10 years after debut, COPS draws critics
WASHINGTON – It was a signature plan of Bill Clinton’s presidency: Attack the rising crime rates of the early 1990s by putting 100,000 more cops on America’s streets.
Ten years later, the grant program known as COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) has given out $10 billion to help more than 12,000 police agencies hire and reassign officers. Politicians and police chiefs across the nation have said that COPS is a big reason for the sharp decline in crime rates that began in the late 1990s.
But now, with the largest buildup of local law enforcement in U.S. history winding down, a less flattering view of the COPS program is emerging: Federal audits of just 3 percent 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. And there’s little evidence that COPS was a big factor in reducing crime.
The audits, conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general and reviewed by USA Today, allege that some police agencies wrongly used the hiring grants to cover routine expenses at a time when local budgets were tightening.
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 nation. But a review of programs last year by the White House Office of Management and Budget said 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 percent fewer cops than Justice’s estimate.
Meanwhile, few crime analysts say COPS grants were significant in reducing crime. Of three studies on the issue, only one – funded by the Justice Department – found that the police hiring program was chiefly responsible for drops in violent crime rates among big cities.