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COPS program reaps an uncertain harvest
Joe Mathews
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
27-May-2000 Saturday
Community Oriented Policing Services "COPS"
OLYMPIAN VILLAGE, Mo. -- Before the Clinton administration launched its high-profile 1994 initiative to put 100,000 new police officers on the nation's streets, this isolated hamlet of 752 residents didn't even have a full-time police force.
But like the thousands of other U.S. localities that got wind of the COPS
initiative, it couldn't resist applying for the federal law-enforcement grants.
Soon enough, Olympian Village had itself a department of five federally funded officers -- and an Olympic-size public-relations disaster.
The new chief kicked a resident in the face over a dispute involving an unkempt lawn. His replacement turned out to be a former bounty hunter who was on probation in Illinois for criminal destruction of property.
The rest of the new force devoted most of its time to a speed trap that proved lucrative enough for the city treasury but offended residents so mightily that they called the FBI.
The trap, it turns out, was patently illegal -- it was set up on county, not city, property.
Earlier this year, exasperated aldermen, admitting that they should have watched their police more closely, shut down the department and dismissed all five officers.
But that hasn't stopped the Justice Department from including the village's
defunct force in its count of officers added to the nation's streets over the past six years.
"I don't think there's anything here for the federal government to be proud of," says Joe Micciche, a former St. Louis police officer who served on Olympian Village's short-lived force.
Known formally as the Community Oriented Policing Services, COPS is an $8.8
billion federal grant program billed as a groundbreaking effort to expand community policing. About 12,000 of America's 18,000 local and state police departments applied and received money as part of the 1994 Crime Act.
President Clinton regularly declares that his administration added 100,000 officers to the streets "ahead of schedule." And Vice President Al Gore, who has proposed extending the program's authorization for five more years and adding 50,000 more police, credits COPS for helping to make America "safer than it has been in decades."
A close examination of COPS, using state and local audits of COPS grants and the Justice Department's own data, undermines those claims. Though they have produced noted successes in many cities, COPS grants have been misused by some localities, spawning delays, miscues and scandals, especially in
the small cities that receive the balance of the awards.
Odd way to count
The cities' struggles to meet COPS mandates are reflected in the officer count. The Justice Department, which once promised to have all 100,000 officers on the street by the year 2000, now acknowledges that only 49,000 new COPS cops are out there.
The number jumps to 60,000 if you count the 11,000 who are "redeployed" -- not new police but rather the government's estimate of officer time saved -- by COPS grants for computers, updated equipment and civilian employees.
What's more, Justice boosts its count by including about 2,000 policemen hired under a federal program that preceded COPS.
Moreover, in some large departments, rising attrition rates have surpassed the inflow of new COPS hires, diluting the program's impact on the overall size of many forces.
And the COPS grants themselves don't guarantee a permanent boost to cities. The grants expire after three years and carry no requirement to retain the officers over the long term.
Depending on which office at the Justice Department is doing the math, the
government estimates that anywhere from 5,000 to 13,000 COPS-funded positions will be lost this way.
Gore's assertions aside, criminologists say they have found no correlation between COPS and the crime rate. Beyond that, about half of all COPS awards went to communities with populations of 10,000 or less -- hardly the
epicenters of criminal activity. Indeed, under the law authorizing COPS, half of its money has to be given to communities of 150,000 or less.
"The program makes sure no one gets left out, putting funds where votes are, not where the violence is," says Lawrence Sherman, a criminologist who directs the Fels Center of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.
New COPS director Thomas C. Frazier and his staff say the program has succeeded simply by approving funding of more than its target of 100,000 new positions. Grants to small cities reflect the reality that "crime means
different things in different communities," Frazier says.
But the actual hiring of officers is a local responsibility; COPS officials say the slow pace of hiring and training in local police departments is a reflection, in part, of a tight job market.
COPS officials say they have tried to improve the process by hiring more grant monitors and offering police training, but some glitches are inevitable. "For the first time, we're putting resources in the hands of
small local agencies that don't have much experience with federal dollars," says Gil Kerlikowske, COPS deputy director of support services. "You wouldn't expect a perfect record."
Baltimore debacle
Frazier's own history in Baltimore, described as a COPS model by federal
officials, highlights the pitfalls of the program for even a more sophisticated metropolis.
In that city, where Frazier was police commissioner until last fall, city auditors in a 1999 report found the police sometimes used COPS money to pay the salaries of veteran officers rather than new hires -- a clear violation of federal rules that the city later rectified.
With one COPS grant large enough to hire 136 new officers, Baltimore added only 98, citing a restructuring that shifted hundreds of regular policemen from desk jobs to the street, and thus seemingly negated the need for the federal hires.
Yet through retirements and attrition, the city, its tax base and population in decline, let the size of the overall force dwindle. It is now down more than 200 officers from its authorized strength.
COPS was never designed to stanch such large-scale retrenchments, but the Baltimore experience shows how difficult it is to measure COPS' crime-fighting value in towns and cities undergoing such wrenching
changes.
In congressional hearings last fall on how COPS has fared, Frazier testified that his leadership and COPS money "turned the tide against crime and violence in the city." But the city's murder rate, the second-highest
in the country, has remained unchanged.
Frazier, through a spokesman, defends his record in Baltimore and says the city was found in full compliance with a 1999 COPS audit.
Many cities have adhered to the program's spirit and added officers in excess of the federal contribution. In Austin, Texas, Ronnelle Paulsen, the police planning manager, says the COPS grants offered a "kick start" to efforts to expand the department to keep up with a city that has grown from 551,000 to an estimated 643,000 people in the past nine years.
Austin added 183 patrol officers through COPS grants and funded 126 new officer positions itself.
Police Chief Stanley Knee used the additional manpower to decentralize his
department into six separate command areas, allowing officers to get to know their neighborhoods better. Knee is effusive:
"There has not been a single law passed or organization established that has helped law
enforcement as much as the COPS office," he says.
Cash-poor small cities have found COPS grants appealing, too. Eighty-three percent of all grants awarded have gone to police agencies serving populations of fewer than 50,000. In more than 300 small towns, COPS grants have created new police departments.
Inherent weakness
Many smaller departments, which rarely have their own auditors or grant officers, have exposed an inherent weakness of the vast COPS program: oversight.
The Justice Department checks cities to make sure they aren't banned from receiving federal funds. And police departments are required to file quarterly financial and annual officer reports, and to respond to a
semiannual phone survey on staffing levels.
Beyond that, COPS is pretty much self-policing. Due diligence in hiring is left to localities, and Justice knows little about police departments other than what it is told. Justice's inspector general has audited fewer than 200 grantees, releasing its results only last year.
Some of the findings were alarming.
In Calumet Park, Ill. (pop. 8,418), the mayor, police officials and their families spent $44,000 in COPS money on cash advances, travel, air fare, liquor, clothing, a "Four Weddings and a Funeral" video and a Nat King Cole tape, an audit found.
The U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago is investigating the matter and declined to comment.
In Lavon, Texas, pop. 350, a COPS grant paid for the salary of Lt. Jeffrey Gardner, who brought in tens of thousands of dollars in seized cash and goods through highly publicized drug raids.
But FBI agents learned he was stealing some of the drug money himself. An indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Sherman, Texas, said he turned the police department into a criminal enterprise, using his powers to commit extortion, marijuana distribution, robbery and mail fraud.
As part of a 1998 plea, he received a nine-year prison sentence. (COPS officials argue that these towns represent only a tiny minority of problem grants.)
Olympian Village was a particularly problematic case. The town is a bedroom
community in a section of abandoned lead mines 60 miles south of St. Louis. Its only municipal edifice is a sewage plant, which doubles as City Hall and the police department. The city collects a park tax but has no park. Because of resignations, it has had 10 mayors in the past nine years.
But through 1996, serious crime had largely spared the village, which was irregularly patrolled by unpaid volunteer cops, mostly retirees. Village aldermen were instead preoccupied with mounting debt.
To avoid bankruptcy, they needed to find new revenue, expand city services, and persuade nearby homeowners and businesses to join the town, says longtime Alderman Buford Cook. In that spirit, village officials filled out
the three-page application for a COPS grant, in hopes of launching a paid five-man full-time force.
By spring 1997, the village had a $254,000, three-year grant -- larger than any other item in the local budget. It paid only starter salaries, so the village went out and recruited graduates of area police academies.
On this fresh-faced team, two 23-year-olds from well-known Olympian Village families quickly assumed leadership. Steve Lower, a muscled Army veteran, became marshal, the local equivalent of a police chief. Mark Naucke, Lower's heavyset friend from junior high school, served as his lieutenant.
Unbeknownst to city officials who never checked, the pair had spent the months before their hiring working as bounty hunters in neighboring Illinois -- and were on probation after pleading guilty in Randolph County court to misdemeanor criminal destruction of property in a hunt gone awry, court records there show.
Lacking experience
Both now concede that they approached their new cop posts with too little experience and too much fervor. Teen-agers complained that Naucke made random searches. Two motorists accused Lower of pushing them to the ground.
"We didn't know what we were doing," says Lower. "There's no question inexperience led us to make mistakes in terms of patrol tactics."
A warm Sunday afternoon in June 1998 marked the beginning of the end. Lower, incensed at an overgrown lawn on Penelope Place, confronted the pipe fitter who owned the house. After an exchange of words, Lower threw then 45-year-old John Goodman down on the street and kicked him repeatedly in
the face, records filed in U.S. District Court in St. Louis show.
Goodman was hospitalized with a blowout fracture of the bone around his right eye. (Two years later, his vision remains blurry.) A few weeks later, the city suspended Lower with pay.
The new mayor, Darrel Marler, says he was disturbed by the incident. But it didn't stop him from ordering his son-in-law Naucke, now acting marshal, to remain aggressive. Confronting a dwindling municipal budget, the mayor ordered the police to hand out as many traffic tickets as possible. By November 1998, speed traps were netting $8,000 a month.
For a few glorious months, the budget balanced. Then, Naucke pulled over a
woman who locked herself in her car rather than be arrested for traffic violations. She also complained that he insulted her dog, Sassy, something Naucke denies. Eventually, the county sheriff had to be called to calm the incident.
Incensed, the woman spent $100 on a newspaper ad inviting anyone with complaints to a meeting in the nearby city of Festus. Sixty-five oft-ticketed drivers showed up.
With that, a movement was born. Residents called the local FBI office, which dispatched an agent to investigate Lower's assault on Goodman. And they asked Jefferson County's top prosecutor to investigate the police's conduct.
At first, the upright, white-haired prosecutor, Robert G. Wilkins, was
perplexed by the complaint. In five years on the job, he had never met an Olympian Village police officer, nor encountered a crime there serious enough to command his attention. What were these cops up to?
Examining the traffic tickets, Wilkins quickly saw that most had been issued on a highway intersection clearly outside the city limits. Olympian Village initially rebuffed his appeals to shut the speed trap down. Angry, he wrote a letter to the village threatening to jail any officer found
outside the city. The sheriff sent special patrols to check for wayward cops. Within a week, the ticketing stopped.
"I learned a few days later that the police there were federally funded," says Wilkins. "I find it positively frightening that the Justice Department would give money to such people."
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