Acting Assistant Attorney General Tracy Henke,
who oversees the COPS program, says most police departments that got
grants spent them effectively. She says the Bush administration is
shutting down COPS to cut costs, and because the program has "met its
objective." But she acknowledges that when it came to tracking the
money, "it's possible that all the necessary controls weren't there."
Officially, the Justice Department says the COPS
program "funded" 118,000 new police positions across the USA. But a
review of Justice programs last year by the White House Office of
Management and Budget said that COPS had put "fewer than 90,000"
officers on the street. A University of Pennsylvania study in 2002 found
that the number probably would wind up closer to 82,000 — or 30% fewer
cops than Justice's estimate.
Meanwhile, few crime analysts say that COPS
grants were significant in reducing crime. Analysts such as Stanford
University's Joseph McNamara say that a much bigger factor has been the
strong economy, which has kept many young people employed and away from
crime.
Of three studies on the issue, only one — which
was funded by the Justice Department — found that the police hiring
program was chiefly responsible for drops in violent crime rates among
big cities. The General Accounting Office, Congress' research arm,
dismissed that study as "inconclusive."
The link between COPS grants and lower crime
rates has been further obscured by the experience of cities such as
Oklahoma City, which did not participate in the police hiring program —
and yet saw crime rates drop by as much as those in cities that got
grants. (Related story:
Okla. City's experience)
Henke says COPS was "a piece of the puzzle" in
cutting crime. "Did it contribute? Yes," she says. "At what level? That
cannot be identified."
Boosting community policing
The COPS program was designed to help bring about
fundamental changes in policing by drawing officers closer to the
citizens they protect. And in scores of communities across the nation,
it did.
Joseph Ryan, chairman of the Department of
Criminal Justice at Pace University in New York City, says that COPS
"changed the way police do business" by giving many police chiefs the
additional staff to implement an anti-crime strategy known as "community
policing."
The idea of community policing is to get away
from the traditional "call-and-response" model, in which officers run
from one emergency call to the next. It involves sending officers into
neighborhoods to build relationships with residents, identify the
sources of crime problems and solve them before they get worse.
Police in Huntsville, Ala., used COPS money to
put 10 new officers in local schools, a move that Chief Rex Reynolds
says helped to curb juvenile crime.
In Illinois, State Police Director Larry Trent
says COPS gave him extra officers to boost patrols of dangerous
roadways, which he says dramatically cut the number of fatal crashes in
the state.
And in Sacramento, the combined $77 million that
the city and county received in COPS grants helped to put nearly 500 new
officers on the street. George Anderson, chief deputy of the Sacramento
County Sheriff's Department, says that although the grants' precise role
in reducing crime "is difficult to assess," the additional cops made
residents feel safer in several troubled communities. (Story:
COPS has cleaned up Sacramento streets)
Nationally, COPS grants provided up to $25,000 a
year for three years to help pay the salary of each new officer. Other
grants provided money for departments to hire civilians or to buy
computers and other technology so that desk officers could be put on the
street.
For departments that accepted the grants, there
was a catch: They had to agree to pick up the tab to keep the additional
officers for at least a year after the grants ran out.
"A big part of our decision (not to participate)
was that we knew some portion of the (federal) funding was gonna go
away," Oklahoma City Police Chief William Citty says. "We just couldn't
guarantee that we could pick up those costs." (Story:
Oklahoma City thriving without COPS)
New York City police got the most money from COPS
— $422.4 million to hire and redeploy 4,808 officers. Still, the
department shrunk by 321 officers, to 36,372, from 1994 to 2004. The
drop came amid sharp budget cuts after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks, which killed 23 officers.
The grants "gave us the resources to mount some
of these programs — gang units, cops in schools, things like that," says
Michael Farrell, New York's deputy police commissioner. With the grants
drying up, the department is shifting resources to try to keep those
programs alive. "We're convinced ... that we need to continue doing
these things."
Questions about spending
The audits by Justice's inspector general
involved only about 370 of the 12,000 law enforcement agencies that
received COPS grants. Some were audited because they were suspected of
misusing the money; others were chosen randomly. But the findings from
that sampling — $277 million in questionable spending — suggest that
many grants were misused.
Auditors found $13 million in questionable or
undocumented spending in Atlanta; $7.5 million in Albuquerque; $7.4
million in El Paso; $7.1 million in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and $6
million in Washington, D.C. The money sent to those cities — more than
$107 million — was supposed to put 1,432 officers on the streets. But
because audits of those police departments are unresolved, Justice's
Henke acknowledges that it's unclear whether the grants came close to
doing that.
Some of the most blatant abuses alleged in the
audits occurred on Indian reservations. On the tiny Picuris Pueblo in
New Mexico, for example, the two-person tribal police department was
awarded $728,125 from 1995 to 2000 to hire eight additional officers.
But the pueblo hasn't documented whether the
officers were hired, and it closed the police department in 2002 amid
financial problems, auditors found. It's unclear what happened to the
grant money, or whether anyone was hired.
"All of our federal grants are in disarray and
our relationships with various federal agencies are in jeopardy," former
tribal governor Gerald Nailor said in a written response to the audit.
Grant money gold rush
Craig Uchida recalls the frenzy when the COPS
grant office opened for business in October 1994.
Thousands of applications poured in, says Uchida,
then the assistant grant director for COPS. There were fewer than
two-dozen staffers to review hundreds of millions of dollars in grant
requests, he says, and they barely had time to determine whether
applicants were legitimate police agencies.
"The (Clinton) administration wanted to make a
splash," says Uchida, now a law enforcement consultant. He says there
was pressure to get as much money "out the door" as quickly as possible.
The program was designed to minimize
administrative costs, and Congress never gave it enough money for a big
staff of grant reviewers, auditors and managers. On the other end of the
pipeline, millions of dollars from COPS went to police departments that
often had little experience with big federal grants. Some didn't have
computers to track spending.
The COPS program's limited staffing often has
meant limited oversight of grant recipients. And when the inspector
general has found that funds were misspent, the COPS office — the only
agency authorized to seek reimbursement — rarely has sought payback.
COPS spokesman Gilbert Moore says the office
focuses on getting police agencies to meet their hiring obligations
under the grants, rather than on seeking reimbursements.
That strategy has led to a curious situation in
the case involving the Picuris Pueblo. Despite the pueblo's acknowledged
failure to account for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the COPS office
has not demanded reimbursement. Instead, the office has requested
"additional information" — from a police department that no longer
exists.
'Funded' jobs weren't filled
Puerto Rico's San Juan Police Department seemed
to win big under COPS. Starting in 1994, when the force had about 450
people, it got $39 million to hire 813 officers.
But an audit by Justice's inspector general in
November 2003 found that San Juan had fallen hundreds of officers short
of its hiring commitments under the grants. The audit questioned $7.1
million in grant spending, and suggested that San Juan used much of it
to pay expenses that should have been covered by the local police
budget.
The audit's allegations remain unresolved. With
urging from the COPS office, San Juan has hired scores of officers in
the past 18 months. The police department also has hired accountants to
document its use of COPS funds.
"Everything is in order," says San Juan Police
Commissioner Adalberto Mercado. "But we haven't sent in all the papers."
Meanwhile, the COPS office at Justice still
counts all 813 officers that were supposed to have been hired in San
Juan toward its tally of 118,000 police it says were put on the street
by the grant program.
The San Juan case reflects the calculus the
Justice Department has used to claim that COPS is responsible for
118,000 new officers. The grants have indeed "funded" that many jobs,
but scores of agencies failed to hire all the officers they were
supposed to. According to federal audits and police staffing data
obtained by USA TODAY from the 20 largest recipients of COPS grants,
thousands of hires funded by COPS never materialized.
In their study of the COPS program three years
ago, University of Pennsylvania criminologists Jeffrey Roth and
Christopher Koper said that while some departments misused COPS money,
many others that hired officers with funds from the program couldn't
afford to keep them once the grants expired.
COPS has been "like an open house, with all these
officers coming and going at different times," Koper says. "There's no
one time at which all 100,000 are there."
Henke doesn't dispute the notion that COPS fell
short of putting 118,000 officers on the street. But, she says, most
agencies "have been able to maintain or sustain those officers" funded
by the grants.
Officials tout impact on crime
During the past decade, the COPS program has been
a common explanation for the decline in crime that began in the
mid-1990s. Former president Clinton has touted it. So has his attorney
general, Janet Reno, along with scores of current and former police
executives.
Robert Olson, a former police chief in
Minneapolis, is among them. He's sure that the 81 cops Minneapolis hired
with $6 million in COPS grants during the mid-1990s helped cut local
crime rates to levels the city had not seen in three decades. Olson
cites what happened after budget cuts wiped out 140 police jobs in 2003:
Robberies jumped 20% as cops were pulled out of neighborhoods to cover
emergency calls.
But other cities did just as well in fighting
crime during the 1990s without COPS grants. Oklahoma City did so by
using community-policing concepts in troubled areas without hiring many
new cops.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think
tank that has called COPS too costly, says the program often gets too
much credit for today's low crime rates. "Observing that crime rates
dropped when COPS grants flowed to a community is not conclusive
evidence that the grants helped to decrease crime," says David
Muhlhausen, a crime analyst for Heritage.
Pennsylvania's Roth and Koper say the lack of
more definitive research on the COPS program's impact on crime may have
as much to do with politics as anything else. They say the Justice
Department has not sought a thorough assessment of COPS because the
results could bring bad publicity to the popular grant program.
Henke says the program has done the "best it
could" to monitor its operations and track its impact.
But Roth and Koper say they asked Justice three
times for funding to do more research on COPS' impact on crime, and were
rejected. "Neither administration (Clinton's nor George W. Bush's) has
ever shown the slightest interest" in such research, Roth says.
