The Facts about COPS: A Performance Overview of the Community Oriented Policing Services Program

By Ralph Rector, David Muhlhausen and Dexter Ingram

One of President Bill Clinton's priorities when taking office was to put 100,000 additional police officers on America's streets to help fight crime. On September 13, 1994, the President signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (P.L. 103-322), authorizing the Attorney General to implement a six-year, $8.8 billion grant program to enable state and local law enforcement agencies to hire or redeploy 100,000 additional officers for community policing efforts.11 Attorney General Janet Reno announced the establishment of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) in October 1994 to administer these grants. Since then, the COPS program has developed into a set of different federal grants that had cost American taxpayers $7.5 billion by the end of fiscal year (FY) 2000.12 It is reasonable for policymakers, community leaders, and taxpayers to question how effective the COPS program has been in meeting its objective of placing 100,000 additional police officers on the street.13 As recently as August 14, 2000, President Clinton reaffirmed this objective and then took credit for having succeeded in placing "more than 100,000 new community police officers" on the streets14 (though in congressional testimony, the COPS Office sometimes redefines the objective of the program to be the funding of 100,000 officers).15 This objective has been closely tied to the overarching goal of reducing crime.16 To meet this objective, it is reasonable to expect COPS grants to be targeted to the communities most plagued by violent crime. At a fundamental level, the issue of whether or not the COPS program has indeed achieved its goals can be addressed by analyzing two assertions: 1. More Police. Many of the supporters of the COPS initiative assert that its grants are responsible for adding 100,000 police officers to community patrols. To test for the accuracy of this assertion, Heritage analysts estimated the number of new police. 2. Lower Crime. Supporters also assert that the COPS program awarded grants to the communities with the greatest need. Heritage analysts tested the accuracy of this assertion by examining awards in terms of per capita population and crime rates. Confounding the goal of putting 100,000 additional police officers on the street is the possibility that recipients will supplant the funds--substitute funds from one source for another. In the case of COPS grants, supplanting occurs when state and local governments use program funds to hire officers they would have hired using their own money if the COPS program did not exist.17 In the 1994 Crime Act, Congress specifically prohibited states and local governments from using federal funds to supplant local funds.18 Determining whether supplanting has in fact occurred is necessary for the effectiveness of the program to be evaluated accurately. How well the Justice Department has allocated the COPS funding can be discerned by analyzing crime rates and population sizes for communities that received the grants, as well as by observing the concentration of grants among law enforcement agencies. Thus, determining whether the COPS grants went primarily to communities that have high violent crime rates, rather than to safer communities, is important to the analysis. To answer these questions, Heritage analysts first combined U.S. Department of Justice data on the COPS grants that have been awarded to police agencies across the country with data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports on violent crime, officer employment, and population. This merged micro-database makes possible an analysis of crime rates and COPS grants on an agency-by-agency basis.

Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2000, 28p.