Washington Times-September 13, 2000
Clinton's laptop cops
By James Bovard
One of President Clinton's favorite boasts is his claim he
put 100,000 new cops on the streets. Mr. Clinton claimed in 1994
that putting the new cops on the street would make Americans
"freer from fear" and that "there is simply no better
crime-fighting tool to be found" than multiplying the number of
government employees packing heat. Vice President Al Gore
mentions the cop-hiring binge often, declaring earlier this year:
"We're putting 100,000 new police on our streets. More Americans
are safer."
But, despite $9 billion in federal spending, the Community
Oriented Policing Service's (COPS) 100,000 new police claim is
another Washington fraud. "Voodoo math" was how one Florida
police chief characterized the Clinton administration's success
claims.
Mr. Clinton's new cops are often nothing more than federally
paid purchases of laptop computers. In Little Rock, Ark., 40 of
the 82 "new" cops are actually "equivalents in technology" � new
cops created by claiming labor savings as a result of purchasing
laptop computers and other equipment.
A 1999 Justice Department inspector general (IG) report
concluded that more than 40,000 of the 100,000 "new cops" are
actually "equivalents" concocted as a result of time savings
attributed to new technology or the hiring of civilians
supposedly to do police paperwork or administrative duties. Such
grants have their own acronym: MORE, for Making Officer
Redeployment Effective.
As usual, the acronym has no relation to how the program
actually operates. Seventy-eight percent of police departments
that receive MORE grants can provide no evidence that federal aid
actually led to more cops on the street, according to the IG.
Almost half of police departments simply substitute federal funds
for local spending.
Unfortunately, some locales wish the program paid for
nothing but laptops. Residents in Johnstown, Ohio, are
threatening to abolish the local police department, as the
Chicago Tribune reported, because the addition of COPS officers
led to the "harassment of average citizens. Residents say
officers stop motorists on any pretext, including having too much
snow or rust on a license plate." Potsdam, Ohio, a village of
250, received federal money to hire 11 cops. After one crackdown
after another, local aldermen voted to suspend the entire police
department. In tiny Lavon, Texas, COPS money paid to hire a
police lieutenant who "turned the police department into a
criminal enterprise, using his powers to commit extortion,
marijuana distribution, robbery and mail fraud," as the Wall
Street Journal reported. (The lieutenant received nine years in
prison for his achievements).
Before COPS, Olympian Village, Mo., had no police force;
after receiving a federal grant, the town hired five cops. To
raise money for the local government, the police busied
themselves setting up illegal speed traps. The new police chief
endeared himself to townspeople by attacking a resident with high
grass in his lawn and kicking him in the face so hard he broke a
bone under the guy's eye, as the Journal noted. Townspeople
appealed to Robert Wilkins, the chief prosecutor of Jefferson
County, Mo., to investigate the wayward cops. Mr. Wilkins
concluded, "I find it positively frightening that the Justice
Department would give money to such people."
The Justice Department has little idea how the program
actually operates because 94 percent of police departments don't
bother submitting mandatory financial status reports (or submit
the reports late). The feds make no effort to verify claims of
new hires. Nassau County, N.Y., received $26 million and was
credited with hiring 327 new cops; an IG audit found that the
county actually reduced his cop force by 218 officers, despite
the grant.
Mr. Clinton perennially invokes his 100,000 new cops as a
way to make average Americans feel their federal government cares
about them. But Kristen Mahoney, who worked in the federal
program during its launch stage, observed: "The COPS office
started off on a wing and a prayer. They threw us into it and
said that . . . we need to spend a billion dollars by the end of
the year." The Chicago Tribune examined grants to the nation's 50
largest police departments and found "no correlation between the
growth in number of officers and crime rates since 1993."
Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore are trying to build on the
"success" of the original COPS program with a new "21st century
crime bill" that will spend another $6 billion to buy more laptop
computers and claim another 50,000 cops hired by 2005. But rather
than more cops, we need fewer laws. Clean the statute books of
all the laws that make government a public nuisance � redirect
police efforts to protecting people from violence � and the
nation will overnight have far more cops than it needs.
James Bovard is the author of the just-published "Feeling Your
Pain: The Explosion & Abuse of Government Power in the
Clinton-Gore Years" (St. Martin's Press).
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