ASSESSING THE COPS PROGRAM; DOUBTERS AND BACKERS

You know you've reached North Pole, Alaska, when you pass the 40-foot
statue of Santa Claus. The town of 1,600 near Fairbanks has an 11-man
police force run by chief Lonnie Hatman.

Three of those officers have been added since 1994 under a
multibillion-dollar federal grants program that President Clinton said
would put 100,000 new police officers on American streets by this year.

Hatman said the program has had some benefits, but unless the city's
government succeeds in an effort to annex nearby population clusters, when
the federal grants run out, so will police jobs. "We just won't have the
funding," he said.

In Tooele County, Utah, county commissioners thought they recognized Santa
Claus coming to town in the form of a $375,000 federal grant to add more
officers in 1997 to the county of 31,000's police force. But then, the
commission rejected it.

"We applied for it at first, but after we really sat and looked at it, it
was obviously just a big political ploy that was going to become another
unfunded federal mandate after the grant expired," said county commissioner
Gary Griffith.

Soon after his election in 1992, Clinton began talking about putting
100,000 additional police officers on America's streets by the end of his
administration.

The program, begun in 1994, was called COPS - Community Oriented Policing
Services - and the Clinton administration credits it with what has been a
significant reduction in crime in the United States since the mid 1990s.

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore uses the COPS program in campaign
talks about the administration's successes against crime. Gore said this
summer he will seek to expand the program by 50,000 more officers and
10,000 extra prosecutors if he is elected in November.

"Here is my commitment, the toughest, most effective anti-crime strategy
this nation has ever seen, more police and more prosecutors to widen the
thin blue line between order and disorder," Gore said in a speech in July.

Talk of the thin blue line conjures images of big-city municipal police
forces. But one of the largest series of COPS grants went to the City
University of New York system - a total of about $13 million to hire campus
police.

City University of New York got more federal money under the program than,
say, Las Vegas, a city of nearly 1 million people which averages more than
100 homicides a year.

That is just one of the anomalies that became apparent when the program was
scrutinized by Scripps Howard News Service in an effort to determine what
the COPS program accomplished in the past six years for its nearly $9
billion price tag.

An investigation, assisted by a detailed analysis of COPS records compiled
by analysts at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank,
raised questions about the program's value.

Far fewer than 100,000 police officers have been added under the program.

The number of officers put on the street was 50,139 last year, according to
a federal audit of the program. The Justice Department inspector general
estimated that fewer than 60,000 officers would be employed by the end of 2000.

In interviews with police chiefs and city managers around the country, it
became clear that some of the additions were planned without COPS grants.
In some cases, the grants became a convenient federal government hand-out,
but didn't affect the size that local police departments would have reached
without them.

"We did find that the number of officers being claimed as an increase under
COPS was not real, and that the goal of the administration could not and
would not be achieved," said former Justice Department Inspector General
Michael Bromwich.

In some places, officers were hired under the grants, then let go when it
became clear that, without federal money, their salaries were too much for
local governments to sustain.

The overall number of police officers added in America during the last four
years of the COPS program - from COPS grants and otherwise - actually is
fewer than the number of officers hired during the Bush administration,
according to numbers compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to the bureau, the number of police officers in America of all
kinds - including transit police and campus officers - rose from 515,212 in
1988 to 699,906 in 1992, an increase of nearly 185,000.

For the initial years of the COPS program of 1994 through 1998, the
increase in officers was from 681,512 to 727,091 - an increase of about 45,500.

Justice Department figures similarly fail to show that the COPS program has
led to a significant increase in the number of police in America.

According to Justice figures of officers employed in cities and towns that
report crime statistics to the FBI, more police officers were hired in 1990
than in any year of the COPS program.

For the four years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department shows
a net increase of officers employed of 9.7 percent. That meant from 1989 to
1992 the number of officers in America rose from 496,000 to 544,000, an
increase of 48,000.

For the first four years in which the COPS program has been fully
operational, between 1994 and 1997, the increase of officers from the
figures compiled by the Justice Department was 10.1 percent. That equaled a
rise from 562,000 to 618,000, an increase of 56,000.

The crime rate in comparable cities appeared to be unaffected by whether
that city took no COPS money, or millions in COPS money, according to the
Heritage computer analysis.

While 30,651 cities and agencies accepted the COPS money, 3,678 cities
withdrew grant requests, many after they were approved.

In comments attached to the withdrawals, cities noted their reasons:
Redwood City, Calif. officials said, "Financial burden at the completion of
grant too great." Advance, Ind.'s rejection said, "Townspeople thought this
would eventually raise taxes."

Dodge City, Kan., initially accepted grants for officers, but eventually
withdrew from the program. City Manager John Deardoff said the city was
having a hard time finding money and qualified people to fill existing gaps
in the police department.

The clincher for withdrawing from the program was the "volumes and volumes"
of paperwork that followed an initial one-page notice of intent to use a
grant, Deardoff said.

Meanwhile, the falling crime rate has occurred for several reasons,
according to experts on crime in America. That decline was a result of
demographics - the aging of a huge cohort of teenagers - and other factors,
like the waning of a crack epidemic that fueled big-city crime, experts said.

"If you look at it nationally, you'd be on very thin ice to claim a
reduction in crime as a direct result of the COPS program," said
criminologist Stephan Mastrofski of George Mason University. "It is within
the realm of possibility that it was a factor in some communities. But it
would take a lot more research than has been done so far to convince social
scientists."

John Eck, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, will release with
colleague Ed McGuire of the University of Nebraska-Omaha this fall a
comprehensive study of the research on the relationship between police and
crime.

"The evidence that adding more cops reduces crime is, to be charitable,
ambiguous," said Eck. "I've not seen any substantive body of evidence that
suggests that the COPS program was a major factor in the recent crime drop."

Eck says that a poor economy and a crack epidemic fueled a crime boom in
the 1980s, and an improving economy and the waning of crack use led to a
crime reduction.

"We studied homicides as an indicator, and homicides actually started down
in 90-91," he said. "COPS didn't get started until late 1994, and it was a
couple more years before the officers hired were trained and on the street.
It is hard to see that it was impacted by COPS."

There are examples of local jurisdictions where officials say the COPS
grants have been a big help in fighting crime.

Johnson Link, police chief of Clemson, S.C., said the three officers his
department has added helped the town do more community outreach.

Edward Stewart, police chief of New Concord, Ohio, said the program has
been a success for his community. It enabled him to add three officers.

He said without COPS, "Our police force would be the same size as it is,
but it would have gotten to this size later."

But in other towns, the grants either amounted to freebies for jobs already
in the pipeline and eventually picked up by local taxpayers, or the grants
briefly beefed up local departments, but were later canceled as needless
extravagances.

Sunnyvale Calif., a city of 121,000 near San Jose, originally applied for
the maximum grant for six new officers. But that request was withdrawn
after a check of what those officers would do to the city's budget by then
city manager Thomas Lewcock.

According to a memo written by Lewcock in the mid-1990s, "The federal grant
would support only 5 percent of the total budgetary effect of the new
programs during the next 10 years, with the remainder having to be
supported by the city."

That's because COPS pays only 75 percent of an officer's salary the first
year, 50 percent the next and 25 percent in year three, up to a maximum of
$75,000 per officer for three years.

In California, each officer costs closer to $100,000 a year, including
benefits, training, vehicle and equipment.

"Once you initiate these things, it is not easy to make them go away,"
Lewcock said. "You end up reducing some other program that had nothing to
do with this. When you look at it over time, there is not enough federal
incentive to justify it."

As crime rates fell, some towns found they had officers they didn't need
and couldn't support.

Anita Lowary, city finance officer of Groton, S.D., a city of 1,200, said
it has been nice to add a third officer to the city's force. But to keep
him after the grant expires will mean a local tax increase. "People aren't
happy," she said.

COPS officials say the program has accomplished much of what it set out to do.

Thomas Frazier, former police commissioner of Baltimore who became head of
COPS last year, said, "I don't think there is any doubt there are more
officers on the street than there would have been otherwise."

He said the emphasis on community policing under the program has helped
departments improve relations with citizens in many cities. Two-thirds of
the cities and towns in America got grants under the program, he said.

Frazier said the results speak for themselves: "Crime is as low as it has
been in 30 years."