Almost five years ago, President Clinton vowed to add 100,000 new police officers to the nation’s streets in a bold gesture to make Americans “freer of fear.”
Last week, after spending $6 billion on that goal, he pumped another $95 million into the program, declaring it “ahead of schedule” and on target to fill the jobs by the year 2000.
But a Tribune investigation of the COPS program–Community Oriented Policing Services–shows that the predictions are overstated and underdelivered.
In fact, the pledge of 100,000 new officers was hyperbole at best. With about a year to go to meet the deadline for filling these jobs, fewer than half the new officers–40,680– have been hired. And, in the little-understood fine print of Clinton’s promise, 38,000 of the positions included in the COPS hiring program actually are civilian employees and computers.
A Tribune investigation has found that COPS funds have paid for speed traps, for cutting down cornstalks and, according to internal audits, maybe even for gambling and liquor. In Calumet Park, a southern suburb of Chicago, the U.S. attorney’s office is investigating allegations that thousands of dollars in COPS money helped bankroll a gambling excursion at a dog track, golf fees and trips to Florida and Arizona.
Illustrating how the numbers can be misleading, in Washington, D.C., the public has been told the grants will provide 781 new officers. But those grants were used to purchase equipment and hire civilians. Not one new officer has been hired with the funds. Based on the Tribune’s findings of mismanagement, the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this month cut off COPS funding to the District of Columbia police.
Federal officials are having an equally difficult time keeping track of how many of the new police officers have been laid off or fired. The program, for instance, continues to count an officer from Rising Star, Texas, who left the police force several years ago after being pressured to kick back $4,800 of his COPS salary to the police chief, federal records show.
John Hart, the COPS office’s deputy director for administration, acknowledged that the public may falsely believe that the 100,000 number reflects only new hires. He called it a “challenge” for administration officials to erase the misperception.
Hart, however, said the money for police equipment and civilian hires has allowed thousands of officers to be redeployed to the streets. Moreover, Hart and other officials said the program has helped revolutionize policing in America by pushing a grass-roots law-enforcement strategy called community policing, a pro-active effort to make neighborhoods safer by fostering partnerships between residents and police.
Once a problem is identified– such as an open-air drug market– police and residents develop a plan for attacking it, which could range from establishing bicycle and foot patrols to public marches.
Many law-enforcement agencies say the program has helped them do their jobs better. The Kane County sheriff’s office hired 10 deputy sheriffs and purchased computers to help gather crime statistics and produce community advisories. “We felt understaffed for a long time,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Dave Barrows. “The COPS funding has been critical.”
Impact tough to evaluate
But the experience in Chicago highlights the difficulty of trying to measure the impact of the program beyond the sheer number of officers hired. Through COPS, the Chicago Police Department has hired hundreds of new officers. But, even though the crime rate here has dropped, the city last year for the first time had the most homicides in the country.
And, while federal dollars have helped fund numerous neighborhood successes in Chicago, two of the five areas where the city launched its community policing initiative continue to have contentious relations with police.
Residents allege that police have not shared information about serial rapists and other criminals– information vital to a safe neighborhood.
Federal officials also point to an overall decline in crime nationwide as confirmation of the program’s accomplishments. But a Tribune analysis of the nation’s 50 largest police departments found there is no correlation between the growth in number of officers and crime rates since 1993–a conclusion that doesn’t surprise experts who have studied the complicated forces affecting crime rates.
“To say that any single action like putting more officers on the street will reduce crime without taking into account all other factors that affect crime is excessively simplistic,” said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University.
Among the other factors reducing crime, Blumstein and other researchers said, are the booming economy, increased incarceration rates and the shrinking of crack cocaine markets.
Clinton’s signing of legislation for COPS in September 1994 set off a rush of activity as the Justice Department scrambled to create a new agency, using money saved by reducing the number of federal employees.
“The COPS office started off on a wing and a prayer,” recalled Kristen Mahoney, a former COPS official now working for the Baltimore Police Department. “They threw us into it and said that . . . we need to spend a billion dollars by the end of the year.”
Under the program, law-enforcement agencies can either hire new officers directly or redeploy existing desk-bound officers to the streets by buying time-saving equipment or by hiring clerks, dispatchers and other civilian employees who aren’t required to have law-enforcement experience.
Hiring grants typically subsidize 75 percent of a new officer’s salary for three years. Communities provide matching funds until the fourth year, when they are required to assume all costs. Hart says one reason for the delay in getting many officers on the street is it can take up to 18 months to recruit and train a new law-enforcement officer.
To qualify for a hiring grant, agencies agree to retain all new COPS officers and increase their overall staff numbers while promising to implement community policing.
Many departments have played by the rules, but others have padded their budgets without hiring the promised number of officers or putting into practice community policing. One Ohio town used the money for nothing more innovative than an old-fashioned speed trap.
Dozens of agencies can’t afford to keep their COPS officers. In Kentucky, the Martin County sheriff’s office fired all five of its COPS officers in the past year after county officials voted to cut off local matching funds for the grants.
“I’ll never be a law officer,” said Floyd Jude, one of the five fired deputies who is now driving a coal truck and cleaning rifles for extra cash.
Jude, 27, is one of a growing number of law-enforcement officers nationwide hired under the COPS program only to have their jobs evaporate in budget cuts and political infighting.
In a report issued last month, the U.S. Office of the Inspector General found that 58 percent of the 144 agencies audited either did not develop a “good faith” plan to retain officers or said they would not retain the officers at the conclusion of the grant. In addition, the COPS office has provided 766 departments nationwide with emergency grants as a bailout to help cover an officer’s salary for an additional year, a Tribune analysis of COPS records shows.
“If COPS positions are not retained beyond the conclusion of the grant, then COPS will have been a short-lived phenomena, rather than helping to launch a lasting change in policing,” according to the inspector general’s report.
COPS officials said the inspector general focused primarily on problem agencies, which represent only a fraction of the 11,300 departments that received funding. They estimate that up to 5,000 officers will be let go, an insignificant number, they say, given the size of the program.
To track the number of officers funded under the program, the Justice Department pays a private company to survey grant recipients three times a year. The department also has created a computerized database to catalog the more than 38,000 COPS grants.
The Tribune, which obtained the COPS database, found thousands of inaccuracies–such as listing grants that were not dispensed– that inflated the hiring count. COPS officials acknowledged problems with the database and said they have recently reduced the count by 1,000 officers in an effort to find and eliminate errors.
Even in an updated version of the database, the Tribune still found numerous errors that exaggerate the hiring numbers.
From Brewster, Wash., to Big Spring, Texas, to Stark County, Ill., more than a dozen municipalities where officers who were hired and later dismissed are still being included in the 100,000 total.
In Ohio, the five-member South Lebanon Police Department was abolished last August, but the Justice Department still includes a COPS-funded officer in their hiring count. In Belle Glade, Fla., all six COPS-funded positions were eliminated because of budget cuts, yet they, too, remain part of the 100,000 total, officials say.
The Tribune found that the COPS hiring count is misleading in another way.
While Justice Department officials are careful to note that the hiring figure includes equipment grants and civilian hires, the distinction is often lost on the public and many politicians, including Clinton, who has frequently laced his speeches with references to hiring 100,000 new officers.
Under program guidelines, all equipment purchases are assigned an “officer equivalency” value. For example, in some departments a laptop computer has been counted as an extra police officer based on the theory that the equipment will free existing officers to do more policing. The Justice Department signs off on the figure and in some cases helps agencies estimate the time savings.
In general, the department requires that an agency create at least one “officer equivalency” for every $25,000 spent on equipment.
In many cases, the grants have helped redeploy sworn officers to community policing, law-enforcement officials say. But in other instances, the benefits have been overstated, according to COPS records and interviews with police officials.
COPS calculates that it is funding the equivalent of 781 officers in Washington, D.C., through a $6.6 million grant for equipment and hiring civilians. However, Nola Joyce, who oversees the department’s grants, said that no more than 46 officers have been redeployed.
“My goodness, how did the Justice Department calculate that?” asked Joyce, who joined the department last year–long after the grants were awarded.
After Hart, the COPS office’s deputy director for administration, was informed of the situation by the Tribune, his office suspended funding for the District of Columbia.
The Tribune found a dozen other examples where the 100,000 total is being inflated by counting non-functioning equipment or civilians who have been fired or let go.
The Tacoma Police Department in Washington spent $83,000 in COPS funds to hire four civilians in 1995 to transcribe reports that had been dictated by officers. But 10 months later, the department laid off the employees and shut down the system after determining it wasn’t saving much time. Despite the failure, the COPS hiring count includes 6.3 officers supposedly redeployed to the streets as a result of the dictation system, according to the COPS database.
Federal officials like to praise COPS for creating a new era of policing. “It has really changed policing in America in a way that has changed the day-to-day quality of life in many places,” said John Schmidt, a Chicago attorney and former Justice Department official who is one of the architects of the COPS program.
But, the Tribune found, many law-enforcement agencies receiving COPS grants are betraying their pledge to foster community policing.
In Johnstown, Ohio, hundreds of residents are threatening to abolish the Police Department because, they say, the addition of COPS officers led not to cooperation with the police, but harassment of average citizens. Residents say that officers stop motorists on any pretext, including having too much snow or rust on a license plate.
Tensions between the eight-member police force and residents escalated last November with the arrest of 24-year-old Stacy Williamson, a lifelong resident of the Central Ohio town. She was pulled over by an officer hired with COPS money, one of three new officers funded by the program.
“He told me that my license plate sticker had expired and that he was taking me in,” Williamson recalled. “I was crying and begging him not to handcuff me. I just kept saying please, please don’t do this to me. I’m not a criminal.”
Few requirements
The conflict in Johnstown, which has 3,200 residents, provides a telling example of how the COPS office liberally doles out tax dollars and then fails in some cases to ensure that the money is used on community policing. While the government offers free training in community policing, Johnstown and many other departments are not required to enroll officers.
Brian Humphress, Johnstown’s town manager, said the $192,000 in COPS funds helped provide police staffing around the clock but acknowledged that it failed to create community policing. He said that inexperience and youth among the COPS officers and others contributed to overzealous enforcement. The officers have been told to be more sensitive.
“I wish I could put a 30-year-old head on a 21-year-old body,” Humphress said.
Residents also are upset in New Rome, Ohio, one of the state’s most notorious speed traps, which received $75,000 in COPS money to hire an officer and a civilian dispatcher.
Located on the western edge of Columbus, the state capital, New Rome (population: 111) is a collection of two-bedroom homes bracketed by car parts stores, a Dairy Queen and an adult bookstore.
On a recent night, two officers raced back and forth along a four-lane highway, maneuvering just inches from vehicles only to back off when they failed to spot anything suspicious. The officers trailed dozens of vehicles before finally nabbing a 28-year-old motorist with an expired license plate.
While traffic enforcement is legitimate police work, the Inspector General’s Office and COPS officials ruled last year that New Rome’s aggressive tactics have little to do with community policing.
New Rome officers were required to attend a training class about community policing, but residents said police have not implemented any programs.
In fact, residents and business owners say the 12-member police force spends so much time following motorists and writing tickets that it has scared off visitors.
“The police are a joke,” said Linda Scott, who owns a flower shop next to the Police Department. “I have customers who say they’d love to come to my shop, but there is no way they are going to drive into New Rome.”
While dozens of places like Johnstown and New Rome have failed to work with residents, many other grant recipients are creating their own definitions of community policing.
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources will use its grant money to hire 40 new officers whose tasks include directing traffic in parking lots and teaching children how to fish.
The Illinois State Police, meanwhile, are cutting down cornstalks at rural intersections and installing deer warnings signs along highways. Both actions are designed to reduce traffic accidents.
Federal officials say the concept of community policing is broad by design to allow agencies the freedom to develop programs that address local needs.
“We’re not sitting here in Washington telling people how to police their communities,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the COPS office.
In an effort to cut red tape, the COPS office has made the grant process as simple as possible–so simple that small communities can secure hundreds of thousands of dollars by filling out a one-page application.
Once the grant is made, law-enforcement agencies are required annually to file various financial disclosure reports.
But the Inspector General’s Office found that 94 percent of the 146 agencies audited from 1996 to 1998 did not submit all of the financial reports, or submitted them late. Without these reports, the office concluded, the Justice Department “cannot monitor implementation of important grant requirements.”
Even in agencies that filed reports, the Inspector General’s Office found substantial problems ranging from the inability to document expenditures to overbilling.
Thomas Bondurant, assistant U.S. inspector general, said in a recent interview that the COPS program is “vulnerable to fraud.”
The U.S. attorney’s office is investigating how Calumet Park, a small suburb of modest brick bungalows with an emerging gang problem, spent federal and state funds, including $68,750 in COPS money, according to a federal source familiar with the investigation.
The federal government awarded the COPS grant–which was to fund a new officer over three years–only to learn years later that the mayor and other town officials allegedly mixed the money with other government funds to bankroll trips to police conferences with their wives and to buy souvenirs, according to the inspector general’s audit.
The officials went on trips to cities ranging from Orlando to Miami to Phoenix, according to an audit by the inspector general. They took a gambling excursion to a dog track. They went on golf outings. They bought CDs, raffle tickets, liquor, artwork and clothing, and even spent $1,190 to pay for the police chief’s installation banquet as head of a regional law-enforcement agency, auditors found.
In total, federal auditors allege that over a seven-year period town officials made $44,598 in “unsupported or unallowable expenditures,” though they could not determine the exact source of the misspent funds because town records were incomplete.
Auditors said the town also violated program rules by taking COPS money for a new officer but then letting the overall staffing of the department decrease. The COPS office has suspended funding to the town.
A town attorney denied that COPS funds were misspent. Mayor Buster Porch conceded that he and other town officials took the trips cited by federal investigators but said some of the findings were false.
He declined to provide specifics. “My people are 100 percent career people and as honest as the day is long,” he said.
Image, not results, studied
To Justice Department officials, public perception about the success of community policing and, by extension, the COPS program is a crucial part of their mission. So important that they spent $244,290 for a study that ranked 26 newspapers–from The New York Times to the Omaha World Herald–based on their positive or negative coverage of the issue.
The study, which was completed in January and found the Omaha paper produced the most negative stories, is one of dozens of scholarly reports commissioned by the COPS office each year.
In total, the COPS program has earmarked $240 million for studies, training and conferences, which Justice Department officials said is critical for spreading the word about community policing and improving local programs.
But not a dime has been spent on quantifying what has become the program’s main selling point– that more cops means less crime.
COPS officials said they are careful not to directly link the number of officers hired with crime reduction, though the officials, along with Clinton and many other politicians, frequently imply as much. COPS officials often say in speeches and interviews that crime has been directly reduced by the expansion of community policing, one of the program’s primary goals.
Most criminologists agree that community policing can help reduce crime, though they say that many local law-enforcement agencies don’t have effective programs. Adding to the problem, they say, is that much of the COPS money is given to small towns with little or no serious crime.
Under legislative guidelines, one-half of the COPS funding must be distributed to agencies serving communities with fewer than 150,000 residents.
The Tribune found that 17,861 grants were given to communities with populations of 10,000 residents or less, most with negligible crime, according to FBI crime statistics.
Regardless of the program’s effectiveness as a crime deterrent, many law-enforcement agencies said they’ll continue to go after COPS grants as long as the money is there.
In Illinois, state police officials have received more than $39 million in grants for officers, computers and other equipment. It was so easy to get the money, they said, that they even asked the COPS office to buy them a $1.5 million helicopter.
But the COPS office thought the state couldn’t justify the request.
“It was worth a shot,” said Ron Ellis, the bureau chief for strategic planning and analysis for the state police. “They seem to give out money for almost anything. It’s a trough.”
