Friday, March 30, 2001

President to Trim Clinton's Community Policing Program Law: Hiring initiative is seen as a key force in fighting crime. School security is at top of agenda.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU, RONALD BROWNSTEIN, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON--The Bush administration has decided to severely scale back a popular Clinton-era program that has put tens of thousands of new police officers on the streets, devoting a "lion's share" of the remaining money to school security officers in the wake of the San Diego-area shootings, officials said Thursday.

The decision, due to be unveiled next month, would mark a major departure from a federal law enforcement policy that some criminologists say helped spur a marked nationwide decline in crime in the 1990s. And it could provoke another intense confrontation between President Bush and congressional Democrats, many of whom are already lining up to defend the $1-billion Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, program.

"If it gets scaled back, you are going to see the number of badges in the cities and counties drop off precipitously," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), who plans to introduce legislation to save the program. The number of officers on the streets "will go down like crazy and we will have crime rates back up," he said.

The COPS program marked the cornerstone of former President Clinton's 1994 anti-crime initiative, providing municipal police departments with more than $9 billion in federal funds to help put an estimated 85,000 new officers on the streets in the six years since, according to government figures. The funds cover 75% of the salaries for three years, then the local departments pick up the costs.

Critics question whether the program has funded as many officers as claimed and whether some of the money has been wasted by bureaucratic inefficiency. But the program has proved to be popular with local politicians and police around the country. In Los Angeles, which has fewer officers per capita than any other major city, the program has furnished the Los Angeles Police Department with $235 million since 1995 to help hire more than 2,000 officers.

But Bush has not been a fan. While former Vice President Al Gore pledged during the presidential campaign to put an additional 50,000 officers on the streets, Bush said in an interview last year that he believed hiring police officers should be largely a local concern. "I view that as focus-group politics that breaches the role of what the federal government should do," he said.

With his budget proposal scheduled to go to Congress on April 9, Bush now has the chance to put those beliefs into practice, and administration and congressional sources say he is expected to make deep cuts in the program.

Although the exact figures aren't yet available, one White House official involved in the administration's discussions of the program said the upcoming budget proposal would likely provide less than a quarter of the $228 million funded in the current budget for hiring municipal police officers.

The administration has concluded that continuing the federal funding would violate the original intention of the 1994 program because it would subject the federal government to "an open-ended commitment beyond the scope that Congress originally passed," the official said.

Moreover, officials are concerned that, with unemployment low, police departments are already having difficulty filling vacancies.

But one part of the program that policymakers have determined is worth salvaging is the hiring of officers to protect schools, a program that has already funded and trained about 3,800 school officers. A Justice Department official who asked not to be identified because the plan has not been finalized said Bush's plan earmarks $180 million for school hires, a level roughly equal to the current level of funding.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said after last week's shooting at Granite Hills High School in El Cajon--the second in suburban San Diego in three weeks--that the violence underscored the importance of schools such as Granite Hills receiving federal COPS funds to protect their students.

After a gunman at Granite Hills wounded five people, an El Cajon police officer assigned full time to the school stopped the attack by shooting and wounding the assailant. Because the school had an armed officer on duty, Ashcroft said, "it meant that probably other students were not injured and not killed."

The Bush administration is convinced that putting more officers in schools should be its priority in funding the program.

"The focus of the funding, the lion's share, will be for school resource officers," the Justice Department official said.

That commitment was made weeks ago in the administration's budget planning, the official said, but "the most recent shootings [outside San Diego] reinforced that this was a good budget decision. . . . It clearly showed the benefit of having a policeman in the school."

The Bush administration is also hoping to protect another part of the COPS program: grants that help local law enforcement officials upgrade their technology and purchase such items as patrol car data terminals, mounted cameras and jail booking software. The program, included in the 1994 crime bill at the behest of such big-city mayors as New York's Rudolph W. Giuliani, is designed to spur labor-saving innovations that allow police departments to move more officers from the desk to the beat.

Early indications are that the key police lobbying groups will not strongly oppose cutbacks in the hiring program if Bush provides a significant sum for those technology grants.

For instance, Gene Voegtlin, legislative counsel for the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, said his group "would not go to war" over the hiring cuts if the technology assistance is protected.

"We think hiring is important, but it's not the sole need for law enforcement," he said. "We will go and push hard if the overall funding level for law enforcement is significantly cut back."

In Los Angeles, Jennifer Roth, deputy mayor for budget and policy, said that the COPS program has been a "tremendous help" for public safety. While the federal government's subsidies for local officers are locked in for the next three years, she said any significant downturn by the Bush administration would likely force the city to do some major "re-prioritizing" in law enforcement in the years ahead.

Biden and 16 other senators wrote Bush a letter last week saying that any significant cuts in police hiring "would signal a misguided retreat from our joint commitment to keep crime down and would be a serious policy mistake."

In a measure that he says should garner support from many Democrats and at least half a dozen Republicans, Biden is planning to propose $1.15 billion in annual funding for the next six years for the COPS program to help put an additional 50,000 officers on the streets.

"We may have a shot at preventing the COPS program from shutting down," Biden said.

The looming fight places the two parties in an unusual alignment, potentially allowing Democrats to position themselves to Bush's right on a critical criminal justice issue.

Many Democrats, backed by criminologists in the academic world, say they believe the COPS program--generating a 12% increase in the number of officers since 1994--was a key factor in a record eight-year decline in serious crime in the United States.

But the administration and other analysts dispute that conclusion. Conservatives generally argue, as the Heritage Foundation concluded in a paper last fall, that "there is no relationship between the awarding of grants and decreasing crime rates." Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times

-- More Assaults to Our Public Safety (is.this@guy.crazy?), March 31, 2001

Answers

Not at all shocked by this. go figure.

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), March 31, 2001.

Yes, everyone should carry a gun instead, this will solve everything. Unfortunately for us conservative morons, this plan could backfire. The liberals are better shooters, and far more intelligent.

-- Tommy H. (NRA@pro-gun.morons), March 31, 2001.

I don't know about the more intelligent part, but it does seem like many of those who want to ban guns own one themselves.

-- Poopsie (don't@call.me), April 01, 2001.