WASHINGTON – It has happened every February for years: President Bush tries to cut the money Washington spends on community-oriented policing, and Democrats toil the rest of the year putting the money back in the federal budget.
But in the spending plan Bush unveiled this month, the Republican president for the first time proposed eliminating the entire program, which San Diego police use for everything from better radios to patrol-car computers.
Perhaps more important than the amount at stake – less than $600 million in a $3 trillion budget – is that this recurrent Capitol Hill tussle reflects a core philosophical debate between the White House and congressional Democrats: Once Washington steps in to lend a hand, how long – and at what level – should it keep up the support?
For a dozen years, the Community Oriented Policing Services program, or COPS, has poured billions of dollars into the nation's law enforcement agencies. It was created during the Clinton administration as a way to connect beat cops with neighborhood residents so they could agree on priorities and the challenges facing a community. It began as a goal to hire 100,000 new police officers, with an initial investment of about $1 billion a year through 1999.
Overall, the program has spent $12.4 billion, put 116,000 officers on the streets and evolved into a system of grants that also pay for computer programs, bulletproof vests and offender re-entry programs.
But some argue the program was supposed to be a short-term infusion of money for police agencies, not a piggy bank for every police program that cities can't pay for themselves.
There's no question police departments have benefited from the program.
“Over the years, a number of things have been funded under the COPS heading, including hiring, technology grants and congressional earmarks,” said Erik Ablin, a U.S Justice Department spokesman.
The San Diego Police Department used its early COPS money to hire 113 extra officers. From there, the money went to more high-tech ventures. In the late 1990s, the department used a $15 million COPS grant to update an antiquated computer system. More recently, the department has used $12 million for radios that better communicate across agency lines in emergencies, and $98,000 to equip patrol-car computers with high-speed wireless capability.
“The Clinton administration didn't just see this as short-term, as in, 'We're going to drop 100,000 cops in your laps and run,' ” said Kimberly Glenn, the Police Department's technology chief. “Community policing is based on communication. And the only way to get communication in a city our size is through automation.”
A San Diego police spokeswoman said that without COPS money, the department “will be tremendously hampered in technological development.”
“It is a challenge merely to keep up with Internet predators, frauds and scams, white-collar crime, human trafficking,” said spokeswoman Monica Munoz. “Even street gangs have sophisticated Web sites.”
Bush has sought to reduce COPS spending for several years. The Democratic-controlled Congress is likely to restore some money, as it has in the past. But spending on COPS has slid from a high of $1.4 billion in fiscal 2000 to this year's $587 million.
David Muhlhausen of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, studied large metropolitan areas including San Diego and found that COPS grants were linked to small reductions in crime, that they did not stimulate local spending and that cities use the money to supplant other department expenses.
“They're no longer really increasing their level of enforcement,” Muhlhausen said. “They're just letting the federal government pay for a larger portion of their budget.”
On the other hand, a Brookings Institution study from last year concluded that COPS is “one of the most successful federal anti-crime measures of the 1990s.”
“The best available evidence suggests that more police lead to less crime,” said the report from the centrist think tank. “COPS appears to have contributed to the drop in crime observed in the 1990s.”
James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, said that since COPS funding started declining eight years ago, there's been a 10 percent decline in the number of officers on the streets in cities with populations of 250,000 or more.
Fox noted that much of the money that previously went to COPS is going to the Department of Homeland Security.
“More people are killed every year in ordinary street violence than were killed on 9/11,” Fox said. “If you think about it, the people most at risk for street crime are poor and the powerless, while the people most at risk for terrorism work in economic centers and tend to be more affluent and powerful.”
