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Counting Cops

As the federal grants for 100,000 new police officers expire, localities struggle with how to pay for the positions.

Three years ago, Trafalgar, Indiana, took a big leap for a small town. It doubled the size of its police force. Of course, in a municipality with only 800 people, this meant hiring just two more officers. Although that's modest by big-city standards, the hiring spree nevertheless gave Trafalgar something it never had before: a cop on patrol--and sometimes two--24 hours a day.

This year, however, was a time of reckoning for Trafalgar and its expanded police department. The two new cops were hired with federal grant money, a tiny slice of the funds from Bill Clinton's pledge to put 100,000 more officers on the street. In June, Trafalgar's grant ran out.

In order to keep the two officers and cover their $27,800 paychecks, Trafalgar officials had to squeeze every penny they could out of the town's $400,000 budget. Rather than hire janitors to clean town hall, they're doing the cleaning themselves. They even had to ditch the Christmas decorations that would normally adorn downtown this time of year. "We just cut wherever we can," says Gary Hall, the town marshal who counts as one of Trafalgar's four men in blue. "It's no frills, just the basics. Hopefully, down the road, the town will be able to afford those things."

When candidate Clinton made his 100,000-cops promise to a roomful of big-city mayors back in 1992, nobody imagined that it would some day end up costing a town such as Trafalgar its holiday cheer. But now, nearly a decade later, cities and counties across the country are feeling Trafalgar's pain. The $9 billion in federal grants that helped to beef up the staffs of thousands of police departments are gradually expiring. That leaves cities holding the bag and facing a difficult choice: Find the money to pay the new cops, or let them go.

For local governments, the Community Oriented Policing Services program was always a Faustian bargain. From the start in 1994, COPS grants covered only part of the cost of hiring new officers. And as the years went on, the federal share decreased and localities were expected to pick up more of the tab. This formula, some police chiefs argued, was akin to buying officers on credit. They steered clear of the grants altogether, or accepted only portions of the grants in order to minimize the fiscal hit when their part of the bill came due. This is the main reason why Clinton's pledge fell roughly 25,000 officers short of its goal.

Yet many chiefs didn't see it as a bad deal at all. They saw it as a chance to leverage federal dollars to beef up the ranks and also as a way to try community policing. Some 12,000 cities and counties eventually took the feds up on the deal. They included large departments such as Los Angeles and Chicago, but most of the hiring grants went to smaller cities, including a lot of two-cop shops like Trafalgar's. "It helped bring us up to the manpower we should've been at for years," says John Packett, police chief in Grand Forks, North Dakota. A pair of COPS grants boosted Packett's force from 67 sworn officers to 81 and allowed him to deploy a neighborhood resource officer in each of the city's seven wards. "It's given us a three- to four-year window to prove the worth and value of these positions."

This year, however, the grant money for eight of Grand Forks' new cops ran out, just as the city's budget came under assault from a shaky economy and a bevy of new priorities. The city council scraped up funds to keep the officers on board for another year. But in the future, the city faces budget-busters such as a new wastewater treatment plant and must come up with $79 million for a flood-control project. Moreover, since September 11, the city has borne the cost of heightened security at its water wells and fuel tanks. "I don't know anybody on the council who doesn't want more police officers on the street," says city council president Hal Gershman. "The question is, can we afford everything?"

So it seems now that the ultimate legacy of Clinton's 100,000-cops pledge will be decided not in Washington but in thousands of budget battles in the council chambers of places like Grand Forks and Trafalgar. The sum of their choices will determine whether Clinton's program had a lasting impact on policing levels in this country or if all the staffing up was nothing more than a temporary spike.

That may seem like a simple question, but answering it is much more difficult than it sounds. By setting a clear numerical goal--100,000 cops--Clinton dared both his critics and admirers to take head counts. But over time, police staffing is much too fluid for that. During the 1990s, police departments were hit by a wave of retiring officers and difficulty in recruiting a new generation to take their place. In addition, as crime dropped through the 1990s--due in part, some believe, to Clinton's program--it was reasonable to expect cities to downsize their police departments. "If crime comes down, do you really need that many police officers anymore?" asks Pace University criminologist Joseph Ryan, co-author of an extensive evaluation of the COPS program published last year by the Urban Institute.

Yet an unmistakable aim of the program was for police departments to not only bulk up but to stay bulked up. The federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, which administers the grants, expected localities to make a "good faith" effort to retain their cops after the grants dried up. That requirement was later changed to mean that police departments fund the positions on their own for at least one full budget cycle. In the COPS evaluation, Ryan surveyed departments about their retention plans. While 95 percent of them said that COPS-funded officers would become part of their agencies' base budgets by the time their grants expired, half said they weren't sure exactly how they would pull it off.

Since then, thousands of grants have expired. But there is no data on whether police agencies are following through on their end of the deal. The COPS office says "an overwhelming majority" of grantees are retaining or plan to retain their COPS-funded officers, but it doesn't follow up with departments after the grants go away.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that departments are all over the map. Faced with increasingly tight budgets, some police chiefs have had to cut back on positions once funded with COPS money. Portland, Oregon, for example, received a $1 million COPS grant in 1996 to hire 42 civilian clerks. The clerks staffed desks around the clock at police headquarters and the city's four precincts and allowed dozens of sworn officers to be redeployed on the streets. That grant ran out in June, leaving Portland to pick up the full cost of the clerks' salaries, about $1.9 million.

Unfortunately for Portland, the city's budget this year was hit hard by the economic downturn and the loss of some franchise fees. Mayor Vera Katz ordered big cuts from the police bureau's budget, forcing it to lay off 21 of the clerks. Precinct desks are now manned only 12 hours a day, leaving sworn officers to spend more of their time doing administrative tasks, such as pulling police files.

Not many departments have had to take such drastic steps as Portland. Yet many face equally tight budgets, and even if they're not laying anybody off, they're still cutting positions. Augusta-Richmond County, Georgia, for example, hired 68 deputies in 1997, using a $3.6 million grant that expired this year. With the county now bleeding red ink, commissioners asked every department for budget cuts. Sheriff Ronnie Strength had to cut $1.2 million from his budget, and he turned to the positions once funded by COPS grants for most of it. Nobody was fired, but 34 positions were eliminated through attrition.

This sort of "retention through attrition" is technically not allowed under COPS rules. Nevertheless, plenty of departments have gone that route. Given a choice, chiefs will always opt to keep the manpower-- but fiscal reality can make that impossible. "The grant had a major impact for us," Sheriff Strength says. "In the three years we had it, we saw a decrease in criminal activity three years in a row. With more officers out there, we could respond to calls much faster. Now, it's the opposite. Our response time is not as good and our calls get backed up."

Then there are cities and counties that are buckling down to keep their new officers on the force. In these places, COPS grants are having an intended effect: to force the question of police staffing onto the political agenda. Given a three-year taste of life with a stronger police force, some communities will never go back. And they're willing to raise taxes or take other extraordinary steps to keep their cops. Trafalgar, for example, did more than skimp on Christmas this year. The town also moved to bolster its future finances by annexing 27 outlying properties into the town limits. It is yet another subtle, if unforeseen, consequence to a decade-old campaign pledge that some town residents have by now, no doubt, forgotten.

Maintaining a staff of four officers may not be easy for Trafalgar. But Gary Hall, the town marshal, is steadfast in his commitment to a larger police force. "They said departments had to keep them through one budget cycle," Hall says. "But personally, I think they should've told departments to keep them forever. Some choose to keep their cops for one year and then let them go. To me, that's not taking the money because you need officers, it's just taking the money because it's free."

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