He talked about his landmark legislative accomplishments, like 100,000 cops on the street. I seem to remember that that produced practically no cops and was a complete flameout. Help?
And the rest of the money went ???
Slate 2001 http://www.slate.com/id/2058553/
“He talked about his landmark legislative accomplishments, like 100,000 cops on the street. I seem to remember that that produced practically no cops and was a complete flameout. Help?”
******
100,000 Cops on the Beat? Not Even If You Use New Math
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25, 2000—Eager to claim credit for a dropping national crime rate, President Clinton continues to boast of putting “more than 100,000 new community police officers” on the street through the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program.
But the first independent analysis of the program, released today by The Heritage Foundation, shows that the actual number of new officers added through COPS falls well below the 100,000 mark.
Analyzing the latest Justice Department data on COPS grants, along with crime statistics and other FBI data, researchers in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis conclude that COPS—and a predecessor program that also funded community policing—added, at most, only some 40,000 full-time officers to the nation’s police ranks during its first five years (1993-1998).
Indeed, given the rapid growth in police hiring that began prior to 1993, the true number of police hires attributable to COPS may be considerably lower.
But a large proportion of COPS grants have flowed to agencies with relatively mild crime problems, Heritage’s team of researchers found. For example, among the 20 police departments receiving the largest COPS grants from 1993-1997, at least five (25 percent) had violent crime rates lower than the average for large (100,000+ population) cities.
from 1993 to1997, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department received $44 million in COPS grants. During that same period, Nashville’s Metropolitan Police Department—battling nearly three times as many violent crimes and a violent crime rate three and a half times higher—received only a quarter of that amount ($11.8 million).
Some agencies added few police officers despite receiving large amounts of COPS funds. The Miami Police Department, for example, received nearly $46 million in COPS grants from 1993 to 1997. Of this amount, $34.4 million was marked for hiring new officers, yet the department expanded its ranks by only 21 officers—a cost of more than $1.6 million per officer. “Some COPS programs make those $800 Defense Department hammers look like a real bargain,”
Some funded agencies actually down-sized. The Atlanta Police Department received $15.3 million from 1993 to 1997, but dropped 75 officers (a 4.9 percent reduction) from 1994 to 1998. The biggest drop in officer strength, however, came right in COPS’ backyard: The Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department received $6.7 million in COPS funds to place more of its officers on the street, yet slashed 595 officers from its payroll (a 14.5 percent decline).
From 1993 to 1997, almost half (48 percent) of the $1.58 billion dispensed to the nation’s 315 largest police agencies went to just 10 police departments.
A July 1999 Justice Department report concluded: “Clearly, the COPS grants will not result in 100,000 additional officers on the streets by the end of FY 2000. Based on projections by the COPS Office, only 59,765 of the additional officers will by deployed by [then].”
Justice concluded that two of every five (41 percent) had used the money simply to “supplant local funds”—that is, to pay officers they would have hired even without federal funding.
“He talked about his landmark legislative accomplishments, like 100,000 cops on the street. I seem to remember that that produced practically no cops and was a complete flameout. Help?”
******
Federal audits of just 3% of all COPS grants have alleged that $277 million was misspent. Tens of thousands of jobs funded by the grants were never filled, or weren’t filled for long, auditors found.
Despite $9 billion in federal spending, however, the claim of the Community Oriented Policing Service (COPS) of 100,000 new police is another Washington fraud. “Voodoo math” was how one Florida police chief characterized the Clinton administration’s claim of success.
Clinton’s new cops are often nothing more than federally paid purchases of laptop computers. In Little Rock, Arkansas, for example, 40 of the 82 “new” cops are actually “equivalents in technology” new cops created by claiming labor savings resulting from purchases of laptop computers and other equipment. The Omaha, Nebraska, police department was credited with hiring 72.8 new police officers after it received $2.8 million in federal grants to purchase laptop computers even though the laptop computers were not purchased.
A 1999 Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) report concluded that more than 40,000 of the 100,000 “new cops” are actually “equivalents” concocted as a result of assertions of time savings from new technology or from hiring civilians supposedly to do police paperwork or administrative duties.
The Clinton administration’s COPS campaign is another attempt to make people more dependent on government for their own safety and survival. At the same time that the Clintonites are trying to maximize the number of government employees packing heat, the Clinton administration has strongly opposed proposals to permit more private citizens to carry concealed weapons. According to several national studies, guns are used by private citizens to prevent crimes roughly two million times per year. Economist John Lott concluded that “of all the methods studied so far by economists, the carrying of concealed handguns appears to be the most cost-effective method for reducing crime.”