Oct. 8, 2000

CLAIMS OF 100,000 NEW COPS EXAGGERATED

President Clinton is fond of boasting that his administration has put 100,000 additional cops on the street. Vice President Al Gore repeated the claim in his convention speech, and promised 50,000 more beyond that.

You should understand that both the boast and the promise are so much hot air.

Federal grants began in December 1993, and through the end of September the Community Oriented Policing Services program distributed $7.5 billion in grants. The COPS office estimates that the cost of adding a new officer is $75,000, so in theory that's enough money for 100,000.

The first problem is that $75,000 pays for one officer for one year. The money comes in handy, no doubt, in paying for training costs and new equipment, but it does nothing to help departments cover the cost of keeping the new officer on after the first year.

Police departments can figure that out, even if Clinton and Gore can't. So, as you would expect, they have been much slower to add to their forces than the numbers the administration claims.

How much slower? The Heritage Foundation has combined information about grants from the program, which is part of the Department of Justice, with data from the FBI on the number of officers employed in law-enforcement agencies across the country, together with statistics on crime rates and population (heritage.org/copsandcrime on the Web).

Heritage cites a Justice report that conceded the number of additional officers employed would reach only 57,175 by 2001. But even that overstates the case. Many agencies use the federal funds in place of their own money to hire people they would have hired anyway. The laws bans the practice, but in one study of high-risk grants Justice researchers found up to 41 percent of recipients did it.

Some grants allow agencies to hire civilian staff members, and then to count as ''new cops'' the officers who move into community policing. Even with that generous way of counting, the total number of COPS officers will be no more than 69,000 to 85,000 by 2001. And again, it overstates the case. Four of five departments in the study ''could not demonstrate that they had or would re-deploy officers from administrative duties to the streets.''

And the size of police forces was increasing even before Uncle Sam started handing out money. Had the trend of recent years simply continued, the number of officers today would be only 6,000 less than it is after spending $7.5 billion.

''Some COPS programs make those $800 Defense Department hammers look like a real bargain,'' said William Beach, director of Heritage's Center for Data Analysis.

Figures from individual agencies suggests that the effect of COPS funding is highly unpredictable. Between 1994 and 1998 Atlanta received $11 million for hiring new officers, and the size of the force fell by 75. Miami added 21 officers though it got $34.4 million, while San Francisco received $7.1 million and added 363 officers.

Heritage also found that the money an agency received was only loosely related to the amount of crime it had to deal with. ''If street officers are to take 'a bite out of crime,' '' Beach said, ''they must be deployed within biting distance -- in high crime areas.''

Those oddities show up in the Colorado grants. Denver, not surprisingly, had both the largest total of grants 1993-2000, $7.6 million, and the largest number of crimes. Aurora was second, at $5.9 million, and Boulder Police Department (the sheriff's department is listed separately) was third at $3.5 million. But the number of crimes in Denver, 29,174 in 1998, is five times the number in Boulder, 5,443 that year.

Parker, which listed only 400 crimes in 1998, pulled in $1.4 million over seven years, while Longmont, with more than 10 times as much crime, got $1.3 million. Parker added seven officers from 1995 to 1998; Longmont, 12.

Crime rates have decreased significantly over the past several years, and the increase in the number of police offices most likely has something, but not everything, to do with that. The availability of COPS grants most likely has something to do with the increase in the number of police officers.

But when Clinton, and now Gore, tell you that crime has dropped because they put ''100,000 officers'' on the street -- well, they didn't.

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