Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

Created in the middle of President Bill Clinton's first term, the Community Oriented Policing Ser­vices (COPS) program promised to put 100,000 new state and local law enforcement officers on the street by the year 2000. Critics said that COPS would fail to meet this goal. Critics also said that state and local governments would do what they always do when the federal government subsidizes any responsibility of state or local governments— stop paying for it themselves. The critics were right on both counts.

Another fundamental goal of the COPS program was to promote "community policing" throughout the nation. Although COPS certainly did not hinder the spread of community policing, the evi­dence does not support claims that it substantially advanced it. Instead, the independent actions of police chiefs have been the most important factor in the adoption of community policing, and federal grants were largely unrelated to those decisions.

S.368: Exacerbating Existing Problems. Un­daunted by the COPS program's failure to meet its most important public goals and in response to con­siderable lobbying by state and local officials, Con­gress is now proposing to resuscitate COPS with an enormous appropriation of taxpayer funding. Even with most national crime rates at or near 15-year lows (and the most recent FBI data show that they have fallen once again), presidential candidates and commentators have argued that pouring more money into COPS, despite its demonstrated fail­ures, would make American streets safer. This cash infusion will supposedly enable "COPS 2.0" to meet its goals—something the COPS program has never done before.

But the game is rigged. Rather than crafting COPS 2.0 to ensure that COPS fulfills its sponsors' original goals for the program, the COPS Improve­ments Act of 2007 (S. 368) would simply eliminate the very performance standards and yardsticks in "COPS 1.0" that helped to expose the program's fail­ures. Under the current bill, the COPS program would no longer be "saddled with" adding a specific number of law-enforcement officers on the street by a specific date. State and local governments would no longer be required to use COPS hiring grants to hire only new law enforcement officers or be required to pay the salaries of officers hired using COPS grants after the grants expire.

Without any meaningful performance standards in place, the bill's sponsors can safely claim that the program is a success because the "success" of COPS 2.0 will presumably be measured by the amount of taxpayer funds spent. In performing this function, Congress has no peer.

Perhaps of greater concern, the COPS Improve­ments Act of 2007 appears designed to reduce accountability and encourage state and local law enforcement to become progressively more depen­dent on federal funding. S. 368 bolsters the false public perception that ordinary street crime is a fed­eral responsibility, and it encourages state and local officials who fail to devote adequate resources to fighting crime to shift their own responsibility for local crime problems onto the federal government.

Effective Policing Strategies. Police officers serve as the frontline forces in preventing and deter­ring crime in America. The combined efforts of aggressive and intelligent local policing can reduce crime. Further, effective policing at the state and local levels does not require funding from the fed­eral government. Policymakers can encourage more effective policing by focusing on results and proven strategies. Simply spending more (federal) money is not an effective solution.

A review of the policing research by Professors David Weisburd and John E. Eck suggests a few innovative approaches that have proven results. "Hot spots" policing, focusing on repeat offenders, and problem-oriented policing can effectively reduce crime. Unlike broader strategies that con­centrate on community relations, these three approaches share a common focus of targeting criminogenic factors, such as high-risk locations and repeat offenders.

Conclusion. The COPS program has an exten­sive track record of poor performance and should be eliminated. It has failed to achieve its goals and has assigned to the federal government responsibil­ities that fall squarely within the expertise, jurisdic­tion, and constitutional responsibilities of state and local governments. With a drastically smaller bud­get and a failed history, COPS is a flawed program in desperate search of a mission. Congress should reject efforts to resuscitate the program and instead eliminate it entirely.

The COPS Improvements Act of 2007 takes precisely the wrong approach. It bolsters the false public perception that ordinary street crime is a federal responsibility. In doing so, S. 368 would encourage state and local officials who fail to devote adequate state resources to fighting crime to become permanent supplicants for federal COPS funding and to continue to shift account­ability for local crime away from themselves and toward the federal government.

S.368 appears to be expressly designed to reduce accountability and to encourage state and local law enforcement to become progressively more depen­dent on federal funding. The bill "addresses" the COPS program's failures to achieve its stated goals and to enforce the program's requirements by elimi­nating those goals and requirements. This approach would elevate what some Members of Congress may think are political imperatives while expanding federal control over state and local law enforcement.

While claiming to "put more cops on the beat" might play well with some constituents, Members of Congress concerned about effective law enforce­ment policies and retaining the constitutional struc­ture of the U.S. government should instead focus on the manifold shortcomings of the COPS Improve­ments Act and of the COPS program itself.

David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis and Brian W. Walsh is Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.