Posted by
CKR6480 on Friday, September 08, 2006 1:56:15 AM
Does anyone remember the COPS (Community Oriented Policing) program from the Clinton Administration?
I do, the COPS program is how I became a police officer in the mid 1990's. The only nice thing I can say about the program is that I got hired. Other than that, I can not say anything nice about the program. The program had many flaws and it only contributed to wasteful spending by city governments around the country. The program did not fulfill its promise of putting 100,000 police officers on the street. According to a USA TODAY article by Peter Eisler and Kevin Johnson titled "10 years and 10B later, COPS drawing scrutiny, in 2005. The number was "closer to 82,000 - or 30% fewer cops than Justice's estimate", according to a University of Pennsylvania study in 2002 found. "Federal audits of just 3% of all COPS grants have alleged that $277 million was misspent. Ten of thousands of jobs funded by grants were never filled, or weren't filled for long, auditors found. and there's little evidence that COPS was a big factor in reducing crime", according to Peter Eisler and Kevin Johnson of USA TODAY.
The idea behind the program was to provide $25,000 a year for three years for new officers. Sounds pretty good doesn't it? The problem is once the new officers get hired and work past the three year mark, who is going to pick up the bill. Don't get me wrong, we actually need these officers on the street and we definitely need more. However, the program was flawed and needed to be better monitored by the federal government. The truth of the matter, is the only way to pay for these additional officers is through local taxes approved by either that local government or through the people of that community. They have to make that decision, not the Federal government. What makes sense in Phoenix, may not work in Dallas, Tx.
I guess your probably wondering where I am going with all this information. I had almost forgotten about the program altogether except for the Democrats. While searching the web, I came across an article about the democrats new agenda about security. So, I did some additional searching and found my way to their web site. While reading through the agenda portion, I came across the new security proposal. I was amazed to find that on their DNC web site, there security agenda was only three paragraphs long and say nothing about, nothing! The GOP.com web site listed six points and listed details on every point (read for yourself).
The part that caught my attention the DNC website, was the sentence "That's why we led the fight to create the Department of Homeland Security, continue to fight to ensure that our ports, nuclear and chemical plants, and other sensitive facilities are secured against attack and support increased funding of our first responders and programs like the COPS program so we keep our communities safe".
What's really interesting is that the Republican Party and the Bush Administration are the ones who created the Depart. of Homeland Security and secured the ports, chemical and nuclear plants. Not the Democrats! Then the Democrats throw in the COPS program at the end of a very long sentence, to actually show something that they thought had worked.
Two things that really hit you in the face. One, the democrats have to pull something from the mid-1990's play book of old politics. Second, I don't think that they have even mention the COPS program since the mid- 1990's. You think that they would come up with something new and not try to recreate the old.