," said William Beach, director of Heritage's
Center for Data Analysis, who spent six months investigating
the COPS program. "After $8 billion, not even half the
number of police we were suppose to have are on the street
and the program is rife with problems."
It is not clear what the federally funded COPS program
actually has accomplished.
During the four years of President Bush's administration,
before the COPS program began, Justice Department
records document a 9.7 percent increase between 1989 to
1993 in the number of police officers assigned nationwide.
The number of officers rose from 496,000 to 544,000, an
increase of 48,000.
Under the first four years of a fully-funded COPS
program, beginning in 1994, Justice Department records
show that the number of police officers increased nationwide
by 10.1 percent from 562,000 to 618,000, an increase of
56,000 officers.
The Justice Department also noted that while 30,651
cities and agencies received COPS grants, 3,678 cities later
withdrew their grant requests — some after they already had
been approved. It also said that despite a requirement that
the new officers be retained after the three-year federal grants
expired, about 32,000 of the new hires could be lost.
In the Heritage study, investigators also found that many
of the grants for the COPS program went to police
departments with relatively low crime rates. In fact, Mr.
Beach noted there was little relationship between crime rates
and the COPS money.
An example included Sacramento, Calif., where police
received $76 million in COPS grant money, even though its
violent crime rate was below the national average, while
Chicago — a city seven times the size of Sacramento —
received $47 million in grant money for police. Another
example was Nashville, Tenn., with nearly 3 times as many
violent crimes as Sacramento, where police received $12
million in grant money.
A Heritage examination of 147 "high risk" grant recipients
said two of every five police agencies receiving COPS funds
used the money to pay for officers they would have hired
even without federal funding. Mr. Beach said the investigation
uncovered "other disturbing insights as well," including
information that:
• Some agencies added few police officers despite
receiving significant grant monies from the program. Miami,
for example, received $46 million in grant money, using $34
million for hiring new officers — but added only 21 officers to
its ranks.
• Some agencies actually downsized, including
Washington, D.C., which received $7 million in COPS grant
money to place more of its officers on the street but slashed
595 officers from its payroll; and Atlanta, which got $15
million from 1993 to 1997, but dropped 75 officers from
1994 to 1998.
Mr. Beach also said the allocation of funds from the
COPS program was highly concentrated and that between
1994 and 1998, almost half of $2 billion dispensed to the
nation's largest police agencies went to 10 police agencies.
"Intelligent targeting of funds is every bit as important as
the number of officers put on active duty," he said. "You can
add a million new officers every year, but if you put them to
work pounding the beat in Mayberry, you won't put a dent in
the national crime rate. When you put more 'feet on the
street,' they should be directed to the meanest streets in the
country."
Christopher S. Koper, an Urban Institute researcher who
participated in the COPS study, said that while some
projections failed to meet expectations, the program
succeeded in two major areas: putting more police officers on
the street and promoting community policing.
"Whether they reach the goal of a full 100,000 officers on
the street depends on a number of things, including the
reporting accuracy of the agencies receiving grants and the
continuation of the COPS program," he said. "I would say it's
possible."
"Our study showed the program made progress toward
many of its major goals, including helping some agencies to
accelerate their efforts at community policing without having
to cut back on other activities," he said.
Miss Reno established the COPS program to select which
grants to award, to develop and administer them, and to
monitor the program. The department's Office of Justice
Planning got the job of dispersing funds for the grants and
overseeing them.
The program included hiring grants to employ new officers
and fund their positions for three years, and one-year
redeployment grants to fund the cost of equipment and
technology to free existing officers from administrative duties
to be returned to the streets.
It is not clear how successful the department has been,
with the agency's Office of Inspector General questioning the
difference between the 100,000 new officers promised by the
end of this year and the number expected to actually be on
the street — somewhere between 57,125 and 59,765.
"This is significantly different from having 100,000 new
officers hired and actually deployed to the streets by the end
of 2000, a goal that has been stated publicly by COPS and
various administration officials and has appeared in Justice
Department publications during the past four years," said
Inspector General Michael R. Bromwich in the July report.
Mr. Bromwich, who has since left the department, said
the COPS program counted an officer as funded when it
approved a grant application for the hire, and program
officials were counting "grants and police officers even where
the grant had never been accepted or had been terminated."
He also said "a considerable delay exists between the time
grants are awarded and when new officers are hired."
Administration officials have conceded there could be a delay
of as long as 18 months between the time an agency receives
funding and a new trainee is ready to hit the streets.
The IG's office also has questioned the program's
longevity, saying 58 percent of the cities receiving grants for
new officers either had no "good-faith plan" to retain them or
failed to keep them at the conclusion of the grant's three-year
period.
It said 14 percent of those who received grants
overestimated salaries and benefits; half included unallowable
costs in their claims; 78 percent had no system to track the
redeployment of officers into community policing; 41 percent
used federal funds to supplant local funding; and 23 percent
were unable to distinguish COPS activities from pre-grant
operations |
